The 1939 Nobel Prize in chemistry was shared by the German biochemist Adolf Friedrich J. Butenandt and the Croatian-Swiss chemist Leopold Ruzicka (1887-1976) for work on sex hormones, although these scientists worked independently of each other.
Butenandt, the son of a German businessman, was born on March 24, 1903, in Bremerhaven-Lehe in northwestern Germany (about 35 miles north of Bremen) on the Weser River. He received his early education in the Oberrealschule in Bremerhaven, after which he entered the University of Marburg (in central Germany north of Frankfurt), where he began to study chemistry and biology. After receiving his baccalaureate degree, he did postgraduate work at the University of Göttingen in western Germany, receiving a PhD degree in 1927 with a thesis on the chemistry of rotenone, a compound used in insecticides.
After receiving his doctoral degree, Butenandt remained at the University of Göttingen, during which time he was hired as a researcher by the Schering Corporation of Germany. From 1927 to 1930, he was Scientific Assistant at the Institute of Chemistry in Göttingen, and from 1931 to 1933, was Privatdozent in the university's Department of Biological Chemistry.
In 1929, Butenandt isolated estrone from the urine of pregnant women. Estrone is one of the hormones responsible for sexual development and function in females. Similar research was performed almost simultaneously by the American biochemist Edward A. Doisy (1893-1986). Butenandt continued his research on sex hormones, and in 1931, he isolated and identified androsterone, a male sex hormone. He remained in Göttingen until 1933, when he became professor and director at the Technische Hochschulen in Danzig, Germany (now Gdañsk, Poland). There, he isolated and identified the hormone progesterone, a hormone important in the female reproductive cycle. This work was important for the eventual development of the birth control pill. He also conducted research on the interrelationships of sex hormones and their possible carcinogenic properties.
From 1936 to 1945, Butenandt was director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Berlin. In 1945, the name was changed to the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry. After 1937, he directed his attention to the action of the gene and demonstrated that eye-color mutation found in several insects could be traced to a metabolic defect and concluded that genes act by directing metabolism and that a gene mutation results in a metabolic defect.
As a professor of physiologic chemistry, Butenandt taught at the University of Tübingen in southwestern Germany (about 20 miles south of Stuttgart) after 1945 and at the University of Munich after 1956. During the time that he studied hormones, he also applied his scientific expertise to the study of carcinogens and viruses.
In 1958 and 1959, after 20 years of research, Butenandt and his associates purified the sexual attractant of the silk moth Bombyx mori and determined the chemical structure of this substance, now known as a pheromone.
In 1960, Butenandt was elected president of the Max Planck Foundation for the Advancement of Science, serving until 1972. In 1971, he retired from the University of Munich to become professor emeritus. Besides receiving the Nobel Prize, he was awarded honorary degrees from many universities and honors from scientific societies the world over. Butenandt died on January 18, 1995, in Munich, Germany; he was 91 years old. He was honored on a stamp (Scott No. 1635b) issued in 1995 by Gambia.