Albert Eschenmoser

Who is Albert Eschenmoser?

Albert Eschenmoser is a Swiss chemist working at the ETH Zurich and The Scripps Research Institute.

His work together with Lavoslav Ružička on terpenes and the postulation of squalene cyclization to form lanosterol improved the insight into steroid biosynthesis.

In the early 1960s, Eschenmoser began work on what was the most complex natural product synthesized at the time—vitamin B₁₂. In a remarkable collaboration with his colleague Robert Burns Woodward in Harvard, a team of almost one hundred students and postdoctoral workers worked for many years on the synthesis of this molecule. The work was finally published in 1973, and it marked a landmark in the history of organic chemistry.

The Eschenmoser fragmentation, the Eschenmoser sulfide contraction and Eschenmoser's salt are named after him.