- Person
- Tadeus Reichstein
- Lived
- 1897–1996
- Field
- Chemistry, endocrinology
- From
- Polish-born Swiss
The story
Tadeus Reichstein, a Polish-born Jewish chemist whose family had fled the pogroms of the Russian Empire for Switzerland, began studying the hormones of the adrenal cortex in the mid-1930s. The adrenal glands sit above the kidneys, and their outer layer makes hormones that control sugar metabolism, salt balance and the immune system. Little was known about their chemistry.
His work almost stalled. A dispute over patent rights forced him to leave Leopold Ruzicka’s laboratory in Zurich, and in the late 1930s it was almost impossible for a Polish Jew to be appointed a full professor at a Swiss university, even though Reichstein was a Swiss citizen who had served in the Swiss army. The University of Basel, under an anti-fascist city government, offered him its chair of pharmacy in 1938.
In Basel, Reichstein and a small team processed more than a ton of cattle adrenal glands and isolated about thirty related steroid hormones, some in quantities of only milligrams, without the modern separation techniques chemists now rely on. One of them was the hormone now called cortisone. In the United States, Edward Kendall isolated the same compounds, and the physician Philip Hench showed that cortisone could dramatically relieve rheumatoid arthritis. The three shared the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and in his Nobel speech Reichstein credited his American rivals for revealing the substances’ medical importance. His research on plant starting materials also helped make partly synthetic production of these hormones possible, and in 1953 and 1954 he helped identify aldosterone, the hormone that regulates salt and water.
Cortisone and the many corticosteroid drugs developed from it, such as prednisone and hydrocortisone, are now among the most widely used medicines in the world. They treat arthritis, asthma, severe allergies and skin diseases, help prevent the rejection of transplanted organs, and save lives when the body’s own adrenal hormones fail.
Why it matters
Corticosteroid medicines descended from cortisone ease inflammation and save lives for millions of patients with arthritis, asthma, allergies and transplants.
About Tadeus Reichstein
Polish-Jewish refugee chemist in Switzerland who found the cheap way to make vitamin C, still named after him, and helped isolate cortisone, a mainstay against inflammation. Nobel Prize 1950.
More about Tadeus Reichstein
Sources
- Reichstein, Tadeus Encyclopedia.com (New Dictionary of Scientific Biography)
- Tadeus Reichstein, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Tadeus Reichstein Jewish Virtual Library
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