Name Gunther Ohloff | Role Chemist | |
Died November 9, 2005, Bernex, Switzerland Education Dresden University of Technology Books Scent and Chemistry, Scent and Fragrances: The Fascination of Odors and Their Chemical Perspectives | ||
Günther Ohloff (21 July 1924 in Tapiau near Königsberg – 9 November 2005 in Bernex near Geneva) was a prominent German fragrance chemist.
Contents
Life
Ohloff was raised in East Prussia. When World War II erupted, he served in the German military, serving on the Eastern Front. He was severely wounded during the Battle of Stalingrad. After the war he studied Pharmacy at the University of Königsberg and Erlangen, as well as Chemistry at the Technische Hochschule Dresden. He received a Ph.D. in 1951, based on his work on the condensation of terpenes with formaldehyde (Prins reaction) unter the direction of Heinrich Wienhaus.
Career
Ohloff began his career in 1951 with Schimmel & Co. in Miltitz near Leipzig, at that time the most renowned flavor and fragrance company. In 1953 he left Eastern Germany to take a position with Dragoco, Holzminden. In 1959 he was offered a position at the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry in Mülheim with Günther Otto Schenck. There he worked on the industrial-scale application of photooxygenation reactions employing singlet oxygen, ene reactions and sigmatropic rearrangements. Ohloff returned to Industry in 1962, joining Firmenich in Geneva to head the process-research group. He was named the firm's research director and member of the board of directors in 1968, which he remained until his retirement in 1989.
Ohloff's scientific work, which is documented in 228 publications and 111 patents, centered around ths structure elucidation and reactivity of terpenes, the insdustrial syntheses of odorants, and structure–odor correlations. He was the leading expert of empirical odor rules that predict the olfactory properties of new compounds, such as the "triaxial rule of ambergris sensation". He co-discovered the Eschenmoser fragmentation, thus sometimes referred to Eschenmoser–Ohloff fragmentation. His small but condensed magnum opus on the chemistry of odorants "Riechstoffe und Geruchssinn. Die molekulare Welt der Düfte" was republished in English in 2011, completely revised and much extended by Wilhelm Pickenhagen and Philip Kraft, as "Scent and Chemistry – The Molecular World of Odors".