Yuval Shvo

1930–2007 · Israeli · Tel Aviv University, School of Chemistry; earlier the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot

Yuval Shvo (also published as Youval Shvo) was an Israeli chemist who began in natural-product chemistry and spent most of his career at Tel Aviv University, where he was one of the founders of its organic chemistry teaching programme and where a teaching laboratory is named in his memory. In 1963 he and Raphael Mechoulam published "Hashish—I: The structure of cannabidiol", the paper that established the structure and stereochemistry of CBD, largely by then-new NMR methods; that structure was the basis on which the structure of Δ⁹-THC was worked out the following year. He did not continue in cannabinoid chemistry, and is not an author on the THC papers. In mainstream chemistry he is better known for the Shvo catalyst, a diruthenium complex reported in 1986 that hydrogenates and transfer-hydrogenates aldehydes, ketones and imines through cooperation between the metal and its ligand.

Compounds credited overall: One cannabinoid paper — CBD, 1963. Around 120 publications overall, most of them natural-product then organometallic chemistry rather than drug chemistry.