Nobel Prize Recipient. Tadeusz Reichstein, a Polish-born Swiss chemist, received world-wide professional recognition after receiving the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Working independently of others, he received 17 nominations for the Nobel candidacy since 1943. He shared equally this coveted award with Americans from the Mayo Clinic, Edward Calvin Kendall and Philip Showalter Hench. The trio received the award "for their discoveries relating to the hormones of the adrenal cortex, their structure and biological effects." He helped discover the hormone cortisone, leading to the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. Between 1934 and 1944, he isolated the chemical structure of 29 pure substances from the extract of the adrenal cortex. All of them were found to be steroid derivatives, including corticosterone and hydrocortisone. In 1953, Reichstein isolated the pure crystalline form of a substance with a strong effect on electrolyte and water balance, aldosterone. Another hormone, desoxycorticosterone, was used for many years to treat Addison's disease. Born the oldest of five sons into a Polish-Jewish family, his family relocated from the Ukraine to Switzerland when he was eight years old, escaping the anti-sematic atmosphere in the Russian Empire. A small-framed boy, he was the son of an engineer, Isidor Reichstein, and a school master, Gastava Brockmann. His mother received notoriety for her work during World War II with the refugees from Nazi occupied countries. He attended a strict German boarding school for a couple of years, which followed with homeschooling and private tutors. He enjoyed working in his uncle's pharmacy, learning the names of chemicals. In 1914 he and his brothers became Swiss citizens. He served in the military during World War I. After the war, the family became penniless as there was no work for his father, which followed with his father's death in 1931. His mother rented rooms in their home for an income. He attended Oberrealschule, a technical school in a junior college, and in 1916 entered the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, graduating in 1920. After finding only a part-time position in the field of chemistry, he began to do research under 1953 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient, Hermann Staudinger, receiving his doctorate degree in 1922 for adding flavoring substances in roasted coffee. He found a position in the coffee industry, researching the aromatic substances in chicory for nine years and publishing several papers on the subject. In 1929, he became a lecturer at the Institute of Technology, where he was able to do scientific research with 1939 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Leopold Ruzicka. Successively, he was appointed in 1934 Titular Professor, in 1937 Associate Professor, in 1938 Professor in Pharmaceutical Chemistry, and at that point, moved to the University of Basel as the Director of the Pharmaceutical Institute, and in 1946, the Chair of Organic Chemistry was added and he held both these appointments until 1950. Between 1948 and 1952, he supervised the building and equipment of a new Institute of Organic Chemistry, which was ready for occupation in 1952. He became the Director of the Institute of Organic Chemistry in 1960. In 1933, working independent of 1937 Nobel Prize recipient Sir Walter Norman Haworth, he began synthesizing vitamin C. The principal industrial process for the artificial synthesis of Vitamin C bears his name. Another one of his interests was botany, especially ferns. He was a prolific author writing 635 papers, with the last ones at the age of 97. Besides the Nobel Prize, he received the Swiss Marcel Benoist Prize in 1947, the Cameron Prize for Therapeutics of University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 1951, an Honorary Doctorate of the Sorbonne in Paris, and in 1952 was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, London, receiving the Copley Medal in 1968 "in recognition of his distinguished work on the chemistry of vitamin C and his authoritative studies of the cortico-steroids." He married Henriette Louise Quarles van Ufford, of Dutch nobility, in 1927. The couple had one daughter. Until 2008, he was the longest-living Nobel recipient at the time of his death. His mother's 20-page biography with photographs was published in the text "East European Jewish Migration to Switzerland."