Anselme Payen

Anselme Payen, (1795-1891), French chemist, the discoverer of the enzyme diastase and the carbohydrate cellulose. Payen was born in Paris. He first studied under his father, a lawyer who established chemical factories, and later under French chemists Louis Nicolas Vauquelin and Michel Eugène Chevreul. Payen’s father put him in charge of a borax refining plant when he was 23 years old. At the time, the Dutch held a monopoly on borax, which they obtained from the East Indies. Payen devised a method of producing borax from boric acid. This allowed him to break the monopoly, and he sold borax at one-third the Dutch price.

Payen’s father died in 1820, leaving his son in full control of the family holdings. Payen’s interest turned to a factory that refined sugar from sugar beets. In 1822 he decolorized the sugar through the use of activated charcoal, and chemists have used activated charcoal as a purifying substance ever since. The improvements Payen made in sugar-beet processing hastened the shift in world production of sugar from sugar cane to sugar beets.

In 1833 Payen reported the separation of a substance from malt extract that catalyzed (sped up) the conversion of starch to glucose. He called the substance diastase, from a Greek word for “separate.” He used the name because, in a sense, the substance separated the building blocks of starch and produced the individual glucose units. Diastase was the first isolated enzyme—an organic catalyst that displays catalytic activity without being a living organism itself. Because of diastase, the suffix -ase eventually came to be used in biochemistry in the names of enzymes.

While Payen was studying the chemical composition of wood in 1834, he obtained a substance isolated from plant cell walls that could be broken down to glucose units as starch could. Payen named the substance cellulose. This set the fashion of the -ose suffix in the naming of carbohydrates. Cellulose is now understood to be the main constituent of cell walls in most plants, and it is important in the manufacture of numerous products with fibrous components, such as paper, textiles, pharmaceuticals, and explosives.

Payen abandoned his business in 1835 and accepted a position as professor of industrial and agricultural chemistry at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, spending the rest of his life as a researcher.