Marcel Delépine was a French pharmacist and chemist who introduced the Delépine reaction, and studied the preparation of primary amines.
Background
Marcel Delépine was born on September 19, 1871 in Saint-Martin-le-Gaillard, France. He was one of four children of Léopold Régis Delépine, a farmer, and Joséphine Marcelline Denis. His parents married in 1864.
With his mother’s encouragement, Delépine followed in the footsteps of his older brother Léopold by studying pharmacy.
Education
Delépine received his professional training in Paris, where he studied pharmacy at the École Supérieure de Pharmacie and science at the Sorbonne, receiving his doctorate in 1898 with the thesis Amines et amides dérivés des aldéhydes ("The amines and amide derivatives of aldehydes").
From 1892 to 1897 Delépine served as intern in pharmacy and from 1902 to 1927 as a pharmacist of the Hospitaux de la Ville in Paris. In 1898 Delépine became Doctor of Physical Sciences. From 1895 to 1902, he was préparateur to the famous chemist and statesman Marcellin Berthelot at the Collège de France, where he worked on thermochemical determinations and remained until Berthelot’s death in 1907.
In 1904 Delépine was appointed an associate at the École de Pharmacie, where he was promoted in 1913 to the rank of professor. He remained there until 1930, when he succeeded Charles Moureu as a professor at the Collège de France, thus occupying the chair once held by his mentor Berthelot. Although he inspired a number of students, including Raymond Charonnat and Alain Horeau, his successor, Delépine preferred to do most of his own laboratory work.
Delépine’s work encompassed almost all fields of chemistry. Like Alfred Werner, of whose work he was an ardent proponent, he began his long and fruitful career as an organic chemist. The thesis for his degree in pharmacy dealt with the separation of methylamines by formaldehyde, and his doctoral dissertation involved a primarily thermodynamic study of the amines and amides derived from aldehydes. He determined the structure of aldehyde ammonia and demonstrated the reversibility of the formation of acetals.
Delépine’s voluminous work on organic sulfur compounds included studies of dithiourethanes, the discovery of the monomeric sulfides of ethylene (whose existence had been considered impossible), and the recommendation of dithiocarbamates as analytical reagents. He discovered that certain compounds containing doubly bound sulfur have the property of spontaneous oxidation accompanied by phosphorescence (oxyluminescence). He also made extensive studies of catalytic hydrogenation in the presence of Raney nickel. His organic work also dealt with terpenes, heterocyclic compounds, pyridine compounds, alkaloids, and aminonitriles.
In the field of inorganic chemistry, Delépine immediately adopted Werner’s then-controversial views, and his numerous studies of coordination compounds, particularly those of the noble metals, confirmed their geometric and optical isomerism and verified Werner’s coordination theory. His classical work on iridium, especially the chloro salts, pyridine derivatives, and oxalates, placed the stereochemistry of this element on a firm basis, just as Werner’s work had done for the compounds of cobalt. Delépine also perfected a method for preparing pure tungsten for use in electric light filaments. He was also a master of stereochemistry and crystallography, and he devised the method of active racemates for resolution of coordination compounds and determination of their configurations. In addition, he published several articles on the history of chemistry.
His retirement in 1941 did not decrease his prolific scientific productivity; during his retirement, he added some sixty publications to his 200 articles. He continued to work in his laboratory with the aid of an assistant until six weeks before his death at the age of ninety-four.