Alfred Werner

Alfred Werner was the Swiss chemist who taught the world how molecules hold hands. Born on the 12th of December 1866 in Mulhouse, Alsace, the last child of a foundry worker, he studied in Zurich and, by proposing the octahedral arrangement of transition-metal complexes, founded modern coordination chemistry. In 1913 he became the first inorganic chemist to win the Nobel Prize, a distinction unmatched for sixty years. His later life was shadowed by a degenerative arteriosclerosis, worsened by years of overwork and drink, and he died in Zurich in 1919, aged 52.

His Sun in Sagittarius is the Jupiter-ruled philosopher-explorer, a walking university born to shine through learning and the big-picture view; it suits a mind that reimagined the very architecture of matter. That Sun sits in the fourth house of home and lineage, where a soul shines from its roots. His Moon in Aquarius gives the crazy-genius psyche, detached, inventive, wired to unorthodox ideas, and it rests in the fifth house of creation, where his science became his beloved offspring. A Virgo Ascendant lent the precise, analytical, detail-hungry mask of one who serves through the disciplined intellect.