Hafner, Walter

Pagel, Walter. William Harvey s biological ideas selected aspects and historical background. New York Hafner, 1967. 

In July 1955, Harold Zeiss (Fig. 5.3) visited the chemistry department of the University (LMU) in Munchen and gave a seminar, in which he discussed the results of Minoru Tsutsui s doctoral thesis. In this context, he mentioned that Hein s polyphenylchromium compounds might be in fact 7r-arene chromium(I) complexes. Walter Hafner attended the seminar and instantly remembered the outcome of his previous experiments. A few days later, after having repeated the reaction of CrCl3, Al, A1C13 and... 

In my opinion (and I am convinced that Ernst Otto Fischer would have agreed), Walter Hafner was one of the best Ph.D. students, probably the best Fischer ever had. After he finished his doctoral research, he joined the Consortium filr Elektrochemische Industrie, a research subsidiary of Wacker-Chemie in Munich, where he laid the foundations for the palladium-catalyzed oxidation of ethene to acetaldehyde, the Wacker process. This process has been licenced to various chemical companies all over the world and initiated an evergrowing area of synthetic organic chemistry. Walter Hafner retired in 1992 and died in 2004. 

Hafner, F.W. (1982). Kodak Ektachem multilayer film technology for clinical chemistry analysis. Principles of multilayer film analysis - Colorimetric analysis slides. In Kaiser, E., Gabl, F., Muller, M.N. and Bayer, P.M. (Eds.), Proc. Xlth Int. Congr. Clin. Chem. Vienna (1981). Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, New York, 1161-1165. 

Jiirgen Smidt, Rolf Sieber, Walter Hafner... 

L. J. Ball, R. Kuhne, B. Hoffmann, A. Hafner, P. Schmieder, R. Volkmer-Engert, M. Hof, M. Wahl, J. Schneider-Mergener, U. Walter, H. Oschkinat, and... 

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