Inventor of Photochemistry
Giacomo Luigi Ciamician was an Italian-Armenian chemist and senator. He was a pioneer in photochemistry and green chemistry. In 1910 he became the first man born in Trieste to be nominated Senator, in the XXIII Legislation of the Kingdom of Italy.
Ciamician studied at Vienna and Giessen, where he received the Ph.D. in 1880. He became Cannizzaro’s assistant at the University of Rome (1880) and professor of general chemistry at Padua (1887) and then at Bologna (1889). The excellence and importance of his work was such that Emil Fischer several times proposed him for the Nobel Prize.
Research
Ciamician’s earliest researches (1877–1880), conducted while he was still a student in Vienna, were in spectroscopy. His first organic chemical studies were on the components of natural resins. In 1880 he began a lengthy investigation of the chemistry of pyrrole and related compounds that resulted in eighty papers and lasted until 1905. He established the nature of pyrrole as a secondary amine and clarified its ring structure by synthesizing it from succinimide. Ciamician prepared many derivatives of pyrrole, pyrroline, and pyrrolidine, including the synthesis of iodol (tetraiodopyrrole), which proved to have therapeutic use as a substitute for iodoform.
Ciamician was one of the founders of photochemistry, making the first systematic study of the behavior of organic compounds toward light. Between 1900 and 1915 Ciamician and his assistant Paolo Silber published fifty photochemical papers. Among the many photochemical reactions that he discovered were the reciprocal oxidation-reduction of alcohols and carbonyl compounds, the hydrolysis of cyclic ketones into fatty acids and unsaturated aldehydes, the condensation of hydrocyanic acid with carbonyl compounds, the polymerization of unsaturated compounds, and numerous photochemical syntheses. Ciamician was also interested in the applications of photochemistry and discussed the potentialities of the utilization of solar energy in desert regions and in the large-scale photochemical syntheses of valuable plant substances.
Another important area of Ciamician’s investigation was plant chemistry. From 1888 to 1899 he determined the constitution of several essential oils: eugenol, safrole, and apiole from the oils of cloves, sassafras, and parsley and celery, respectively. During his photochemical studies he became convinced that the future of organic chemistry lay in its application to biology. From 1908 to 1922 Ciamician, in collaboration with Ciro Ravenna, professor of agricultural chemistry at Pisa, published twenty-one papers on the origin and function of organic substances in plants. They achieved the synthesis of glycosides in plants by inoculating them with the proper raw materials. Injection of plants with amino acids stimulated the production of alkaloids. The two chemists made many studies of the influence of organic compounds on the development of plants. They found that inoculation of plants with alkaloids such as caffeine and theobromine increased the activity of chlorophyll and led to the overproduction of starch. Ciamician and Ravenna concluded that alkaloids were not excretory products of plants but had a function similar to that of hormones in animals.
Honors and awards
Ciamician received the honorary Doctor of Laws (DLL) from the University of Glasgow in June 1901. University of Bologna’s Department of Chemistry is named after Ciamician.
