Friedrich Wöhler. Image provided by Edgar Fahs Smith Memorial Collection, Department of Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania Library. Friedrich Wöhler (1800–1882) Friedrich Wöhler had a long career as a chemist, investigating many areas of organic chemistry, and was a devoted classroom teacher at the University of Göttingen for many years. He is most famous for one experiment early in his career. In 1827 he synthesized urea, an organic compound, entirely from inorganic materials. This result contradicted the conventional wisdom of the day, which held that only living things could make organic compounds. This result helped scientists understand that all matter, living and nonliving, behaves according to the same chemical laws and principles. Wöhler advanced organic chemistry in many other ways, often with his friend and collaborator Justus von Liebig. The two discovered organic radicals, groups of atoms in a molecule that tend stay together during chemical reactions when other atoms may be split off from the molecule, rearranged, and so on. They also carried out early investigations of a family of plant bases called alkaloids, which includes familiar compounds like caffeine, nicotine, and morphine.