Staudinger, Hermann (1881-1965)

German organic chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1953 for his discoveries in macromolecular chemistry, of which he was the founder. He carried out pioneering research into the structure of albumen and cellulose.

To measure the high molecular weights of polymers he devised a relationship, now known as Staudinger's law, between the viscosity of polymer solutions and their molecular weight.

Staudinger was born in Worms, Hesse, and studied at a number of German universities. He became professor in 1908 at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe, moved to Zürich, Switzerland, 1912, and from 1926 was at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, where in 1940 he was made director of the Chemical Laboratory and Research Institute for Macromolecular Chemistry.

He devised a new and simple synthesis of isoprene (the monomer for the production of the synthetic rubber polyisoprene) in 1910.

Most chemists thought that polymers were disorderly conglomerates of small molecules, but from 1922 Staudinger put forward the view that polymers are giant molecules held together with ordinary chemical bonds. To give credence to the theory, he made chemical changes to polymers that left their molecular weights almost unchanged; for example, he hydrogenated rubber to produce a saturated hydrocarbon polymer.

In his book Macromolekulare Chemie und Biologie (1947), Staudinger anticipated the molecular biology of the future.