🌻Manfred T. Reetz, an organic chemist of the highest caliber, died of cancer on April 23, 2026. He was born on August 13, 1943, in Lower Silesia, now Poland, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1952. Reetz studied chemistry at University of Washington @UW and at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor @UMich, where he received his master’s degree in 1967. He then returned to Germany and completed his PhD at the University of Göttingen @uniGoettingen in 1969 under Ulrich Schöllkopf, a student of Nobel laureate Georg Wittig. He subsequently moved to the University of Marburg to work with Reinhard W. Hoffmann, a former postdoc with Georg Wittig. Reetz habilitated in Marburg in 1974 and stayed there until 1991, interrupted by a short stint at the University of Bonn from 1978 to 1980. From 1991 to 2011, Reetz was a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research in Mülheim an der Ruhr. As Managing Director, he also helped reshape the institute’s organizational structure. After his retirement, he continued his research, first at the University of Marburg and later both in Mülheim and at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. At the beginning of his independent career, Reetz developed dyotropic and other rearrangements as tools in #OrganicSynthesis; later his group made innumerable contributions to the use of #organometallic chemistry in organic synthesis, with titanium as a central element. Starting in the 1990s, the final major chapter of his efforts was devoted to #biocatalysis. Manfred Reetz pioneered biological methods—directed evolution—as a tool to improve the performance of enzymes in stereoselective organic synthesis. He trained an army of excellent students and postdocs who went on to make their own careers. He received numerous awards, including the Karl Ziegler Prize of the GDCh @GDCh_aktuell, the Otto Hahn Prize, considered the highest award for chemists and physicists in Germany, and most recently in 2025, the Ryoji Noyori Award. Reetz was a member of a number of esteemed academies and he served the scientific community in manifold ways, not the least as a member of the GDCh Board. Manfred Reetz, a giant of organic chemistry, will be dearly missed by his former students and colleagues as well as by the wider scientific community.

📅Lutz Ackermann @aztul, Peter Gölitz, Dieter Kaufmann, and Oliver Reiser @chemieimalltag have organized an Armin de Meijere Memorial Symposium, “From Small Rings to Large Compounds” (program: l-i-c.org/news-events.html#2…), which will take place on May 22, 2026, at the University of Göttingen @uniGoettingen. Attendance is free for all, registration required (see program). Armin de Meijere (xitter.cf/livesinchem/status/200…) was not only a highly respected, internationally renowned organic chemist, he was also a great supporter of the autobiography series “Lives in Chemistry” (l-i-c.org). Ryoji Noyori, for example, thanked him explicitly in his autobiography for a “careful reading of the manuscript” (l-i-c.org/1135).

🌻Henning Hopf passed away on March 12 only three months after his 85th birthday xitter.cf/livesinchem/status/199… A great organic chemist who had deeply cared about our community—a true “mensch”—has left us. Lives in Chemistry l-i-c.org lost a most insightful Advisory Board member who had enormously contributed to this endeavor from the beginning.