Leopold Ružička

Born Lavoslav Stjepan Ružička on 13 September 1887, he left Croatia for Switzerland and built a career decoding the structure of polymethylenes and higher terpenes, molecules that had resisted chemists for decades. The work culminated in the first chemical synthesis of male sex hormones, a breakthrough that brought him the Nobel in 1939. He spent most of his life in Swiss labs, collecting eight honorary doctorates, seven prizes, and two dozen honorary memberships in scientific societies along the way. He died on 26 September 1976, seventeen days after his eighty-ninth birthday.