Tadeus Reichstein

Tadeusz Reichstein (July 20, 1897 – August 1, 1996) was a Polish-born Swiss Nobel Prize-winning chemist.

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He was born into a Jewish family at Włocławek, Poland. After passing his early childhood at Kiev, Ukraine, where his father was an engineer, Reichstein was educated, first at a boarding-school at Jena, Germany.

In 1933, working in Zürich, Switzerland, Reichstein succeeded, independently of Sir Norman Haworth and his collaborators in Britain, in synthesizing vitamin C (ascorbic acid).

Together with E. C. Kendall and P. S. Hench, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1950 for their work on hormones of the adrenal cortex which culminated in the isolation of cortisone.

He died in Basel, Switzerland. The principal industrial process for the artificial synthesis of Vitamin C still bears his name.

Reichstein was the oldest living Nobel laureate and is the oldest Nobel laureate ever.