Wislicenus, Johannes Adolph

Johannes Wislicenus, (born June 24, 1835, Kleineichstädt, Thuringia [Germany]—died Dec. 5, 1902, Leipzig, Ger.), German chemist whose pioneering work led to the recognition of the importance of the spatial arrangement of atoms within a molecule.

Wislicenus’s education included study at Harvard and Zürich, where he taught, prior to professorships elsewhere. He anticipated the structural theory of Jacobus van’t Hoff and Joseph-Achille Le Bel by several years in his work on lactic acid, which led to his discovery (1873) that two compounds might have the same chemical formula but exhibit different characteristics. Wislicenus attributed this phenomenon (isomerism) to the different molecular structure or arrangement of atoms of the two compounds.