Ninety-year-old chemist’s achievements remembered

Abstract

In 1936, Otto Theodor (Ted) Benfey was an elementary school student in Berlin. Hitler had recently assumed power in Germany. And Benfey’s father had been fired from his job as a justice of the German Supreme Court because of the family’s Jewish background, even though the Benfeys had converted to Lutheranism. On Benfey’s last day of school, before he left Germany, his classmates chased him home, yelling, “Jude, Jude, Jude”—German for “Jew.” Only one classmate, Hans-Jürgen Peiper, stood by 10-year-old Benfey and accompanied him home. Last month, at the American Chemical Society national meeting in Philadelphia, Peiper stood up for Benfey again, this time as a speaker at a symposium in Benfey’s honor. His presence at the event—and that of all the other speakers who came to pay tribute to Benfey—spoke volumes about the scientist’s warm personality and notable achievements in chemical education and history. “Ted Benfey is a teacher