Marcellin Berthelot

✶October 25, 1827

†March 18, 1907

4 candles burning, 8 lit in all

About their life

Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot was a French chemist and Republican politician noted for the Thomsen–Berthelot principle of thermochemistry. He synthesized many organic compounds from inorganic substances, providing a large amount of counter-evidence to the theory of Jöns Jakob Berzelius that organic compounds required organisms in their synthesis.

Berthelot was convinced that chemical synthesis would revolutionize the food industry by the year 2000, and that synthesized foods would replace farms and pastures. "Why not", he asked, "if it proved cheaper and better to make the same materials than to grow them?"

French chemist and politician (1827-1907)

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Biography from the article Marcellin Berthelot on the English Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.