Hermann Staudinger

Hermann Staudinger was born on 23 March 1881 in Germany and trained as an organic chemist at a time when most scientists believed materials like rubber and cellulose were just clumps of small molecules held together by mysterious forces. He insisted they were true macromolecules - long chains of repeating units - and spent decades defending the idea against ridicule. Along the way he discovered ketenes and developed the Staudinger reaction, and in the 1920s worked with Leopold Ružička to map the molecular structures of pyrethrin I and II, work that would later enable synthetic pyrethroid insecticides. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry came in 1953, vindication for the man who'd forced chemistry to see big. He died on 8 September 1965.