Klaus Biemann, a longtime Alton resident, died on June 2, 2016, at the age of 89, with his family by his side.

Klaus was born November 2, 1926, in Innsbruck, Austria, the son of Willibald and Margarethe (Dinkhauser) Biemann. He earned his Ph. D. in organic chemistry from the University of Innsbruck in 1951 and was appointed instructor there. He spent the summer and fall of 1954 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, with the support of a Fulbright travel grant and returned there permanently in the fall of 1955, advancing to full professor in 1963. He became a naturalized citizen in 1965. Over the years he developed the use of mass spectrometry to determine the chemical structure of natural products, such as alkaloids, peptides and proteins. He helped to analyze the lunar rocks returned by the Apollo 11, 12 and 14 missions to the Moon in 1969 and 1970. In 1976 he sent a miniaturized mass spectrometer to Mars as part of NASA’s Viking mission, conducting the first search for organic compounds on the surface of the Red Planet.        

Klaus was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966, the National Academy of Science in 1993 and received many awards, among them NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, the Fritz Pregl Medal from the Austrian Microchemical Society, the Field and Franklin Award from the American Chemical Society, the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry, and others. He mentored 139 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers and retired from MIT in 1996. His students and friends established the Biemann Medal, which is awarded annually to a young scientist for exceptional achievements in mass spectrometry. In 1995, Klaus established the Science Scholarship at the Alton Central School, now at Prospect Mountain High School, for high school seniors embarking on careers in science.         

In 1965 Klaus and his wife Vera purchased an historic stone house built by George Derby of the Derby Desk Company on Black Point in Alton. In addition to his work at MIT in Cambridge, he soon became involved in Alton and the Lakes region. He was the representative of the Black Point (Derby Side) Association to the United Associations of Alton (then an umbrella organization of all the Alton Bay Shoreline associations), then a member of its Board of Directors and finally its president. In that capacity he organized the Alton-Alton Bay Lay Lakes Monitoring Program in 1983 and coordinated it until 2005. He also was a trustee of the Alton Housing for the Elderly (Prospect View) from its founding to 2006, when he served as its president.         

Klaus Biemann was predeceased by Vera (Themistocles), his beloved wife of 52 years, and is survived by his son, Hans-Peter Biemann and his wife Karen, his daughter Elisabeth (“Betsy”) Biemann and her husband Sean Callahan, and four grandchildren, Anna, William (“Mac”), Justin and Brennan, who brought him much joy in his later years.         

Services will be private.  In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to “Science Scholarship” and sent to Trustees of Trust Fund, P.O. Box 608, Alton, NH 03809.

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