Friedrich Wöhler

Born 31 July 1800 in Germany, Wöhler trained as a chemist and spent the 1820s pulling pure metals out of ores no one had cracked - beryllium, yttrium - and synthesizing odd inorganic compounds like silane and silicon nitride. Then in 1828 he heated ammonium cyanate and got urea, the stuff mammals piss out, without a kidney in sight. It was the first time anyone had built an organic compound from plainly inorganic starting materials, a result that chipped at vitalism, the reigning idea that a mysterious "life force" was required to make the molecules of life. How much credit Wöhler deserves for killing that doctrine remains debated, but the urea synthesis became a landmark. He kept working in both organic and inorganic chemistry until his death on 23 September 1882.