y; Foreign Member of the RoyalSociety; Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy; Corresponding Member of theAustrian Academy of Sciences; Member of the American Philosophical Society; HonoraryMember of the Belgian Chemical Society; Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy ofSciences; Honorary Member of the Swiss Chemical Society; Member of the DeutscheAcademe der Naturforscher (Leopoldina); Foreign Member of the Academia Nazionaledei Lincei; Honorary Fellow of the Weizmann Institute of Science; Honorary Member ofthe Pharmaceutical Society of Japan. Robert Woodward's marriages include Irja Pullman in 1938, who he later divorced,and then married Eudoxia Muller in 1946. He has three daughters: Siiri Anne (b. 1939),Jean Kirsten (b. 1944), and Crystal Elisabeth (b. 1947), and a son, Eric Richard Arthur (b.1953). Organic Chemistry and the Modern EraOrganic chemistry developed extensively in the 19th cent., prompted in part byFriedrich Wohler's synthesis of urea (1828), which disproved the belief that only livingorganisms could produce organic molecules. Other important organic chemists includeJustus von Liebig, C. A. Wurtz, and J. B. Dumas. In 1852 Edward Frankland introducedthe idea of valency (see valence), and in 1858 F. A. Kekule showed that carbon atoms aretetravalent and are linked together in chains. Kekule's ring structure for benzene openedthe way to modern theories of organic chemistry. Henri Louis Le Chtelier, J. H. van'tHoff, and Wilhelm Ostwald pioneered the application of thermodynamics to chemistry.Further contributions were the phase rule of J. W. Gibbs, the ionization equilibrium theoryof S. A. Arrhenius, and the heat theorem of Walther Nernst. Ernst Fischer's work on theamino acids marks the beginning of molecular biology.At the end of the 19th cent., the discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson and ofradioactivity by A. E. Becquerel revealed the close connection between c...
