Many scientists today know little about László Zechmeister or his work, yet his books ^[1][2][3][4] and scholarly publications were widely read and cited during the 1930s to the 1950s. He was one of the researchers who rediscovered chromatography and demonstrated its use for separating and isolating complex natural pigments.

László Zechmeister was born on 14 May 1889 in the city of Győr, a town in the north-west of Hungary. He received his primary education in Győr, and he finished high school in 1906. In 1907, Zechmeister commenced his studies in chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where he followed lectures and enjoyed the guidance of the future Nobel Prize laureate Richard Willstätter. He received his degree as a chemical engineer in 1911. When Willstätter left for Berlin in 1912, Zechmeister followed him and worked as his assistant from 1912 to 1914. During this period, he wrote his doctorate thesis about cellulose and lignins ^[5].

It was Willstätter who sparked his interest in the investigations of natural products such as chlorophylls and carotenoids, a subject which he never gave up. Willstätter was the first to determine the correct molecular formulae of some plant carotenoids, thus placing a key in the hands of carotenoid researchers for further investigations. Zechmeister admired his professor (he kept a photo of him above his desk), and he often said, citing the work style of Willstätter, “to achieve the maximum possible result, we have to wish for the impossible”.

His scientific career was interrupted when World War I began. Zechmeister was enlisted in the Hungarian army and had to fight on the front line, where he was injured twice. He was taken captive and sent to a Russian prison camp in Siberia for three years. At the end of the war, he left the prison and came home to Hungary. Due to post-war chaos, he could only find temporary positions, such as the work of a chief scientific officer at the Chinoin pharmaceutical factory in Hungary, where he conducted industrial chemical research. At the same time, he worked at a veterinary college with György Hevesy. He was offered a teaching appointment at the Royal Danish Agriculture and Veterinary Academy in Copenhagen, where he worked as an instructor and scientific assistant of Niels Bjerrum in 1922–1923.

In 1923, Zechmeister was offered a professorship and directorship of a chemistry laboratory at a medical school in the newly established Erzsébet University in Pécs. This was, of course, a great honor, as Zechmeister was only 33 years old, and there had never been such a young person holding a position such as that in Hungary before ^[6]. The university, as an institution, had operated in earlier years in Pozsony (today Bratislava). In respect to the equipment, everything stayed in Bratislava, and only the name was transferred to the new university. Zechmeister was mainly involved in organizational work, such as the building process of the premises and the laboratories and the hiring of scientific staff. In a short time, he developed his department into an effective teaching and research institute. He had the ability to collect brilliant colleagues around him, who played an important role in educational and research work, and who later became prominent in academic circles. His colleagues in the department worked in different fields of chemistry, but he had the greatest passion for carotenoid research. In the preface of his book, “Carotinoide” ^[1], Zechmeister wrote: “It would be an understatement to say that carotenoids are just a special class of natural colorants and put them into a system. On the one hand, the peculiar structure poses new tasks to the organic chemist and on the other hand, the vast distribution of these polyene pigments in a large number of different organisms gives a strong indication that these compounds are essential for life”. Zechmeister soon became a respected teacher and a worldwide acknowledged authority in carotenoid research. By the end of the 1930s, he had gained several awards and a well-deserved reputation in Europe, as well as in the US. He was often invited to teach at various universities.

As an authority in the field of chromatography and a well-known expert of research on pigments and stereoisomers, Zechmeister was also the founder of the book series Progress in the Chemistry of Organic Natural Products and was its editor until 1969 ^[7]. The first volume was inaugurated in 1938, and, remarkably, the series has not yet completed with the recent publication of the 118th issue. Although in former times the series was simply referred to as “Fortschritte”, when German was still the language of science, it is now also known under the short form “Zechmeister”, in memory of its founder, or simply as “Progress”.

The prosperous years of scientific research were again interrupted by political events. The outbreak of the World War II in 1939 prompted Zechmeister to leave Hungary. He accepted an invitation by Linus Pauling to work at the Gates and Crellin Laboratories of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he continued his work on pigments and carotenoids. In 1959 László Zechmeister became professor emeritus at the Department of Organic Chemistry at CalTech. Until this time he had published 254 scientific papers with 87 co-authors. Nevertheless, he remained active even after his retirement. In 1962, he published a monograph on cis and trans isomeric carotenoids ^[4], which is very useful even today. Zechmeister received many honours during his life, including the Medaille Pasteur from the Biochemical Society (Paris), the Medaille Claude Bernard, the Grand Prize of the Hungarian Academy of Science, the Semmelweis Medal of the American-Hungarian Medical Association, and the American Chemical Society’s Award on Chromatography and Electrophoresis. He was an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Science and that of the Austrian Chemical Society. He was a foreign member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science, and in 1971 the University of Pécs Medical School conferred on him an honorary M.D. degree.

He continued teaching and researching until the summer of 1971 when he fell ill and passed away on 28 February 1972 in Pasadena. As he requested, his ashes were scattered into the ocean near Los Angeles.

After Zechmeister left, the carotenoid research group in Pécs was led by László Cholnoky, head of the Chemistry Department since 1946. Cholnoky was ten years younger than Zechmeister, and he was enrolled as a student of pharmacy at the University of Budapest and showed a great interest in analytical chemistry already during his studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in pharmacy in 1924, and then he moved to Pécs and started to work as Zechmeister’s assistant. In 1940 he was promoted to a department professor. Prior to World War II he spent some months in Jena (Germany), where he studied the theoretical and practical questions of optical measurements, and later he stayed at Graz with F. Pregl to learn methods of organic microanalysis. Cholnoky also played a very active role in the university community; he was a vice dean, vice rector, and finally the rector of the university between 1964 and 1967. He was awarded the Kossuth Prize in 1959 and became a corresponding member of the board of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1960. His sudden death on 12 June 1967 was a great shock for everybody.

After the death of Cholnoky, József Szabolcs became the head of the carotenoid research group and later also head of the department. He graduated as a chemist at the Loránd Eötvös University (Budapest) in 1951 and then started to work at the Department of Biophysics of the University of Pécs, and he joined the Department of Chemistry in 1954.

In 1990 József Szabolcs unexpectedly retired, and Gyula Tóth became the new head of the carotenoid research group. He completed his studies as a medical doctor at the University of Pécs in 1961. After his graduation he began to work with László Cholnoky, and, at his suggestion, the name of the department was changed in 1991 to the Department of Medical Chemistry. In 2002 the Department of Medical Chemistry was fused with the Department of Biochemistry to become the Department of Biochemistry and Medical Chemistry, hosting other groups for the research of analytical chemistry and biochemistry. In 2004 Gyula Tóth retired, and since then József Deli has been leading the carotenoid research group.