Adolf Friedrich Johann Butenandt
Butenandt, Adolf Friedrich Johann (1903-1995), a German biochemist, studied the structure of male and female sex hormones. He was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in chemistry, which he shared with Croatian-born Swiss chemist Leopold Ruzicka.
Butenandt studied chemistry and biology at the University of Marburg. He then studied biochemistry at the University of Göttingen under Adolf Otto Windaus, the winner of the 1928 Nobel Prize in chemistry. He received a doctorate in 1927 and became an assistant at Göttingen's Institute of Chemistry. Butenandt married his research assistant, Erika von Ziegner, in 1931. The couple had two sons and five daughters.
During his career, Butenandt isolated the female hormones estrone and progesterone and the male hormone androsterone. He and Leopold Ruzicka synthesized the male hormone testosterone. By 1929, Butenandt had isolated estrone, a female sex hormone, in pure crystalline form. His investigations laid the foundation for birth control pills and medical products such as cortisone. Butenandt showed that female and male hormones were chemically related and that cholesterol is a precursor of the sex hormones. For his work in this field, he shared the 1939 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Ruzicka. Butenandt also studied viruses and insecticides. He discovered the first crystallized pheromone.
In 1933, Butenandt was appointed professor of chemistry and director of the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the Danzig Institute of Technology. From 1936 to 1945, he served as director of the Kaiser Wilhem (now Max Planck) Institute of Biochemistry in Berlin. During World War II (1939-1945), he remained in Berlin. After the war, Butenandt taught physiological chemistry at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Tübingen and at the University of Munich, where he became professor emeritus in 1971. He served as president of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science from 1960 until 1972.