On May 13, 2007 one of the most prominent crystal growers of the last half century, Hans J. Scheel from Switzerland, celebrated his 70 th birthday. Colleagues and friends in industrial and academic laboratories on at least three continents, where the jubilee worked during his professional life, congratulated him.
Hans Scheel, a native German, is, no doubt, one of the most productive, most engaged and most active personalities in the crystal grower community for about 40 years. Even after his retirement from his last official position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 2001, he is still restless active. Thus, immediately after his retirement he founded his own "Scheel Consulting" company, he organized and chaired the famous International Workshops on Crystal Growth Technology in Beatenberg, he spent several months per year with universities in Japan and China, was active on International Conferences and he is just going to organize and preside the technical session on "Crystal Growth Technology" of the 15 th International Conference on Crystal Growth to be held in August 2008 in Salt Lake City, USA. This short overview about his activities after his retirement from the official professional life already shows his vitality and engagement for the science and technology of crystal growth.
Hans Scheel was born in 1937 in Bremen, Germany. He spent a childhood overshadowed by the Second World War. After high school / college and after education in chemistry in 1958 he joined the Chemical Institute of the University of Zurich as the last assistant to Prof. Paul Karrer (Nobel prize winner 1936). At that time he worked on the chromatographic separation and crystallization of the famous arrow poisons of the South American Indians, the Curare alkaloids.