Courageous questioning of established thinking: The life and work of hermann staudinger

Abstract

Hermann Staudinger (23.3.1881-8.9.1965) gave plastics chemistry its theoretical foundations. Although his outstanding career as a scientist - doctorate at 22, professorship at 26 - culminated in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Staudinger has remained largely unknown (as a public figure too) and nowadays only specialists are familiar with his life and work. In 1920, Hermann Staudinger published his "Macromolecular manifesto", which gave plastics chemistry its foundations but was rejected resoundingly by the organic chemistry establishment. The opposition that Staudinger faced as a result threatened to isolate him, but he defended his theory stubbornly and continued his attempts to prove experimentally the existence of the "giant molecules" he had postulated in theory. Hermann Staudinger started a new phase of his life in the 1930s: his theory about the macromolecular structure of polymers, which was hotly contested in the initial stages, finally received the recognition it deserved. While the opposition he faced fromthe scientific community decreased, new storm clouds developed in 1933, when the Nazis assumed power. Staudinger's life's work culminated in the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which he received from the Swedish King on 10 December 1953. This was late recognition for a 72-year-old retired professor, who no longer represented the avant-garde of his subject but whose achievements are still being acknowledged. This article aims to rectify this. It portrays Staudinger as a productive and unorthodox thinker, who refused to accept conventional arguments in both his scientific and political activities - until his ideas finally became mainstream convictions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.