The career of Vladimir Prelog is a useful demonstration of how chemistry actually advances - not in a single leap, but in results that hold.
Vladimir Prelog was born at Sarajevo in 1906. His recorded nationality is Serbia. He was educated at Czech Technical University in Prague and III Gymnasium Osijek.
Around the turn of the twentieth century the sciences fractured into specialisms and simultaneously became national assets, funded and directed on a scale no earlier generation had seen.
The institutions that housed his research were ETH Zurich and Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry, where the work centred on biochemistry and organic chemistry.
Chemistry is a discipline of purification: most of its history is the work of separating one thing from another.
The Serbia setting is not incidental. National academies, funding and language decided which findings travelled and which stayed local, in this period as in ours.
Formal recognition came in the shape of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1975), Davy Medal (1967) and Foreign Member of the Royal Society (1962).
The measure that matters is durability. Results that survive re-examination become the floor of a discipline, and it is on that floor that everything afterwards is built.
Death came in 1998, at 92. By then the contribution had passed into the settled body of chemistry, where it is used without being credited - the surest sign that it was right.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry — 1975
- Davy Medal — 1967
- Foreign Member of the Royal Society — 1962
- Held posts at ETH Zurich and Faculty of Pharmacy and Biochemistry
- Educated at Czech Technical University in Prague and III Gymnasium Osijek
- Fields of research: biochemistry and organic chemistry
