Ira Remsen (February 10, 1846 – March 4, 1927) was an American
chemist
A chemist (from Greek ''chÄ“m(Ãa)'' alchemy; replacing ''chymist'' from Medieval Latin ''alchemist'') is a scientist trained in the study of chemistry. Chemists study the composition of matter and its properties. Chemists carefully describe t ...
who discovered the
artificial sweetener
A sugar substitute is a food additive that provides a sweetness like that of sugar while containing significantly less food energy than sugar-based sweeteners, making it a zero-calorie () or low-calorie sweetener. Artificial sweeteners may b ...
saccharin
Saccharin (''aka'' saccharine, Sodium sacchari) is an artificial sweetener with effectively no nutritional value. It is about 550 times as sweet as sucrose but has a bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations. Saccharin is ...
along with
Constantin Fahlberg
Constantin Fahlberg (22 December 1850 in Tambov – 15 August 1910 in Nassau, aged 59) was a Russian chemist who discovered the sweet taste of anhydroorthosulphaminebenzoic acid in 1877–78 when analysing the chemical compounds in coal tar a ...
. He was the second president of
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...
.
Early life
Ira Remsen was born in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
on February 10, 1846. He is the son of James Vanderbelt Remsen (1818–1892) and Rosanna Secor (1823–1856). He married Elisabeth Hilleard Mallory on Apr 3, 1875 in New York City, New York. They had two children together. Their son,
Ira Mallory Remsen
Ira Mallory Remsen (May 11, 1876 – November 29, 1928), known locally as Rem Remsen, was an American painter, playwright and Bohemian Club member. He was the son of Dr. Ira Remsen chemist and former president of Johns Hopkins University. Rems ...
(1876–1928), became a playwright living in
Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.
Remsen earned an M.D. from the
New York Homeopathic Medical College in 1865. He subsequently studied chemistry in
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
, studying under chemist
Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig
Wilhelm Rudolph Fittig (6 December 183519 November 1910) was a German chemist. He discovered the pinacol coupling reaction, mesitylene, diacetyl and biphenyl. Fittig studied the action of sodium on ketones and hydrocarbons. He discovered the Fi ...
, receiving a PhD from
University of Göttingen
The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded ...
in 1870.
Career
In 1872, after researching pure chemistry at
University of Tübingen
The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (german: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; la, Universitas Eberhardina Carolina), is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-Wà ...
, Remsen returned to the United States and became a professor at
Williams College
Williams College is a private liberal arts college in Williamstown, Massachusetts. It was established as a men's college in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams, a colonist from the Province of Massachusetts Bay who was kill ...
, where he wrote the popular text ''Theoretical Chemistry''.
Remsen's book and reputation brought him to the attention of
Daniel Coit Gilman
Daniel Coit Gilman (; July 6, 1831 – October 13, 1908) was an American educator and academic. Gilman was instrumental in founding the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale College, and subsequently served as the second president of the University ...
, who invited him to become one of the original faculty of
Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...
. Remsen accepted and founded the department of chemistry there, overseeing his own laboratory. In 1879 Remsen founded the ''
American Chemical Journal
The ''Journal of the American Chemical Society'' is a weekly peer-reviewed scientific journal that was established in 1879 by the American Chemical Society. The journal has absorbed two other publications in its history, the ''Journal of Analytical ...
'', which he edited for 35 years.
In 1879 Fahlberg, working with Remsen in a post-doctoral capacity, made an accidental discovery that changed Remsen's career. Eating rolls at dinner after a long day in the lab researching
coal tar
Coal tar is a thick dark liquid which is a by-product of the production of coke and coal gas from coal. It is a type of creosote. It has both medical and industrial uses. Medicinally it is a topical medication applied to skin to treat psorias ...
derivatives, Fahlberg noticed that the rolls tasted initially sweet but then bitter.
Since his wife tasted nothing strange about the rolls, Fahlberg tasted his fingers and noticed that the bitter taste was probably from one of the chemicals in his lab. The next day at his lab he tasted the chemicals that he had been working with the previous day and discovered that it was the oxidation of o-toluenesulfonamide he had tasted the previous evening. He named the substance
saccharin
Saccharin (''aka'' saccharine, Sodium sacchari) is an artificial sweetener with effectively no nutritional value. It is about 550 times as sweet as sucrose but has a bitter or metallic aftertaste, especially at high concentrations. Saccharin is ...
and he and his research partner Remsen published their finding in 1880. Later Remsen became angry after Fahlberg, in patenting saccharin, claimed that he alone had discovered saccharin. Remsen had no interest in the commercial success of saccharin, from which Fahlberg profited, but he was incensed at the perceived dishonesty of not crediting him as the head of the laboratory.
Throughout his academic career, Remsen was known as an excellent teacher, rigorous in his expectations but patient with the beginner. "His lectures to beginners were models of didactic exposition, and many of his graduate students owe much of their later success in their own lecture rooms to the pedagogical training received from attendance upon Remsen's lectures to freshmen."
He was elected as a member to the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
in 1879.
In 1901 Remsen was appointed the president of Johns Hopkins,
where he proceeded to found a School of Engineering and helped establish the school as a research university. He introduced many of the German laboratory techniques he had learned and wrote several important chemistry textbooks. In 1912 he stepped down as president, due to ill health, and retired to
Carmel, California
Carmel-by-the-Sea (), often simply called Carmel, is a city in Monterey County, California, United States, founded in 1902 and incorporated on October 31, 1916. Situated on the Monterey Peninsula, Carmel is known for its natural scenery and ric ...
.
In 1923 he was awarded the
Priestley medal.
Death
He died on March 4, 1927 in
Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. His ashes are interred behind a plaque in the chemistry building on the Homewood campus at Johns Hopkins University.
Legacy
After his death, the new chemistry building, completed in 1924, was named after him at Johns Hopkins. His ashes are located behind a plaque in Remsen Hall; he is the only person buried on campus.
His
Baltimore house was added to the
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic ...
and declared a
National Historic Landmark
A National Historic Landmark (NHL) is a building, district, object, site, or structure that is officially recognized by the United States government for its outstanding historical significance. Only some 2,500 (~3%) of over 90,000 places listed ...
in 1975.
Remsen Hall in
Queens College is also named for him.
Remsen Award
In 1946, to commemorate the centenary of Remsen, the Maryland chapter of the
American Chemical Society
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all ...
, began awarding the Remsen award, in his honor.
Awardees are frequently of the highest caliber, and included a sequence of 16
Nobel laureates between 1950 and 1980.
;Recipients:
* 1946:
Roger Adams
Roger Adams (January 2, 1889 – July 6, 1971) was an American organic chemist who developed the eponymous Adams' catalyst, and helped determine the composition of natural substances such as complex vegetable oils and plant alkaloids. He isolat ...
* 1947:
Samuel C. Lind
* 1948:
Elmer V. McCollum
* 1949:
Joel H. Hildebrand
* 1950:
Edward C. Kendall
Edward Calvin Kendall (March 8, 1886 – May 4, 1972) was an American chemist. In 1950, Kendall was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine along with Swiss chemist Tadeusz Reichstein and Mayo Clinic physician Philip S. Hench, for t ...
* 1951:
Hugh Stott Taylor
Sir Hugh Stott Taylor (6 February 1890 – 17 April 1974) was an English chemist primarily interested in catalysis.Who Was Who, Published by A&C Black Limited In 1925, in a landmark contribution to catalytic theory, Taylor suggested that a cat ...
* 1952:
W. Mansfield Clark
* 1953:
Edward L. Tatum
* 1954:
Vincent du Vigneaud
Vincent du Vigneaud (May 18, 1901 – December 11, 1978) was an American biochemist. He was recipient of the 1955 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his work on biochemically important sulphur compounds, especially for the first synthesis of a polypep ...
* 1955:
Willard F. Libby
* 1956:
Farrington Daniels
Farrington Daniels (March 8, 1889 – June 23, 1972) was an American physical chemist who is considered one of the pioneers of the modern direct use of solar energy.
Biography
Daniels was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on March 8, 1889. Dani ...
* 1957:
Melvin Calvin
Melvin Ellis Calvin (April 8, 1912 – January 8, 1997) was an American biochemist known for discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spent most of h ...
* 1958:
Robert B. Woodward
* 1959:
Edward Teller
Edward Teller ( hu, Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" (see the Teller–Ulam design), although he did not care for ...
* 1960:
Henry Eyring (chemist)
Henry Eyring (February 20, 1901 – December 26, 1981) was a Mexico-born United States theoretical chemist whose primary contribution was in the study of chemical reaction rates and intermediates.
History
Eyring, a third-generation member of th ...
* 1961:
Herbert C. Brown
Herbert Charles Brown (May 22, 1912 – December 19, 2004) was an American chemist and recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with organoboranes.
Life and career
Brown was born Herbert Brovarnik in London, to Ukrainian Jewis ...
* 1962:
George Porter
George Porter, Baron Porter of Luddenham (6 December 1920 – 31 August 2002) was a British chemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967.
Education and early life
Porter was born in Stainforth, near Thorne, in the then West ...
* 1963:
Harold C. Urey
* 1964:
Paul Doughty Bartlett
* 1965:
James R. Arnold
James Richard Arnold (May 5, 1923 – January 6, 2012) was the Harold C. Urey Professor of Chemistry (emeritus), and a noted pioneer in the field of planetary and space chemistry at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), wher ...
* 1966:
Paul H. Emmett
* 1967:
Marshall W. Nirenberg
* 1968:
Har Gobind Khorana
Har Gobind Khorana (9 January 1922 – 9 November 2011) was an Indian American biochemist. While on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he shared the 1968 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Marshall W. Nirenberg and ...
* 1969:
Albert L. Lehninger
Albert Lester Lehninger (February 17, 1917 – March 4, 1986) was an American biochemist in the field of bioenergetics. He made fundamental contributions to the current understanding of metabolism at a molecular level. In 1948, he discovered, wit ...
* 1970:
George S. Hammond
* 1971:
George C. Pimentel
* 1972:
Charles H. Townes
Charles Hard Townes (July 28, 1915 – January 27, 2015) was an American physicist. Townes worked on the theory and application of the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated wi ...
* 1973:
Frank H. Westheimer
* 1974:
Elias J. Corey
Elias James Corey (born July 12, 1928) is an American organic chemist. In 1990, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his development of the theory and methodology of organic synthesis", specifically retrosynthetic analysis. Regarded by many ...
* 1975:
Henry Taube
Henry Taube, (November 30, 1915 – November 16, 2005) was a Canadian-born American chemist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "his work in the mechanisms of electron-transfer reactions, especially in metal complexes." He ...
* 1976:
William N. Lipscomb, Jr.
* 1977:
Ronald Breslow
Ronald Charles David Breslow (March 14, 1931 – October 25, 2017) was an American chemist from Rahway, New Jersey. He was University Professor at Columbia University, where he was based in the Department of Chemistry and affiliated with the De ...
* 1978:
John Charles Polanyi
John Charles Polanyi ( hu, Polányi János Károly; born 23 January 1929) is a German-born Canadian chemist. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in chemical kinetics.
Polanyi was born into the prominent Hungari ...
* 1979:
Harry B. Gray
* 1980:
Roald Hoffman
Roald Hoffmann (born Roald Safran; July 18, 1937) is a Polish-American theoretical chemist who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He has also published plays and poetry. He is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Emeritus, a ...
* 1981:
Koji Nakanishi
* 1982:
Harden McConnell
* 1983:
George M. Whitesides
George McClelland Whitesides (born August 3, 1939) is an American chemist and professor of chemistry at Harvard University. He is best known for his work in the areas of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecu ...
* 1984:
Earl L. Muetterties
* 1985:
Richard N. Zare
* 1986:
Gilbert Stork
Gilbert Stork (December 31, 1921 – October 21, 2017) was an organic chemist. For a quarter of a century he was the Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry Emeritus at Columbia University. He is known for making significant contributions to the t ...
* 1987:
Stephen J. Lippard
* 1988:
Mildred Cohn
Mildred Cohn (July 12, 1913 – October 12, 2009) was an American biochemist who furthered understanding of biochemical processes through her study of chemical reactions within animal cells. She was a pioneer in the use of nuclear magnetic re ...
* 1989:
K. Barry Sharpless
* 1990:
Robert G. Bergman
Robert George Bergman is an American chemist. He is Professor of the Graduate School and Gerald E. K. Branch Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
Early life and education
Born in Chicago, Robert Bergm ...
* 1991:
Rudolph A. Marcus
* 1992:
William Klemperer
William A. Klemperer (October 6, 1927 – November 5, 2017) was an American chemist who was one of the most influential chemical physicists and molecular spectroscopists in the second half of the 20th century. Klemperer is most widely known fo ...
* 1993:
Christopher T. Walsh
Christopher T. Walsh NAS IoM AAA&S AAM is a Hamilton Kuhn professor of biological chemistry and pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on enzymes and enzyme inhibition, and most recently he is focused on the problem of an ...
* 1994:
Edward I. Solomon
* 1995:
* 1996:
David A. Evans
* 1997:
William Hughes Miller
* 1998:
Peter Dervan
* 1999:
* 2000:
Alexander Pines
Alexander Pines (born June 22, 1945) is an American chemist. He is the Glenn T. Seaborg Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, Chancellor's Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School, University of California, Berke ...
* 2001:
Ad Bax
Adriaan "Ad" Bax (born 1956) is a Dutch-American molecular biophysicist. He was born in the Netherlands and is the Chief of the Section on Biophysical NMR Spectroscopy at the National Institutes of Health. He is known for his work on the methodolo ...
* 2002:
* 2003:
Henry F. Schaefer III
Henry Frederick "Fritz" Schaefer III (born June 8, 1944) is a computational and theoretical chemist. He is one of the most highly cited chemists in the world, with a Thomson Reuters H-Index of 121 as of 2020. He is the Graham Perdue Professor of C ...
* 2004:
Samuel Danishefsky
* 2005:
Judith P. Klinman
* 2006:
Gabor A. Somorjai
* 2007:
* 2008:
John C. Tully
* 2009:
Jean Frechet
* 2010:
John T. Groves
* 2011:
Graham R. Fleming
Graham R. Fleming is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and member of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute based at UCB.
Fleming's team is known for developing and using techniques in advanced multidimensiona ...
* 2012:
Daniel G. Nocera
* 2013:
Eric Jacobsen
* 2014:
Emily A. Carter
* 2015:
JoAnne Stubbe
* 2016:
Charles M. Lieber
* 2017:
Robert H. Grubbs
* 2018:
Chad Mirkin
Chad Alexander Mirkin (born November 23, 1963) is an American chemist. He is the George B. Rathmann professor of chemistry, professor of medicine, professor of materials science and engineering, professor of biomedical engineering, and professo ...
* 2019:
Catherine J. Murphy
* 2020:
Tom W. Muir
References
Further reading
*
External links
Ira Remsen: The Chemistry was Right
*
Papers of Ira Remsen
{{DEFAULTSORT:Remsen, Ira
1846 births
1927 deaths
American chemists
Johns Hopkins University faculty
Presidents of Johns Hopkins University
People from Carmel-by-the-Sea, California
Presidents of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons alumni