Pongamos cara y vida a la ciencia. ALEXANDER ZAITSEV.

Fuente: wikipedia

Alexander Mikhaylovich Zaitsev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Миха́йлович За́йцев), also spelled as Saytzeff and Saytzev (2 July 1841 – 1 September 1910), was a Russian chemist from Kazan. He worked on organic compounds and proposed Zaitsev's rule, which predicts the product composition of an elimination reaction.

Zaitsev was the son of a tea and sugar merchant, who had decided that his son should follow him into the mercantile trades. However, at the urging of his maternal uncle, the physicist Lyapunov, Zaitsev was allowed to enroll at Kazan' university to study economics. At this time, Russia was experimenting with the cameral system, meaning that every student graduating in law and economics from a Russian university had to take two years of chemistry. Zaitsev was thus introduced to Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov.

Early on, Zaitsev began working with Butlerov, who clearly saw in him an excellent laboratory chemist, and whose later actions showed that he felt that Zaitsev was an asset to Russian organic chemistry. On the death of his father, Zaitsev took his diplom in 1862, and immediately went to western Europe to further his chemical studies, studying with Hermann Kolbe at Marburg, and with Charles Adolphe Wurtz in Paris.

Between 1862 and 1864, he studied with Kolbe at Marburg, and here Zaitsev discovered the sulfoxides and trialkylsulfonium salts. In 1864, he moved to Paris, where he worked for a year in the laboratories of Wurtz before returning to Marburg in 1865.

In order to teach, he required either a master's degree from a Russian university, or a Ph. D. from a foreign university, so he wrote up his work on the sulfoxides and submitted it to the University of Leipzig where he was awarded the Ph. D. in 1866.

Zaitsev submitted his Dr. Chem. dissertation in 1870, and was awarded the degree over the indirect objections of Markovnikov (as second examiner of the dissertation, Markovnikov had written an overtly positive assessment that was meant to be read between the lines). The same year, he was promoted to Ordinary Professor of Chemistry.

His research at Kazan was primarily concerned with the development of organozinc chemistry and the synthesis of alcohols.

Zaitsev's Rule was reported in 1875, and appeared just as his nemesis, Markovnikov, (who had made a prediction which the rule contradicts) was taking the Chair at Moscow University. Zaitsev received several honors: he was elected as a Corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Science, an honorary member of Kiev University, and he served two terms as President of the Russian Physical-Chemical Society.