Prelog, Vladimir

Prelog, Vladimir (vlädyē`mĭr prā`lôg), 1906–98, Swiss chemist, b. Sarejevo, Austria-Hungary (now in Bosnia and Herzegovina). Educated in Prague, he worked in Yugoslavia until the German invasion in 1941, when he moved to Switzerland to teach at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. In 1975, Prelog shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Cornforth for his application of X-ray analysis techniques to the determination of the structures of many types of complex organic molecules, such as antibiotics, and for formulating systematic rules that relate molecular structure to the properties of chemical compounds.

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Prelog, Vladimir 

Born July 23, 1906, in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. Swiss organic chemist.

After graduating from the Technical University of Prague in 1928, Prelog worked at the G. J. Driza Laboratories in Prague. He returned to Yugoslavia in 1935 and taught organic chemistry at the University of Zagreb. In 1941, after the fascist occupation of Yugoslavia, Prelog left for Switzerland. He worked at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, in 1957 replacing L. Ružička as director of the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry, a major center for the study of the chemistry of natural compounds and of physiologically active substances.

Prelog has written works on the stereochemistry and development of modern methods for studying complex organic compounds, including a number of antibiotics of practical importance. He is a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1966).