Nobel Prize for Chemistry

Abstract

Prof. W. N. Haworth, of Birmingham, and Prof. Paul Karrer, of Zurich, have been awarded jointly the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for 1937. Prof. Haworth is Director of the Chemistry Laboratories of the University of Birmingham, now provided with the most modern chemistry department in Great Britain through a generous benefactor who has recognized the value and possibilities of Prof. Haworth's investigations. He is a Davy medallist of the Royal Society and Longstaff medallist of the Chemical Society. For many years his name has been associated with outstanding results obtained in his laboratories in the elucidation by chemical and physical methods of the constitution of substances of biochemical importance, particularly the sugars and polysaccharides and, more recently, as the notice of the award indicates, with the synthesis and determination of the constitution of the antiscorbutic vitamin C to which he assigned the name of ascorbic acid. With this later work, other names are also associated, particularly those of Prof. A. Szent-Györgyi, who has received the Nobel Prize for Medicine, and Prof. E. L. Hirst, of Bristol, who has long been associated with Prof. Haworth. Prof. Haworth's name will remain outstanding in classical organic chemistry. The success of his work is due in no small measure to his great ability in organizing and leading a team of loyal collaborators, which calls forth qualities as necessary in modern chemical investigations as those required for carrying out the investigations themselves. Of this loyal collaboration Prof. Haworth has never ceased to express his appreciation whenever he has had occasion to describe the results of investigations in laboratories of which he has had charge.