Reichstein Medal

It is the most important task of the SSPhS to actively promote the Pharmaceutical Sciences, also by honouring persons from academia and industry for their merits in this wide field of research and general actitivities. Therefore the Swiss artist Willy Engel, Thun, has been asked to create the Reichstein-Medal.

This valuable token is supposed to highlight the merits of the Swiss chemist and nobel price winner, Tadeus Reichstein.

We are proud that we were able to give this award to two further Swiss nobel price winners, although our appreciaton equally extends to non-academical persons of merit from Switzerland and abroad.
We anticipate that we will be given the opportunity to expand our little gallery of the Reichstein-Medal winners by many further persons of merit.

Reichstein-medal winners gallery

  • Prof. Dr. William I. Higuchi

    Medal winner of the year 1994

    Prof. Dr. William I. Higuchi is a Distinguished Professor of the Department of Pharmaceutics and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Utah. He has graduated more than 100 Ph.D.students and is worldwide known because he has authored more than 400 scientific papers and book chapters, has edited the periodical "International Journal of Pharmaceutics and his leadership in drug delivery. Dr. Higuchi is world reknown for his rigorous scientific contributions in developing mechanistic models of biologically relevant processes.

    More informations: http://www.lipocine.com/ | http://www.bioscience.utah.edu/

  • Prof. Dr. Rolf Zinkernagel

    Medal winner of the year 1997

    Professor for experimental immunology at the university of Zurich and director of the Institute of Experimental Immunology has been rewarded, together with the Australian immunologist Peter Doherty, with the 1996 nobel price for medicin. Their discovery, how the immune systems detects virus infected cells is considered to be of trendsetting importance for the clinical medicine and allows the pharmaceutical sciences to develop entirely new vaccines.

    More informations: http://www.immunology.uzh.ch/index.html

  • Prof. Emeritus Dr. Richard R. Ernst

    Medal winner of the year 2000

    Prof. Emeritus Dr. Richard R. Ernst has been awarded the Nobel Price in Chemistry in 1991 for a radical improvement of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, therewith creating a powerful diagnostic tool in medicine. After receiving his Ph.D. in Technical Sciences in 1962 from the Swiss Federal  Institute  of Technology in Zurich, he worked five years in California and returned 1972 to the ETH, where he became full professor 1976.

    More Informations: http://www.chab.ethz.ch/ | http://www.boston.com/globe/search/stories/nobel/1991/1991g.html

  • Werner Glatt

    Medal winner of the year 2002

    Founder an honorary president of the Glatt group of companies, for his excellence as entrepreneur and for his cooperation with universities promoting Pharmaceutical Sciences.

  • Jean-Pierre Lorent

    Medal winner of the year 2005

    For the first time the Reichstein medal has been awarded for outstanding pharmaceutical services. J.P. Lorent has in the past totally committed himself to implement the ideas of the founders of the Swiss Toxicological Information Centre, which is nowadays internationally recognized for his free toxicological service to anyone enquiring, such having saved numerous lives during its foundation. The excellent reputation of the Tox Centre today has also been achieved by the modest, but the systematic and persevering work of J.P. Laurent.

Tadeus Reichstein died on August 1, 1996, shortly after his 99th birthday.

From 1938 to 1950 he was Head of the Pharmaceutical Institute and from 1946 to 1960 Head of the Institute of Organic Chemistry, both at the University of Basel.
During his scientific career he received various honours and awards.
For the isolation, structure elucidation and synthesis of important hormones of the adrenal cortex he shared the 1950 Nobel Prize in Medicine with the American scientists Eward C. Kendall and Philip S. Hench.

According to an article in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of July 23, 1997, on the occasion of his 100th birthday, Reichstein told in an interview that his most important appreciation in Switzerland was the Marcel Benoist Prize in 1948 and the creation of the Tadeus Reichstein medal of the SGPhW for excellence in pharmaceutical sciences.