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 kil…