Butenandt, Adolf Friedrich Johann (1903-1995), was a German scientist known for his investigations of sex hormones. He shared the 1939 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his work on such hormones. Butenandt isolated the sex hormone estrone from the urine of pregnant women in 1929. His discovery of the male hormone androsterone followed two years later, and it was followed in 1934 by his isolation of progesterone and testosterone. Using microanalytical techniques first invented by the Austrian chemist Fritz Pregl, Butenandt was able to determine the relationship between these newly discovered sex hormones and steroids. He also studied sex hormones in insects and investigated viruses. See Hormone (Growth and sex hormones) .
Butenandt was born in Bremerhaven and educated at the universities of Gottingen and Marburg. In 1936, he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biochemistry in Berlin (after 1945 known as the Max Planck Institute). In 1939, Butenandt was named co-winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry with the Croatian-born Swiss scientist Leopold Ruzicka, but Germany’s Nazi leadership forbade him to accept the award, and he did not receive it until 1949, four years after the end of World War II. In 1960, Butenandt became president of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science. He retired from all his posts in 1972.
