Adolf Windaus
German chemist (1876-1959) · Germany · Scientists · Died at 82
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Something wrong?A German chemist who cracked the code linking sterols to vitamins, work that earned him the 1928 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and set the stage for a student who'd win the same prize eleven years later.
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Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus was born on 25 December 1876 in Germany. He built his career in chemistry around a question most ignored: how sterols - waxy compounds in cells - connected to vitamins, the molecules that kept bodies from breaking down. The answer, worked out across years of lab isolation and structure mapping, won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1928. He taught Adolf Butenandt, who followed the thread into sex hormones and claimed his own Nobel in 1939. Windaus died on 9 June 1959, his name attached to a turning point in biochemistry that made the invisible machinery of nutrition visible.
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