On Chirality and the Universal Asymmetry: Reflections on Image and Mirror Image

Georges H. Wagnière was born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1933. Following undergraduate studies at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, he obtained a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from Harvard University in the USA. After working for a few years in the chemical industry in Basel, he was appointed assistant professor at the University of Zurich in 1965, and promoted to associate professor in 1969. He became a full professor of physical chemistry in 1978. In the years 1990-92 he acted as dean of the Faculty of Science of the University of Zurich. From 1996-2000 he was president of the board of experts for the Swiss National Research Program on Nanosciences. He has been a visiting scientist at the IBM Research Center in San Jose, California, at the High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Grenoble, France, and an invited lecturer at the University of Lausanne. He retired officially from the University of Zurich in 1999, remaining scientifically active since.

His research interests concern the electronic and optical properties of large molecules, focusing on natural optical activity, magneto-optics, magnetochirality, and nonlinear optics. Beside research papers in chemical and physical journals, ranging from Helvetica Chimica Acta to Physical Review A, he has published two books, Introduction to Elementary Molecular Orbital Theory and to Semiempirical Methods (1976), and Linear and Nonlinear Optical Properties of Molecules (1993).