Switzerland
At age 7 he and his two older brothers were sent to the Swiss boarding school La Châtaigneraie, near the home town of his mother, Renée Tapernoux, in Vevey. At high school he made a pact with a childhood friend, one of them would become a doctor and the other a scientist and then they could cure the ills of the world. While at high school Fischer was admitted to the Geneva Conservatory of Music, he also considered becoming a professional musician.
At the completion of high school Fischer wanted to study microbiology, however he was advised to study chemistry. He studied at the University of Geneva during World War II, he enjoyed organic chemistry and also studied biology. He completed a PhD in organic chemistry under the supervision of Kurt H. Meyer, who worked on the structure of polysaccharides, and the enzymes needed for their synthesis and breakdown. Fischer worked on alpha-amylase.
Read more about this topic: Edmond H. Fischer
Famous quotes containing the word switzerland:
“In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”
—Orson Welles (1915–84)
“I look upon Switzerland as an inferior sort of Scotland.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)