Kurt Heinrich Meyer

Life and work

Meyer, the son of the pharmacologist Hans Horst Meyer, was a student from 1892 until 1901 in the “Gymnasium Philippinum” in Marburg, Germany. This was followed at first by studies in medicine, later in chemistry in Marburg (where Theodor Zincke was the professor), and in Leipzig, Freiburg, London, and Munich. In Leipzig, Meyer obtained his PhD in 1907 with the dissertation “Untersuchungen uber Halochromie” (Research on Halochromie) under the direction of Arthur Hantzsch. Afterwards, following the advice of his father, he travelled to England to complement his education and worked for several months in the laboratory of Ernest Rutherford. After his return to Germany in 1891, he obtained the highest academic degree, the Habilitation, working under the direction of Adolf von Baeyer in Munich on the determination of the equilibrium of the Keto-enol tautomerism of ethyl acetoacetate. This was done through the determination of the Enol content in Keto-Enol-tautomerism equilibria via titration of bromine (“Ueber die Keto-Enol Tautomerie”). The Meyer-Schuster rearrangement and the "Meyer’s Back Titration" method bear his name.

In World War I, begiining in 1914, Meyer served as an officer in the artillery, however he was called in 1917 to carry out warfare research work in the Kaiser Wilhelm Society Institute in Berlin under the direction of Fritz Haber. After the end of the war he worked at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich under the direction of Richard Willstatter. After a few more years at the University, he moved in 1921 to the BASF AG in Ludwigshafen, where he was appointed as director of the Research laboratories. Here his interests were concerned with high Polymer chemistry. He worked in collaboration with Herman Francis Mark, whom he had brought into his institute. In 1929 he relinquished this position of director and in 1931 became Professor of organic and inorganic Chemistry at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. There, one of his long-time collaborators was A.J.A. van der Wijk. Among his many students and collaborators was Edmond H. Fischer, who obtained in 1992 the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine he shared with Edwin G. Krebs. Fischer’s doctoral research was involved with the isolation and purification of the Alpha-amylase, where he confirmed its nature as that of a protein, and not of a polysaccharide.

Meyer died in 1952 on a vacation in Menton, France. His son, Horst Meyer, studied at the universities of Geneva and Zurich and since 1959 has been a professor of physics – emeritus since 2005 - at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.