12 Facts About Oscar Loew

Oscar Loew was a German agricultural chemist, active in Germany, the United States, and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Oscar Loew studied at the University of Munich under the noted chemist Justus von Liebig; he was Liebig's last student.

Oscar Loew was an assistant in plant physiology at the City College of New York and participated in four expeditions to the southwestern United States in 1882 before returning to Munich, Germany, where he collaborated with Carl Nageli.

Oscar Loew served as instructor at Tokyo Imperial University between 1893 and 1907, succeeding Oskar Kellner as professor of agricultural chemistry there.

Oscar Loew trained many notable Japanese chemists, including Umetaro Suzuki.

Oscar Loew worked for a short time in Puerto Rico before settling back in Munich in 1910, where he was employed as private contractor working with soil bacteriological problems.

Oscar Loew was a versatile researcher and produced several significant technical papers on organic chemistry and enzyme theory.

Decades before the work of Buchner, Oscar Loew was convinced that the activity of yeasts was not a function of the living cell, but of the enzymes produced by the yeasts.

Oscar Loew invented a method to produce formaldehyde from methanol by oxidation with atmospheric oxygen and metallic copper as a catalyst.

Oscar Loew proposed the name 'catalase' for the enzyme that decomposes hydrogen peroxide to oxygen and water.

In 1892 Oscar Loew observed that both calcium and magnesium can be toxic to plants when there is an excess of one and a deficiency of the other, thus suggesting there may be an optimal Ca:Mg ratio.

Oscar Loew's grave is at the municipal cemetery of Lichterfelde West in Berlin.