Paul Hermann Muller

Muller, Paul Hermann (1899-1965) Swiss Chemist Paul Hermann Muller was born at Olten, Solothurn, Switzerland, on January 12, 1899. He attended primary school and the Free Evangelical elementary and secondary schools. He began working in 1916 as a laboratory assistant at Dreyfus and Company, followed by a position as an assistant chemist in the Scientific-Industrial Laboratory of their electrical plant. He attended Basel University and received a Ph.D. in 1925. He became deputy director of scientific research on substances for plant protection in 1946. 

Paul Hermann Muller. Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 6. Chicago Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., 1979. Source for 1968 DDT production and DDT s half-life in the environment. 

Paul Hermann Muller received a degree in chemistry and worked for the J. R. Geigy Corporation, which later became part of Novartis (McGrayne 2001). Geigy specialized in dyestuffs for woolens. Chemists at the company discovered a chlorinated hydrocarbon compound that protected woolens from clothes moths, but it was a stomach poison. Geigy then searched for other insecticides that killed other pests. Natural insecticides made from plants include pyrethrum from chrysanthemum, rotenone from a tropical... 

Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller finds that DDT is very effective as an insecticide, which makes it useful in preventing infectious diseases such as malaria. 

Paul Hermann Muller was carrying out research on insecticides at Geigy Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland when he came across a compound that had first been made in 1874 by Othmar Zeidler, a young chemistry student. It had remarkable insecticidal properties at very low doses, and it was quickly conuner-cialized. Factories churned out about three million tons of DDT over the next thirty years. Muller was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine for his contribution to human health. 

Paul Hermann Muller was the first non-physician to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1948 for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods. ... 

DDT is an abbreviation of the old name of the compound 4,4 -dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane. It was first prepared by Austrian chemist Othmar Zeidler (1859 -1911) in 1874, its insecticide potential was only discovered 60 years later in the systematic studies of Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller (1899-1965), who was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his insights. 

DDT (Paul Hermann Muller) Muller discovers the insect-repelling properties of DDT. He is awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 

At the time when Ross was awarded his Nobel Prize, dichloro-diphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), the compound that would prove to be a champion mosquito-control agent, had already been synthesized. The compound s value as a pesticide, however, would have to wait for anther thirty-seven years, until 1939, to be discovered. When that notoriety came, it proved to be worth the wait. DDT was used to control malaria and typhus during World War 11, and it proved to be such an effective pesticide that it won Swedish chemist Paul Hermann Muller, who uncovered the drug s hidden pesticide talents, the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1948. 

---