Marcel Delépine, A Long-lived French Chemist

Stéphane Marcel Delépine, a French pharmacist and chemist, whose name is associated with the Delépine reaction for the preparation of primary amines, was born on September 19, 1871, in Saint-Martin-le-Gaillard, and died on September 21, 1965. He studied at the Sorbonne and at the École Supérieure de Pharmacie in Paris and received his doctorate in 1898. He served as préparateur at the Collège de France (1895–1902) . In 1902 he was named chief pharmacist to the hospitals of Paris, a position that he kept until 1927. Delépine’s work involved research in the fields of organic, inorganic and general chemistry. He made contributions in his investigations of terpenes, platinum group metals (iridium and rhodium), compounds of sulfur, etc. In 1935 he described a general method for catalytic hydrogenation with Raney nickel. He discovered the phenomena of “oxyluminescence” and discovered a new process for preparing pure tungsten.