There are people whose inner lives are so rich that the footnotes to their biographies contain the material for entire novels. Such a person was Tadeusz Reichstein (1897–1996). A Polish Jew who spent most of his working life in Basel as a naturalized swiss, he gave his name to the Reichstein Process for the industrial manufacture of vitamin C and won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or medicine in 1950 in recognition of his groundbreaking work in the field of adrenal cortical hormones. He also, in a retirement lengthier and more active than many a scientific career, published no fewer than a hundred works on the subject of ferns.
If ferns – Reichstein’s great passion in later life – seem a long way from vitamins, then vitamins might likewise seem a long way from coffee, another subject with which Reichstein was fascinated for many years.
It was his attempts to synthesize coffee in the 1920s, however, which led eventually to his successful isolation of Vitamin C, and ultimately to the creation of the Reichstein Process. Reichstein was a true researcher, who combined daring thinking with loving attention to detail: even his failures took him in productive new directions.