March 19

Sir (Walter) Norman Haworth FRS (19 March 1883, White Coppice, Chorley, Lancashire – 19 March 1950, Barnt Green, Worcestershire) was a British chemist best known for his groundbreaking work on ascorbic acid (vitamin C) while working at the University of Birmingham. He received the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his investigations on carbohydrates and vitamin C". The prize was shared with Swiss chemist Paul Karrer for his work on other vitamins.
Haworth worked out the correct structure of a number of sugars, and is known among organic chemists for his development of the Haworth projectionthat translates three-dimensional sugar structures into convenient two-dimensional graphical form.

In 1912 Haworth became a lecturer at United College of University of St Andrews in Scotland and became interested in carbohydrate chemistry, which was being investigated at St Andrews by Thomas Purdie (1843–1916) and James Irvine (1877–1952). Haworth began his work on simple sugars in 1915 and developed a new method for the preparation of the methyl ethers of sugars using methyl sulfate and alkali (now called Haworth methylation). He then began studies on the structural features of the disaccharides. Haworth organized the laboratories at St Andrews University for the production of chemicals and drugs for the British government during World War I (1914–1918).

He was appointed Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Armstrong College (Newcastle upon Tyne) of Durham University in 1920. The next year Haworth was appointed Head of the Chemistry Department at the college. It was during his time in the North East of England that he married Violet Chilton Dobbie.

In 1925 he was appointed Mason Professor of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham (a position he held until 1948). Among his lasting contributions to science was the confirmation of a number of structures of optically active sugars: by 1928, he had deduced and confirmed, among others, the structures of maltose, cellobiose,lactose, gentiobiose, melibiose, gentianose, raffinose, as well as the glucoside ring tautomeric structure of aldose sugars.

In 1933, working with the then Assistant Director of Research (later Sir) Edmund Hirst and a team led by post-doctoral student Maurice Stacey (who in 1956 rose to the same Mason Chair), having properly deduced the correct structure and optical-isomeric nature of vitamin C, Haworth reported the synthesisis of the vitamin. Haworth had been given his initial reference sample of "water-soluble vitamin C" or "hexuronic acid" (the previous name for the compound as extracted from natural products) by Hungarian physiologist Albert Szent-György, who had codiscovered its vitamin properties along with Charles Glen King, and had more recently discovered that it could be extracted in bulk from Hungarian paprika. In honor of the compound's antiscorbutic properties, Haworth and Szent-Györgyi now proposed the new name of "a-scorbic acid" for the molecule, with L-ascorbic acid as its formal chemical name.