Gerhard L. Closs

Gerhard Ludwig Closs ( born May 1, 1928 in Elberfeld, now Wuppertal to; † 24 May 1992, Palos Park, Illinois ) was an American chemist ( Physical Organic Chemistry ). He was professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago.

Closs was drafted as a 16- year-old Wehrmacht and seriously wounded on the Eastern Front. He studied and graduated at the University of Tübingen with Georg Wittig and went in 1955 in the U.S. as a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University to Robert B. Woodward, where he worked on the synthesis of chlorophyll. From 1957 he was assistant professor (at the time of Chemistry of Natural Products ) and from 1963 professor at the University of Chicago, where he temporarily presided over by the chemistry faculty. He was next three years as head of the chemistry in the Argonne National Laboratory. In Chicago he was Michelson Distinguished Service Professor.

Closs was from the late 1950s, a leader in the chemistry of carbenes, which he then used new methods such as ESR and ENDOR and the mid-1960s there ( one of the first applications of this technique ) chemically induced dynamic nuclear polarization anwandte ( CIDNP ) spectroscopy. He was a pioneer in the application of magnetic resonance to the characterization of intermediates of chemical reactions. He made important contributions to the study of various photosynthetic pigments, especially chlorophyll, one of his main research topics. From the late 1970s he worked on electron transfer reactions.

In his early days he also tested fungal drugs for a research project.

In 1991 he received the Arthur C. Cope Award, 1971, the Jean Servas Stas Medal of the Belgian Chemical Society and the 1974 James Flack Norris Award of the ACS. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1975 ) and the National Academy of Sciences (1974). A price of the Inter- American Photochemical Association is named after him.

He was a regular at Bell Laboratories, Bayer held the lecture at the University of Cologne, was Merck Lecturer at Rutgers University and a visiting professor at Yale University.

He was married to the chemist Lieselotte Pohmer since 1956 ( also a PhD student of Wittig ), with whom he worked and published. In 1992 he died at his home of a heart attack.