Elisabeth Dane, born in Mayen in 1903, had an extraordinary Career at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich: doctorate at the age of 26 despite studying in different places, habilitation and venia legendi at 31, own working group, publications in Angewandte Chemie, lectures and collaboration in the editorial staff of Liebig's Annalen der Chemie. Heinrich Wieland (1877 - 1957), her patron since her second association examination in 1927, wrote when her habilitation was due in 1933: "Miss Dane ... is one of the most talented of the students I have trained so far. She has an independence and accuracy of scientific thought that I have not yet found in women ... I am of the opinion that women should only be called upon for academic work in special cases, but this is such a special case."

There followed 35 years as a private lecturer, Professor of Organic Chemistry (1939 - 1968) at LMU, and for 30 years she was responsible for training medicine students in chemistry. She was the first female professor of chemistry in Munich and one of the first at LMU. Elisabeth Dane had her own working group, was the first bestselling author of GDCh-Verlag-Chemie, and in 1998 a street in Munich was named after her. And yet hardly anyone in chemistry recognises her name today.

How does this happen? One reason is certainly that all the authors of the biographies of female chemists written to date (t1p.de/p9v0z) did not study at LMU Munich, there were simply no personal references.

If you research the CVs and careers of the pioneers, you can recognise patterns. In the first phase, a generic, above-average interest in science and the openness of an educated family are important. Then male (!) mentors and the development of internal and external networks come into play. In the second Career phase, it is important to continue to "go with the flow" in research, to take up new methods and theories together with a committed working group. As a lone fighter with many tasks outside of research, you fall behind. Things initially went very well for Elisabeth Dane: Heinrich Wieland, Nobel Prize winner in 1927, recognised her abilities, she published outstanding work on the synthesis and structural elucidation of complex natural substances together with him and on her own; he involved her in many projects as a private assistant, promoted independent research and entrusted her with the training of medicine students in chemistry, which was very important for the institute.

However, Elisabeth Dane's mentor Heinrich Wieland was then faced with a second war. In 1942, he celebrated his 65th birthday, Elisabeth Dane was 39 years old, a bachelor and the only woman among his large group of students. Her colleague Franz Wille (1909 - 1986), who was six years younger, wrote about this time and about Elisabeth Dane in particular when he looked back on his 70th birthday:

"Miss Dane ruled the roost on the ground floor. She was the boss's earpiece. Difficult institute matters always had to be discussed with her before they were presented to the boss. We lecturers rarely visited each other in those days. But Mrs Dane did come once, and I'll never forget it. It was at half past eight in the morning; she rang the bell and came rushing in immediately "Wille, you don't need to get up and go to the institute. It's broken." That was in December 1944."

The institute was completely destroyed, the laboratories were relocated, research and training were kept up on a makeshift basis - everyone travelled long distances by bike and on the few trains available to communicate with each other. While all male lecturers were dismissed at the end of the war, Elisabeth Dane, who was not a member of the NSDAP, received permission from the military government on 18 December 1945 to "continue research work in the field of vitamin A". But she hardly had time for this. Her mentor and head of the institute, who was in poor health, commissioned Elisabeth Dane and his exceptionally talented, 17 years younger "junior student" Rolf Huisgen (1920 - 2020) to organise the key tasks of the institute, the medical internship and the reconstruction of organic chemistry. Elisabeth Dane was the only constant for Heinrich Wieland in the post-war years; in 1948, the former colleagues were reinstated and Rolf Huisgen was appointed to Tübingen in 1949. Elisabeth Dane also received a call in 1948/1949 - to Rostock; but she declined without (!) demanding negotiations to stay, as she did not want to leave "her medicine and her mentor and colleague Heinrich Wieland" alone during the reconstruction. A successor to Wieland was not quickly found, partly because the institute had been completely destroyed. Several of his students cancelled, Elisabeth Dane was obviously not trusted with this role, and so Rolf Huisgen was finally appointed in 1952. Elisabeth Dane had just turned 50.

Elisabeth Dane had too little time for research and to catch up with the new theory-orientated international organic chemistry. She successfully researched the still young field of peptide chemistry in pharmaceutical chemistry and was perhaps somewhat ahead of her time. It was a Herculean task to organise the medical training of 450 students who were not particularly interested in chemistry with 15 frequently changing assistants, including the oral examinations that were common at the time. Elisabeth Dane became known throughout Germany for this, not least thanks to the book "Kleines chemisches Praktikum", which was published in 1960 and is still available today, which she wrote with Franz Wille and regularly updated; over 400 easy-to-reproduce experiments combined with short theoretical texts made the work and thus her name famous.

In the 1960s, Elisabeth Dane published again in the Angewandte and attended international peptide congresses in Oxford and Athens, which, however, were now primarily organised by biochemistry institutes; Elisabeth Dane had remained at the organic institute because of the medical training there. This did not help Elisabeth Dane's scientific networking. In 1965, a heart attack forced her to take a longer break and curbed her passion for research, but not her passion for cigarettes. She would have liked to continue at the institute beyond retirement age, but her application was rejected. So she retired to her self-built and designed house in Gauting, far outside the centre of Munich. She refused to celebrate milestone birthdays and was buried quietly at her own request in March 1984 after a long illness and cared for by her sister.

In his work on the history of the Faculty of Chemistry at LMU, published in 2023, Wolfgang Beck writes about Elisabeth Dane's colleague of the same age: "Friedrich Klages (also a Wieland student) belonged to a generation that was skipped over for appointments to professorships as a result of the turmoil of the war and post-war period. This also applies to Elisabeth Dane, Hans Behringer, Rudolf Hüttl and Franz Wille."

Perhaps a quota would have been helpful for their careers. Their path shows how important it is "that the chemistry is right" - time and time again.

This article was published in "Nachrichten aus der Chemie", May 2025

Author: Dr Eva E. Wille, Chairwoman of the Division of Senior Expert Chemists