Raymond Lemieux

Raymond Urgel Lemieux was a world-renowned Canadian chemist and professor at the University of Alberta. In 1953, alongside George Huber at the NRC's Prairie Regional Laboratory, Lemieux accomplished what had eluded organic chemists for a century: the total chemical synthesis of common table sugar (sucrose).

Lemieux discovered the conformational phenomenon known as the anomeric effect and developed groundbreaking methods for synthesizing blood-group antigens and complex oligosaccharides, enabling safe blood transfusions and synthetic vaccines against bacterial infections. He received the Wolf Prize in Chemistry and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science.