PROFESSOR WIKTOR KEMULA FIFTY YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY 50 years ago Wiktor Kemula--who is today one of the leading analytical chemists and electrochemists--started his scientific career by accepting the post of demonstrator at Prof. S. TotIoczko's Department of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Lw6w.
Born March 6, 1902, in Ismail (Bessarabia), the son of a Polish expatriate, Wiktor Kemula came to Poland in 1921 and read Chemistry and obtained his M.Ph. and Ph.D. degrees in Lw6w. At first he investigated the action of u.v. radiation on simple alkanes and their chloro-derivatives, becoming one of the pioneers of organic photochemistry 1. In 1929 he joined J. Heyrovsk~ in Prague, being one of his first students of polarography2; the next year he completed his studies in photochemistry and electrochemistry working with F. Weigert and P. Debye in Leipzig. In 1936 he was appointed associate professor of Physical Chemistry at the Johannes Casimirus University in Lw6w; at the time Kemula was one of the youngest professors in Poland. He continued his photochemical research, for example on the photo-polymerization of acetylene to aromatics 3 and carried out investigations in the field of analytical emission spectrography, but mainly he did much as an apostle of polarography in Poland.