Dieter Seebach

Umpolung, formalized by Dieter Seebach, describes the reversal of a functional group's natural reactivity polarity in organic synthesis. The concept expanded the synthetic toolkit by allowing chemists to perform disconnections and bond formations that would otherwise be impossible with the functional group's inherent polarity.

The Seebach self-regeneration of stereocenters (SRS) is a method that temporarily converts an existing stereocenter into a new cyclic one, allowing selective reactions at what would otherwise be non-selective positions. This technique, developed by Dieter Seebach, has become a widely used strategy in asymmetric synthesis.

Dieter Seebach has been a professor at ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), one of the world's leading institutions for chemistry research. Born in 1937, he has shaped modern synthetic methodology throughout a career spanning decades at ETH.

Beyond umpolung and the SRS method, Seebach has made major contributions to the study of beta-peptides, which are peptides built from beta-amino acids rather than the standard alpha-amino acids found in nature. His work demonstrated that beta-peptides can form stable secondary structures such as helices, influencing the field of foldamers.