Günther Ohloff

Günther Ohloff ( born July 21, 1924 in Tapiau at Königsberg; † 9 November 2005 Bernex in Geneva ) was a German chemist, fragrance and flavor researchers.

Life

Günther Ohloff grew up in East Prussia and studied, after a serious war injury at the Battle of Stalingrad, Pharmacy at the University of Königsberg and Erlangen, and chemistry at the Technical University of Dresden. Ohloff completed his dissertation there in the group of Henry House Vienna with a thesis on the condensation of terpenes with formaldehyde ( Prins reaction ) and in 1951 received his doctorate.

Work

After two years of industrial activities at Schimmel & Co. in Miltitz (Leipzig), the leading fragrance manufacturer this time, Ohloff left East Germany in 1953 to work in the research department of Dragoco, wood Minden, under Erich Klein. In 1959 he became a member of Günther Otto Schenck at the former Max Planck Institute for Radiation Chemistry in Mülheim, where he dealt with the application of singlet oxygen in preparative organic synthesis, ene reactions and sigmatropic rearrangements. 1962 Ohloff returned to the industry and took over the management of the process research group of the fragrance manufacturer Firmenich in Geneva, where he rose to become head of the 1968 total research and a member of the Board, a position he held until his retirement in 1989.

His theological work that is documented in 228 publications and 111 patents was rooted in molecular thinking and focused on the configuration information and Reactivity of terpenes, the industrial synthesis of fragrances, as well as structure-odor relationships. Ohloff was considered the most leading expert of the systematic structure-activity research of odoriferous substances and provided a number of empirical and intuitively derived "rules" for predicting odor properties, such as the " triaxial rule of Ambrageruchs ". He also discovered, in collaboration with Albert Eschenmoser the Eschenmoser fragmentation, which is therefore often referred to as " Eschenmoser Ohloff fragmentation ".

Ohloff has boldly published hypotheses often made bold and experimentally checked carefully. Such theories also included the effect of odorants on human emotion and social behavior. He moved like the circle of creative thinkers and so was an important impetus for original scientific work. His 1990 published book " fragrances and smell. The molecular world of fragrances " is considered the standard work of fragrance chemistry and in 2011, completely revised, expanded and enlarged by William Pickenhagen and Philip Kraft, re-launched in English, under the title " Scent and Chemistry - The Molecular World of Odors ".

Honors

• Leopold Ružička Prize of the Swiss Chemical Society (1967 )
• Hackford Jones Prize of the British Society of Perfumery (1980 )
• Otto Wallach badge of the German Chemical Society (1981 )
• RH Wright Award from the Simon Fraser University, Canada (1988 )

Publications (selection)

• Fragrances and smell. The molecular world of fragrances, Springer -Verlag, Berlin, 1990, ISBN 3-540-52560-2. English Translation: Scent and Fragrances: The Fascination of Odors and Their Chemical Perspectives, Springer Verlag, New York, 1994, ISBN 0-387-57108-6.
• Earthly scents, heavenly delight, Birkhauser Verlag 2000, ISBN 3-7643-2753-7. English edition for 2012 announced by the publisher Helvetica Chimica Acta, Zurich.
• Fragrances - signals the emotional world, Verlag Helvetica Chimica Acta, Zurich, 2004, ISBN 978-3-906390-30-7.
• Together with Wilhelm Pickenhagen and Philip Kraft: "Scent and Chemistry - The Molecular World of Odors ", Verlag Helvetica Chimica Acta, Zurich, 2011, ISBN 978-3-906390-66-6.