Johannes Martin Bijvoet

Johannes Martin Bijvoet ( born January 23, 1892 in Amsterdam, † March 4, 1980 in Winterswijk ) was a Dutch chemist and crystallographer at the Department of " General Chemistry " at the University of Utrecht. He was known by the development of a method for determining the absolute configuration of molecules.

Life and work

The concept of the tetrahedral bonding in organic molecules goes back to the works of Jacobus Henricus van ' t Hoff and Joseph Achille Le Bel in 1874. At that time it was impossible to determine the absolute configuration of a molecule. The configuration was determined by using the projection method developed by Hermann Emil Fischer of comparison with glyceraldehyde, its absolute configuration of Fischer was set arbitrarily. The dextrorotatory enantiomer was arbitrarily assigned to the projection with the right-pointing OH radical, and this as the D-configuration, from the Latin dexter: called " right ". Have sugar degraded dextrorotatory glyceraldehyde them the D-configuration was assigned.

In 1949 Bijvoet designed his principle, which is based on the anomalous dispersion of X-rays. 1951 so was able to prove the absolute configuration of Natriumrubidiumtartrat.