WALLACH, OTTO

WALLACH, OTTO (1847–1931), German organic chemist and Nobel Prize winner. Wallach was born in Koenigsberg and worked in Bonn from 1870. He was appointed professor in Berlin (1876) and head of the department of pharmacy (1879–89). From 1889 until he retired in 1915 he was professor at Goettingen and director of the university's chemical institute, continuing his research until he was 80. In 1884 knowledge in the field of "ethereal oils" was in a state of utter confusion. Wallach, after many years of work, characterized 12 terpenes which were different from one another, in place of the far greater number of products previously thought, and charted their interrelationships and determined their structures, based on rings with six carbon atoms as the basic skeletons. He received the 1910 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for "his pioneer work in the field of alicyclic compounds." His work was scientifically important in clarifying a field of natural products, and also (through his students) led to the industrial synthesis of camphor and artificial perfumes. He wrote Terpene und Kampfer (1909, 1914). Wallach   received many honors and was president of the German Chemical Society. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: T.N. Levitan, Laureates, Jewish Winners of the Nobel Prize (1960), 34–35; Partridge and Schierz, in: Journal of Chemical Education, 24 (1947), 106–8; Blumann, in: Proceedings of the Chemical Society (1964), 387–9. (Samuel Aaron Miller)