When one speaks about the biochemistry of carbohydrates, it is difficult not to mention the seminal contributions of Emil Fischer. In fact, he coined the term 'carbohydrate' to make it clear that the formulas for sugars can be written as hydrates of carbon. A product of the great German school of chemistry in the latter half of the 19th century, he worked on many molecules that we all know and love (e.g. caffein, purines and sugars). For his contributions to chemistry, he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1902. Following the death of his wife and two of his three sons during World War I, he committed suicide in 1919.

"The work for which he is most noted began with his preparation of phenylhydrazine in 1875 while at the University of Munich. In 1884 he showed that it could be used to convert carbohydrates to more easily crystallizable phenyhydrazones and phenylosazones. In 1874 van't Hoff and Le Bel had proposed the tetrahedral carbon theory of stereoisomerism and optical activity, so with this new tool in 1888 he set out to prove the theory with Teutonic thoroughness." Quoted from Web site [local].

He invented the Fischer projections [local] that we use to depict the 3-D nature of molecules in two dimensions. He was also bold enough to assign an absolute configuraton to d-glyceraldehyde, the one we normally think of as D-glyceraldehyde. He had no way of knowing if his assignment was correct, but he had a 50% chance of being right. It wasn't until the 1950s that the technique of X-ray crystalography was able to demonstrate that Fischer had been correct. By 1891 he had synthesized and proven the structures (relative to glyceraldehyde) for all of the tetroses, pentoses and hexoses. We still call a depiction of the various straight chain carbohydrates the Fischer Series.

In 1902 he correctly deduced that proteins are essentially polypeptides of aminoacid residues. He then proposed the lock and key mechanism for protein binding to small molecules. An amazing man. An awesome series of contributions.