Willstätter’s nail
A microscale filtration aid pinned to the wrong name
If your country were to descend into war and authoritarian chaos, how would you behave? It is hard to imagine such a situation. Yet given the political gyrations of the last few years, the question is no longer quite so academic as it might have been a decade ago. For German scientists, such ethical questions recurred repeatedly in the first half of the 20th century, and few responded more strikingly than Richard Willstätter, one of the most brilliant chemists of his generation.
His parents had assumed that he would go into the textile business, with his father. But around age 12 he began to dream of becoming a scientist. At university in Munich he was inspired by Adolf von Baeyer, whose synthesis of indigo was the stuff of legend. But Baeyer wouldn’t have him as a student. The alkaloid chemist Alfred Einhorn, who was working on the structure and chemistry of cocaine, took him on. By the time Willstätter graduated, he had evidence that Einhorn’s proposed structure was wrong; Einhorn was upset and banned him from working with cocaine.