Jerrold Meinwald

1927 - 2018

Jerrold Meinwald

Ithaca - Jerrold Meinwald, the Goldwin Smith Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Cornell, died peacefully of cancer Monday in Ithaca. He was 91.

Born in New York City to Herman Meinwald and Sophie Baskin Meinwald in 1927, he graduated from Stuyvesant High School, and briefly attended Brooklyn College and Queens College. After serving in the US Navy as an electronics technician (1945-46), Meinwald earned a Ph.B. (1947) and B.S. (1948) in Chemistry at the University of Chicago, and an M.A. (1950) and Ph.D. (1952) at Harvard, where he worked with R.B. Woodward. In 1952 he came to Cornell, where he spent most of his subsequent career. He was named Goldwin Smith Professor of Chemistry (1980-2005) and held the Andrew Mellon Foundation Professorship (1993-95).

Meinwald trained generations of chemists and produced over 400 journal articles with some 200 collaborators. He lectured frequently, including at five national organic symposia of the American Chemical Society. His research covered a broad range of topics, including molecular rearrangement mechanisms, the synthesis and reactions of highly strained ring systems, organic photochemistry, natural product structure and synthesis, and anesthetic stereochemistry. His earliest long-term chemical collaborator was his first wife, Yvonne Chu Meinwald. Also of note was his fifty-year partnership with entomologist Thomas Eisner: they first investigated chemical defense and communication mechanisms in the insect world, and later went on to various other animals and plants. This work proved pioneering in the new field of Chemical Ecology. In the early 1970s, Meinwald was a founding Research Director of the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya.

Meinwald's research has been nationally and internationally recognized. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1969), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1970, serving as secretary from 2005-2016), and the American Philosophical Society (1987). He was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow (1958-62) and twice a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow (1960-61 and 1976-77). He received an honorary Ph.D. from the University of Göteborg (1989). His awards include the Tyler Prize in Environmental Achievement (1990), the Heyrovsky Medal of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (1996), the American Chemical Society's Roger Adams Award in Organic Chemistry (2005), the Grand Prix de la Fondation de la Maison de la Chimie (2006), the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry (2013), and the Nakanishi Award of the Chemical Society of Japan (2014). In 2014, President Obama presented him the 2012 National Medal of Science.

Popular and successful as a teacher at all levels, Meinwald loved sharing the joy of chemical discovery. His own passion for chemistry was sparked in childhood, when he encountered Michael Cava, reading a biochemistry textbook on the beach. The two would go on to produce homemade fireworks shows for neighbors, lecture to one another on a variety of chemical subjects, and synthesize dyes in Meinwald's home laboratory (using notes hand-copied from the New York Public Library). When a procedure required hours of refluxing, the two would play skeletal versions of assorted orchestral suites on flute and trombone!

This began a long tradition of combining his two great interests, chemistry and music. Meinwald performed chamber music at International Society for Chemical Ecology meetings in Urbana, Illinois (2014), Stockholm, Sweden (2015), and Kyoto, Japan (2017). He studied flute with Arthur Lora, James Pappoutsakis, and Marcel Moyse. Throughout his life, he enjoyed playing music with (and for) colleagues, friends, and family members, often with wife Charlotte Greenspan at the keyboard.

Meinwald is survived by Charlotte, his wife of 37 years; their daughter, Julia; and Constance and Pamela, daughters of his first marriage. Beyond his immediate family, he will be remembered as a generous host and skilled home chef, as a gentle man and wise mentor, as an expressive and versatile musician, and as a researcher motivated by curiosity and the beauty of science.

The funeral will be held at 11 a.m. on Wednesday April 25 at Temple Beth-El, 402 N. Tioga St. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to National Public Radio or Planned Parenthood.