Prelog, Vladimir

Vladimir Prelog, (born July 23, 1906, Sarajevo, Bosnia, Austria-Hungary [now in Bosnia and Herzegovina]—died Jan. 7, 1998, Zürich, Switz.), Swiss chemist who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with John W. Cornforth for his work on the stereochemistry of organic molecules and reactions. (Stereochemistry is the study of the three-dimensional arrangements of atoms within molecules.)

Prelog was born of Croatian parents in Sarajevo. He was educated at the Institute Technical School of Chemistry in Prague, receiving his doctorate in 1929. After several years in a commercial laboratory, he began teaching at the University of Zagreb in 1935, first as a lecturer and later as professor of organic chemistry. In 1942 he joined the faculty of the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, where he served as head of the laboratory of organic chemistry from 1957 to 1965. He became a Swiss citizen in 1959 and retired from teaching in 1976.

Prelog performed wide-ranging research on the stereochemistry of alkaloids, antibiotics, enzymes, and other natural compounds. In particular he contributed to the understanding of stereoisomerism, in which two compounds of identical chemical composition have different, mirror-image configurations (like a person’s right and left hands). With Robert Cahn and Sir Christopher Ingold, he developed a nomenclature for describing complex organic compounds. This system, known as CIP, provided a standard and international language for precisely specifying a compound’s structure.