Background
Hermann Fischer was born on December 16, 1888, in Wurzburg, Bavaria. He is a son of Emil Fischer, professor of chemistry at the University of Würzburg and Nobel laureate. Hermann was the oldest of three boys.
University of Cambridge, The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, United Kingdom
Fischer studied at the University of Cambridge in 1907.
Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin, Germany
Fischer studied chemistry at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin for a year.
Fürstengraben 1, 07743 Jena, Germany
Fischer received a Ph.D. from Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in 1912.
Hermann Fischer was born on December 16, 1888, in Wurzburg, Bavaria. He is a son of Emil Fischer, professor of chemistry at the University of Würzburg and Nobel laureate. Hermann was the oldest of three boys.
Fischer attended a Gymnasium in Berlin and decided to become a chemist, while his two brothers chose medical careers. He studied at Cambridge in 1907, then fulfilled his year of military service at Lüneburg. He began his study of chemistry at Berlin and later transferred to Jena, where he received a Ph.D.
After obtaining the doctorate at Jena, Fischer went to Berlin in 1912 to begin research under his father’s guidance. By 1912 Emil Fischer had ceased working on carbohydrates, purines, and proteins and turned his attention to depsides and tannins. He put his son to work on the synthesis of lecanoric acid, which occurs naturally in lichens. Hermann succeeded, showing that lecanoric acid is a didepside, p-diorsellinic acid.
With the outbreak of World War I, Fischer went to the front in France. Both of his brothers joined the military medical service and died in the line of duty. At the end of the war, Fischer returned to his father’s laboratory.
In 1922, Fisher was appointed assistant professor at the Chemical Institute of Berlin University. With Gerda Dangschat, Fischer elucidated the structure of caffeic acid and chlorogenic acid, the depside of quinic acid. They showed that this depside carries the caffeine in coffee and determines the coffee’s taste after roasting. Beginning an association with Erich Baer that was to continue for twenty-seven years, Fischer started work on the trioses, dihydroxyacetone, and glyceraldehyde. By 1932 Fischer and his co-workers had succeeded in synthesizing the calcium salt of D, L-glyceraldehyde-3-phosphoric acid which Warburg, Embden, and Meyerhof utilized in developing their schemes of alcoholic fermentation and glycolysis.
Fischer accepted a position at the University of Basel in 1932. He continued work on the trioses, with Baer preparing pure D- and L-glyceraldehydes and synthesizing D-fructose and L-sorbose. In Berlin, Gerda Dangschat continued the elucidation of the configuration of quinic acid and shikimic acid, which later proved to be an important intermediate in the formation of aromatic amino acids in bacterial metabolism.
Fischer accepted the invitation of Sir Frederick Banting, who with Charles Best had discovered insulin, to join the staff at the Banting Institute of the University of Toronto. He arrived there in the fall of 1937 with Erich Baer and other assistants, his private laboratory, including the 9,000 reference compounds representative of all of his father’s work, and his father’s library. Fischer continued work on trioses, glycerol derivatives, and glycerides. In his laboratory were Baer, J. M. Grosheintz, Leon Rubin, J. C. Sowden, and Henry Lardy, working on the synthesis of selachyl alcohol, the oxidation of glycols, the condensation of aldoses, the cyclization of glucose into niyoinositol, and the synthesis of biologically interesting organic phosphates.
Fischer became a member of the new department of biochemistry at the University of California in 1948. On 9 October 1952, he dedicated the Emil Fischer Library, containing his father’s books and reference compounds, to the university. Fischer became chairman of the biochemistry department in 1953, holding that position and lecturing on carbohydrates and lipids until his retirement in 1956. Among those who worked with him at Berkeley were D. L. MacDonald, C. E. Ballou, E. A. Kabat, and S. J. Angyal, who investigated sugar disulfones, sugar dialdehydes, inositol derivatives, tetrose phosphates, hexose dialdehydes, D-erythrose-4-phosphate, galactinol, and the confirmational analysis of sugars and inositols. On his retirement, Fischer was given space in the Biochemistry and Virus Laboratory, where he conducted research on carbohydrates, assisted by Hans Helmut Baer, from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg. Starting from Fischer’s observation that a sugar dialdehyde of the pentose series forms, with nitromethane, nitroinositols, Baer worked out the syntheses of 3-amino-3-deoxy-D-ribose and 3-amino-3-deoxy-D-mannose.
Fischer was a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Fischer married Ruth Seckels in 1922. They had a daughter and two sons.