boy he was interested in science. At the boarding school he attended in Switzerland he became a close friend of his natural history teacher, Hans Noll, who profoundly influenced his subsequent education. Together they banded sea gulls on the Lake of Zürich and determined from the rings returned to them that the gulls wintered in Spain and southern France. During this period he also became interested in chemistry, soaking filter papers in the nitroglycerin he had prepared in the school lab and exploding them on an anvil with a hammer.

The family, engaged in the natural silk business, felt that young Hofmann should embark on a career in business. That is, until they were defrauded by someone who sold them on a “new” process to produce synthetic silk. By the time they realized that the so-called new process was the same process everyone else was using, they had lost considerable sums of money and the prospect of having Hofmann study chemistry before entering the business suddenly became appealing. He enrolled at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich as a chemical engineer, and by the time he graduated he was fascinated with the work being done on steroid hormones in the laboratories of Leopold Ruzicka and Thaddeus Reichstein. No more silk for him.

Hofmann did his thesis work on terpenes. Ruzicka was convinced that there was a structural relationship among the various terpenes based on a common building block (now known as the isoprene unit). In the hope of finding a synthetic principle for the construction of this class of compounds, Ruzicka put his students to work on determining structures of and synthesizing many of the terpenes. By the time Hofmann had completed his Ph.D. and two years of postdoctoral work with Ruzicka, he had produced 13 publications on structure determination and synthesis of a