Günther Ohloff (born July 21, 1924 in Tapiau near Königsberg; died November 9, 2005 in Bernex near Geneva) was a prominent German fragrance chemist.
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Günther Ohloff grew up in East Prussia, and studied, after having been heavily wounded in the Battle of Stalingrad, Pharmacy at the University of Königsberg and Erlangen, as well as Chemistry at the Technische Hochschule Dresden. In 1951, he was rewarded his Ph.D. for work on the condensation of terpenes with formaldehyde (Prins reaction) unter the direction of Heinrich Wienhaus.[1]
After two years with Schimmel & Co. in Miltitz near Leipzig, at that time the most renowned Flavor and Fragrance company, he left Eastern Germany in 1953 for Dragoco, Holzminden, where he stayed until 1959, when he was offered a position at the Max Planck Institute for Bioinorganic Chemistry in Mülheim with Günther Otto Schenck. There he worked on the industrial-scale application of photooxygenation reactions employing singlet oxygen, Ene reactions and sigmatropic rearrangements. In 1962, Ohloff returned to Industry and joined Firmenich in Geneva, where he first headed the process-research group. In 1968, he was promoted research director and member of the board of directors, which he remained until his retirement in 1989. His scientific work, which is documented in 228 publications and 111 patents,[2] centered around ths structure elucidation and reactivity of terpenes, the insdustrial syntheses of odorants, and structure–odor correlations. He was the leading expert of empirical odor rules that predict the olfactory properties of new compounds, such as the “triaxial rule of ambergris sensation”. He also co-discovered the Eschenmoser fragmentation, thus sometimes referred to Eschenmoser–Ohloff fragmentation.[3][4][5] His small but condensed magnum opus on the chemistry of odorants “Riechstoffe und Geruchssinn. Die molekulare Welt der Düfte“ was republished in English in 2011, completely revised and much extended by Wilhelm Pickenhagen and Philip Kraft, as “Scent and Chemistry – The Molecular World of Odors”.