Who was Emil Fischer?
1 Answer
Oct 29, 2014
Hermann Emil Louis Fischer was a German chemist and 1902 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
He never used his first name. People simply called him Emil Fischer.
Most organic chemistry students know him as the inventor of the Fischer projection. This is a symbolic way of drawing asymmetric carbon atoms.
In 1875 he discovered phenylhydrazine. It enabled him to determine the stereochemistry of all the known sugars. In 1902 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in part for his work on sugars.
He died in 1919 from chronic phenylhydrazine poisoning (it is readily absorbed through the skin and by inhalation).
At least seven chemical reactions as well as the Fischer projection are named after Emil Fischer.
