Nobel Prize Recipient in Chemistry. Heinrich Otto Wieland received much acclaim after being awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was given the coveted award, according to the Nobel Prize committee, "for his investigations of the constitution of the bile acids and related substances." He received 13 nominations for the Nobel candidacy and received the 1927 Nobel Prize at the 1928 presentation ceremony. In the early 1920s, he researched the liver and gall bladder in relationship to bile acids, documenting the composition and clarifying the function of bile acids in the intestine. He found that the three acids he had isolated were steroids of similar structure that were related to cholesterol. His revealing of the chemical structure of cholesterol was the first step towards treating heart disease. He studied bufotoxin, a poisonous substance that is formed by many toads and that is related to bile acids. Born the son of a prosperous pharmacist, he was raised in a protestant household. His cousin, Helene, married Albert Boehringer, the owner of the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, which manufactured, using Wieland's research, in the 1920s the drugs Cadechol and Lobelin. In 1917 he established the company's research laboratory. In 1901 he received his doctorate at the University of Munich. After graduation, he remained at the university teaching and doing research. In 1911 he received recognition when he found that different forms of nitrogen in organic compounds can be detected and distinguished from one another. From 1913 to 1921, he was a Technical Professor at University of Munich. When 1915 Nobel Prize recipient, Richard Willstätter, retired, he became Chemistry Professor at the University of Munich in 1925, holding this post until his retirement in 1950. During World War I in late 1917, he was ordered to work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to find a way to synthesize mustard gas, but the war was over before he had results and never touch the subject again. He is credited with another synthesized chemical warfare agent, Adamsite. He was fascinated by natural substances, such as the pigments in the colors of a butterfly's wings. In 1941, Wieland isolated the toxin alpha-amanitin, the principal active agent of one of the world's, most poisonous mushrooms Amanita phalloides. Starting as early as 1930, he helped many of his Jewish students to escape Nazi Germany to the United States. In 1935 the Nazi Party enforced the Nuremberg Laws, thus expelling Jewish students from the university. He continued to teach these students as "guests of the privy councilor." Sources state that he hid some of the Jewish students in a room in the laboratory. One of his students was a member of the resistance group the White Rose, Hans Conrad Leipelt, who was arrested for his activities in the White Rose and for collecting money for the widow of a man who had been executed earlier. Wieland traveled to Leipelt's public tribunal where he refused to perform the Nazi salute, but testified on his student's behalf, arguing at length for the student's release, but Leipelt was executed by being beheaded at Stadelheim Prison. Within months, a flurry of Allied bombs destroyed his laboratory in 1945. Although he was a Nobel Prize recipient, sources say that his refusal to back down from his beliefs even during the height of Nazi oppression, remains his greatest legacy. He married Josephine Bartmann in 1908 and the couple had three sons, who all became successful scientists, and a daughter. On May 14, 1937, his only daughter, Eva married Feodor Lynen, who would become the recipient of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Wieland's vast research in Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry has been archived in 400 publications. Besides the Nobel Prize, he was honored by being elected as a member to numerous learned societies including the Royal Society, receiving the Order of Merit, the Otto Hahn Prize, and for twenty years, was the editor of "Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie," one of the oldest journals of organic chemistry. He died at home peacefully shortly after his 80th birthday. Given in remembrance, the international Heinrich Wieland Prize honors distinguished scientists for their outstanding research on biologically active molecules and systems in the fields of chemistry, biochemistry, and physiology as well as their clinical importance. On April 30, 2015 with one single bid of $39,000, his Nobel Prize medal of 23kt gold was sold at a California auction along with items from the theatrical performance the "Sound of Music." Of the eight Nobel Prize Medals ever sold at auction, "the father of biochemistry's" medal is the only one in the category of Chemistry.