Pierre Jean Robiquet

Pierre Robiquet
Portrait c. 1825–1830
Born	(1780-01-14)14 January 1780 Rennes, Brittany, Kingdom of France
Died	29 April 1840(1840-04-29) (aged 60) Paris, Kingdom of the French
Occupation	Chemist

Pierre Jean Robiquet (13 January 1780 – 29 April 1840) was a French chemist. He laid founding work in identifying amino acids, the fundamental building blocks of proteins. He did this through recognizing the first of them, asparagine, in 1806, in the industry's adoption of industrial dyes, with the identification of alizarin in 1826, and in the emergence of modern medications, through the identification of codeine in 1832, an opiate alkaloid substance of widespread use with analgesic and antidiarrheal properties.

Robiquet was born in Rennes. He was at first a pharmacist in the French armies during the French Revolution years, and became a professor at the École de pharmacie in Paris, where he died.

Notable scientific achievements were among other things his isolation and characterization of properties of asparagine (the first amino acid to be identified, from asparagus, achieved. In 1806, with Louis Nicolas Vauquelin), cantharidin (1810), the sigma-1 receptor agonist noscapine (1817), caffeine (1821), alizarin (later on moved to mass industrial production by Carl Gräbe and Carl Theodore Liebermann in Germany, and by William Henry Perkin in Great Britain) and purpurin (1826), Orcin (1829), amygdalin (1830), as well as codeine (1832). Some of these discoveries were made in collaboration with other scientists.