Richard Willstätter

Richard Martin Willstätter was a German organic chemist who spent his career dissecting the architecture of plant pigments. His work revealed the structure of chlorophyll, the molecule at the heart of photosynthesis, along with other compounds that give plants their color. The precision of that research earned him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1915. He died on 3 August 1942, nine days shy of his seventieth birthday.