A boy from Włocławek and Kiev
Tadeus Reichstein was born on July 20, 1897, in Włocławek, a town on the Vistula in the part of Poland then ruled by the Russian Empire. He was the eldest of five sons of Jewish parents, Isidor Reichstein and Gustava Brockmann, whose family was well respected in the town. The family had strong Polish patriotic traditions, and the boy was named after the national hero Tadeusz Kościuszko. His father had studied at the Technical Institute in St Petersburg, unusual for a Polish Jew in Tsarist Russia, and built a business in Kiev as an engineer specialising in sugar-processing plants.
Tadeus spent his early childhood in Kiev. When the family flat grew too crowded, he was sent to live with an aunt whose husband was a pharmacist, and the eight-year-old was allowed to make pills and syrups and mix plasters in his uncle’s shop. Back home he turned his bedroom into a laboratory and tried, with a friend, to turn iron filings into gold. It was, his biographers note, his first and last venture into alchemy.
Escape from the pogroms
In 1905 waves of pogroms swept the Russian Empire. Reichstein witnessed the violence in Kiev and never forgot it. The repeated outbreaks of antisemitic attacks convinced his father that the family had to leave Russia, and they emigrated to Switzerland. On the way, Tadeus was left at a well-known boarding school in Jena, Germany, because the family’s small flat in Zurich was already crowded with relatives who were also fleeing antisemitic violence.
He later described his two years at the Prussian school as hell. Small and thin, he could not keep up on the daily hikes and was beaten by a teacher when he collapsed from exhaustion, but he said nothing to his parents so as not to add to their burdens. In 1907 his father bought a house in the countryside outside Zurich and ten-year-old Tadeus came home. He said later that from that moment his life was a happy one.
Becoming a Swiss chemist
The Reichstein boys were taught at home for several years, with their father teaching them mathematics and physics himself. Tadeus then attended a technical secondary school in Zurich. In 1914 he and his brothers became Swiss citizens, and he was called up for military service soon after the First World War began. The war ruined the family: unable to travel to Kiev, his father lost his business and savings there, and his health collapsed. His mother turned the family home into a boarding house to make ends meet.
Reichstein studied chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the ETH, and took his diploma in 1920. Eager to support his family, he took an industrial job improving flashlight batteries before beginning a doctorate under the future Nobel laureate Hermann Staudinger. For nine years he then worked, with his assistant and lifelong friend Joseph von Euw, on the chemistry of roasted coffee, identifying many of the compounds that give it its aroma. In 1927 he married Henriette Louise Quarles van Ufford, a young Dutch woman who had stayed at his mother’s boarding house; their daughter, Ruth, was born in 1933.
Vitamin C for everyone
In the early 1930s, working in Leopold Ruzicka’s laboratory at the ETH, Reichstein turned to vitamins. Vitamin C, the substance that prevents scurvy, had been isolated only recently, and laboratories in several countries were racing to make it artificially. In 1933 Reichstein succeeded, independently of Norman Haworth’s group in Britain. The difficult step was producing a sugar called L-sorbose, which was needed as a starting material but was not available commercially.
His solution was to let bacteria do the work. Reichstein set out glasses of a solution of the common sugar alcohol sorbitol with yeast and a little vinegar. In some of them, white crystals of pure L-sorbose appeared. In one glass, the story goes, the crystals had grown on the leg of a dead fruit fly that had carried in the right bacteria, later named Acetobacter suboxydans. With his doctoral student R. Oppenauer he completed a route of fermentation followed by chemical steps that could make vitamin C cheaply on an industrial scale. Combining a biological step with chemical synthesis was far ahead of its time and became a model for modern biotechnology.
From laboratory to medicine cabinet
Reichstein and Haco, the Swiss food company that had funded his research, held the patent and made it available to the pharmaceutical firm Hoffmann-La Roche. The company was at first wary of relying on a microbial step, but the process worked, and its royalties kept Reichstein’s laboratory going for years. The Reichstein process became the principal industrial method for producing vitamin C and still bears his name. Many thousands of tons of vitamin C are produced each year by methods descended from it.
The result is a vitamin that costs almost nothing. Synthetic vitamin C is used in supplements, added to foods and drinks to fortify them and to keep them fresh, and used in medicine and animal feed. Scurvy, once the scourge of sailors, soldiers and the poor, became preventable for anyone, almost anywhere, at negligible cost.
Cortisone and the hormones of the adrenal gland
In the mid-1930s Reichstein began studying the hormones of the adrenal cortex, the outer layer of the small glands above the kidneys. A conflict over patent rights forced him to leave Ruzicka’s laboratory, and in the late 1930s it was almost impossible for a Polish Jew to be appointed a full professor at a Swiss university, even one who was a Swiss citizen and had served in the Swiss army. The exception was the University of Basel, where an anti-fascist city government offered him the chair of pharmacy in 1938. His research on these hormones had been supported by the Dutch drug company Organon, and the conflict arose because Ruzicka’s laboratory was committed to assigning its steroid patents to a rival firm.
In Basel, Reichstein and his small team isolated about thirty related steroid hormones from more than a ton of cattle adrenal glands, obtaining some in amounts of only milligrams and without any of the modern separation techniques chemists now take for granted. One of them, then known as Substance E, is the hormone known today as cortisone. Working in parallel in the United States, Edward Kendall isolated the same compounds, and the physician Philip Hench showed in the late 1940s that cortisone could dramatically relieve rheumatoid arthritis. In 1950 the three men shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In his Nobel speech Reichstein generously credited his American rivals for revealing the biological importance of the substances. In 1953 and 1954 he also helped isolate and determine the structure of aldosterone, the adrenal hormone that controls salt and water balance.
Why it matters today
The isolation of cortisone opened the age of corticosteroid medicines. Cortisone and its descendants, such as prednisone and hydrocortisone, are now among the most widely used drugs in the world. They calm the inflammation of rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, severe allergies and skin diseases, are used to prevent the rejection of transplanted organs, and are given in emergencies when the body’s own adrenal hormones fail. Reichstein’s research on plant sources also helped make partly synthetic production of these hormones possible.
He was also a humane leader. His biographers note that he accepted women as scientists and colleagues as a matter of course, and that he led by motivating others rather than by command. When he became head of organic chemistry in Basel, he persuaded the city to rebuild its institute from the ground up, arguing that all of Basel would benefit from chemical research.
Jewish identity
Reichstein’s life was shaped from the start by being a Jew in Eastern Europe. His family’s flight from the Russian Empire followed the pogroms of 1905, and relatives fleeing the same violence crowded into their Zurich home. As a Polish-born Jew in Switzerland in the 1930s, he faced the quiet barriers of academic antisemitism, and found a professorship only in a city whose leaders were determined to resist the influence of Nazi Germany.
He married into a Dutch noble family and lived a largely secular life centred on science, family and nature, and he does not appear to have written publicly about religious observance. He is listed among Jewish Nobel laureates and also appears on lists of Polish Nobel laureates.
Ferns, butterflies and a long life
Reichstein loved plants all his life, a gift he said came from his mother, and his gardens in Basel and in the Ticino were remembered as botanical paradises. With Miriam Rothschild he discovered that monarch butterflies and other insects carry heart-active steroid compounds from the plants they eat. After he retired in 1967 he devoted himself to ferns, studying their chromosomes and evolution, and published scores of scientific papers on them in the last decades of his life.
Tadeus Reichstein died in Basel on August 1, 1996, at the age of 99, at the time the longest-lived Nobel laureate. He had escaped the pogroms as a child, overcome antisemitism as a young scientist, and left behind two gifts that reach almost every household and hospital in the world: cheap vitamin C and the knowledge that made cortisone medicines possible.
Sources & further reading
Tadeus Reichstein, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Reichstein, Tadeus, Encyclopedia.com (New Dictionary of Scientific Biography) · Tadeus Reichstein, Jewish Virtual Library · Tadeusz Reichstein, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.