One night at the dinner table, the wife commented, 'When we were first married, you took the small piece of steak and gave me the larger. Now you take the large one and leave me the smaller.
Don't love me anymore?'
'Nonsense, darling,' replied the husband, 'you just cook better now.'
Georg WittigBorn 16 Jun 1897; died 26 Aug 1987 at age 90.German chemist whose studies of organic phosphorus compounds won him a share (with Herbert C. Brown) of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1979. In 1953, he discovered how a family of organic compounds called ylides could form the basis of the Wittig reaction, which easily and predictably joins two carbon atoms from different molecules to form a double bond. The Wittig reaction's reliability enabled other chemists to pursue and publish findings on thousands of applications for linking large carbon molecules. The process was used for synthesizing complex compounds such as vitamin A, vitamin D derivatives, steroids, and biological pesticides. Because of the Wittig reaction, such compounds can now routinely be synthesized. |
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