This Week in the History of Chemistry		January	February	March	April
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See also This Month in the History of the Periodic Table (with links to a searchable online map).

December 28-January 10

50-year, 100-year, 150-year, etc. anniversaries appear in bold red.
See also Today in Science History by Ian Ellis.

• Ernest Eliel born 1921: organic stereochemistry and conformational analysis
• Karl Remigius Fresenius born 1818: qualitative and quantitative analytical chemistry
• Kary Mullis born 1944: developed polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for making copies of DNA; Nobel Prize, 1993
• Wilhelm Röntgen announced his discovery of new rays, 1895, inspiring research that would lead to a thousand papers on X-rays within a year.
• Lewis Hastings Sarett synthesized cortisone at Merck, Sharp & Dohme Research Laboratories, 1944.

• Ellen Gleditsch born 1879: nuclear chemistry; half life of radium.
• Charles Goodyear born 1800: vulcanization of rubber (US patent 3,633)
• Helen Vaughn Michel born 1932: neutron activation analysis, with applications to archeology and geology
• Alexander Parkes born 1813: invented parkesine (later called xylonite, a kind of celluloid); electroplating
• Harold Urey and co-workers announced discovery of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen (H, element 1), 1931. (Link to a register of Urey's papers.)

• William David Coolidge of General Electric is issued US Patent 1,082,933 for ductile tungsten for incandescent bulb filaments, 1913. [See also Oliver Sacks' memoir Uncle Tungsten for a personal account of this topic in England.]
• Youyou Tu born 1930: discovery of artemisinin, an antimalarial treatment from traditional Chinese medicine; Nobel Prize (medicine), 2015.

• Hermann Boerhaave born 1668: physician and chemist, Elementa Chemiae
• Colin Garfield Fink born 1881: electrochemical research, development, industry, and education; president of the Electrochemical Society
• Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac read his memoir on combining volumes of gases to the Philomathic Society of Arcueil, 1808.
• Avram Hershko born 1937: ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation; Nobel Prize, 2004
• Gilbert Stork born 1921: organic synthesis; first stereorational synthesis (cantharidin, 1951); stereoselective total synthesis of quinine.

• Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA, originally Pittsburgh Reduction Company) renamed, 1907
• U. S. Atomic Energy Commission took over nuclear oversight from wartime Manhattan Engineer District, 1947. (Visit its successor, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.)
• Cigarettes in the US must carry warning label, "Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health," since 1966, mandated by the Federal Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965. Since then, labeling requirements have evolved as has the FDA approach to tobacco.
• Eugène-Anatole Demarçay born 1852: discovered europium (Eu, element 63); spectroscopic evidence of the discovery of radium (Ra, 88)
• Robert John Kane proposed existence of ethyl radical (ethereum) in 1833 (before Liebig).
• Merck & Co. founded, 1891.

• Roger Adams born 1889: organic synthesis. An ACS award in organic synthesis is named for Adams.
• Isaac Asimov born 1920: biochemist; author of hundreds of books in science fiction and many non-fiction subjects (See Asimov bibliography.).
• Rudolf Clausius born 1822: fundamental contributions to thermodynamics and kinetic theory of gases; coined the term entropy. Read his Über die bewegende Kraft der Wärme auf Deutsch (Part I and Part II) or in English translation (Mechanical Theory of Heat).
• Charles Hatchett born 1765: discovered niobium (Nb, element 41), which he called columbium
• Walter Heitler born 1904: quantum-mechanical treatment of molecular hydrogen (Heitler-London approach).
• Julia Vsevolodovna Lermontova born 1847 [Gregorian date]: separation and atomic weight of platinum-group metals

• Henry Bradley, Binghamton, NY, patented oleomargarine (U.S. Patent No. 110,626) in 1871.
• Keith James Laidler born 1916: chemical kinetics; history of physical chemistry and of science and technology.

• Herbert Henry Dow, founder of Dow Chemical, prepared bromine from brine, 1891.
• Aristid Victor Grosse born 1905: isolated protactinium (Pa, element 91); ²³⁵U fission by slow neutrons
• Louis Bernard Guyton de Morveau born 1737: one-time defender of phlogiston theory, chemical affinities, chemical nomenclature. View the 1787 Méthode de Nomenclature Chimique and Guyton's earlier (1782) paper on systematic nomenclature (both en français).
• Richard Royce Schrock born 1945: high-oxidation-state transition-metal complexes; metathesis reactions and catalysts; Nobel Prize, 2005.
• Spirit rover, a NASA geochemistry robot, lands on Mars, 2004, looking for evidence of water.
• John Edgar Teeple born 1874: industrial chemistry and chemical economics; Perkin medal.
• Florence Emeline Wall born 1893: cosmetic chemistry.

• Joseph Erlanger born 1874: electrophysiology of nerves; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1944.
• George Washington Carver died 1943 (born 1860s): food chemistry, particularly known for peanuts and sweet potatoes.

• John Van Nostrand Dorr born 1872: chemical engineer and inventor
• Kenneth Sanborn Pitzer born 1914: chemical bonding and quantum mechanics.
• Stuart Alan Rice born 1932: statistical mechanics and transport phenomena; phase transitions.

• Eilhard Mitscherlich born 1794: crystal structure, catalysis, benzene and its derivatives; discovered chemical isomorphism
• Henry Enfield Roscoe born 1833: chemical action of light; co-inventor of an actinometer; first to isolate vanadium (V, element 23). Read his biography of Dalton and his autobiography.
• John Ernest Walker born 1941: mechanism of ATP synthesis; Nobel Prize, 1997

• Wilhelm Homberg born 1653: photosensitivity of silver salts; attempts at chrysopoeia (transmuting base metal to gold)
• John Allen Veatch found borax in mineral water at Tuscan Springs, CA, 1856.

• Richard Abegg born 1869: valence, especially Abegg's rule that the difference between the maximum positive and negative valence of an element is frequently eight.
• John Werner Cahn born 1928: thermodynamics and kinetics of phase transitions and diffusion; interfacial phenomena; periodic and quasi-periodic structures ("quasicrystals").
• Alec Jeffreys born 1950: genetic fingerprinting; see US Patent 5,413,908.
• Har Gobind Khorana born 1922: first synthesis of an artificial gene; interpretation of genetic code and protein synthesis function; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1968
• Søren Sørensen born 1868: indroduced concept of pH as a measure of hydrogen ion concentration; research on proteins, amino acids, and enzymes

• Sune Karl Bergström born 1916: purification and structure of prostaglandins; Nobel Prize (Medicine), 1982.
• Katharine Burr Blodgett born 1898: thin films (Langmuir-Blodgett films); anti-reflective coatings; gas-surface interactions; Garvan Medal, 1951
• Frederick Gardner Cottrell born 1877: nitrogen fixation, liquefaction of gases, recovery of helium; invented electrostatic precipitator (Cottrell precipitator, US patent 895,729) for removing particles from gases

Dates are given according to the Gregorian calendar to the extent I could find them. (Note: this applies particularly to 19^th-century Russians.)

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