Obituary for the renowned chemist Heinz A. Staab
An obituary by Prof. Thomas Carell, LMU Munich & Prof. François Diederich, ETH Zurich
Prof. Heinz A. Staab died in Berlin on 29 July 2012 at the age of 86. He was born in Darmstadt and studied chemistry and medicine at the universities of Marburg, Tübingen and Heidelberg. He was awarded his doctorate from Heidelberg University in 1953, and completed his postdoctoral thesis in Heidelberg in 1957 as a scientific associate of Nobel laureate Prof. Richard Kuhn at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research. In 1962, Staab was offered a professorship at Heidelberg University where, working in troubled times as Dean (1966-68) and Vice Rector of the University (1968-70) while maintaining the respect of the student body, he took on responsibilities relating to academic self-government as a modern young university teacher. In 1974, he was appointed Director of the Organic Chemistry Department of the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, which he led until his appointment as emeritus professor in 1996. Between 1984 and 1990, Staab was President of the Max Planck Society.
Heinz Staab's early work in the late-1950s has had a lasting impact on chemistry. One of his discoveries, carbonyldiimidazole, known as "Staab's reagent", is a compound that is still used in modern peptide chemistry. His book "Introduction to Theoretical Organic Chemistry", first published in 1959, rapidly became a standard work in modern organic chemistry which has had a lasting impact on the development of chemistry. Staab managed better than almost anyone else to put the new spectroscopic methods into his own clear words and make them comprehensible to a broad community of organic chemists.
In the early sixties, Heinz Staab began to focus on the question of benzenoid and annulenoid aromaticity. The compounds produced at this time, such as benzannellated annulenes, including the compound kekulene, which today features in many textbooks and, in terms of structure and symmetry, can be regarded as a "superbenzene", laid the foundations for and had a major influence on important fields of work. These compounds were the first examples of conformationally stiffened macrocycles which, appropriately functionalised, are today being produced and investigated for applications as advanced materials. Staab was quick to recognise the great significance of non-covalent interactions. For instance, in the early 1970s, he began to synthesise highly pre-organised, conformationally stiffened cyclophanes. He used this class of compounds for example to investigate the dependency of excimer and charge-transfer interactions on orientation and distance, as well as the geometric dependency of electron transfer between cofactor model systems such as nicotinamides and flavines. During his Presidency of the Max Planck Society, this work led to the preparation of cyclophane-bridged porphyrin-quinone conjugates, which he designed as model systems for the photochemical reaction centre.
He was one of the first organic chemists to recognise the potential of short-pulse laser spectroscopy, which he used for the systematic investigation of photochemically induced electron transfer with its similarities to photosynthesis. His scientific publications number more than 340. His numerous lectures, characterised by their extreme precision and clarity, are still clearly remembered by many chemists. No matter what he worked on, Staab was a scientific pioneer who repeatedly recognised the potential of novel physical techniques and combined them with cutting-edge synthesis to push the frontiers of knowledge forward.
Throughout his entire scientific career, Heinz Staab actively and successfully fought for the cause of science in Germany. He was a member of the German Council of Science and Humanities (1976-79), President of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) (1984-1985) and President of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences (1994-96). He was a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina since 1992. Promoting relations between Germany and Israel was a lifetime concern. Devoting himself to this very difficult issue, Heinz A. Staab was a highly-respected ambassador for German science in Israel and, as President of the Max Planck Society, was the driving force behind efforts to clarify the involvement of German science in National Socialist atrocities. Heinz Staab received many honours both for his scientific work and for his broad involvement in science policy. He was awarded, among other distinctions, an honorary doctorate by the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot in 1984, the German Chemical Society's Adolf von Baeyer Memorial Medal in 1988, the German Federal Grand Cross of Merit with Star and the Max Planck Society's Harnack Medal in 1996.
Heinz Staab was supported in his work by his devoted wife Dr. Ruth Staab, his two children and the scientific working group that attracted large numbers of excellent chemists from around the world. His family and working group constituted Staab’s environment in which he was able to subject new scientific ideas to critical examination in an open atmosphere without formal barriers before moving on to laboratory investigations. With the passing of Heinz Staab the science world has lost one of its most creative thinkers.