Mikhail Koton

Born Dec. 16 (29), 1908, at Novyi Petergof station, now Petrodvorets, Leningrad Oblast. Soviet organic chemist. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1960).

Koton graduated from Leningrad State University in 1935. In 1952 he became head of a laboratory at the Leningrad Institute of Macromolecular Compounds of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR; in 1960 he became the institute’s director. His main works are devoted to organic and organometallic chemistry and to macromolecular compounds. Koton studied the reactivity of organic derivatives of mercury, lead, tin, bismuth, arsenic, antimony, and silicon and discovered a new reaction in the mercuration of aromatic compounds. He also established the regularities of the formation of many new polymers of the aromatic and heterocyclic series. Koton is the author of the monograph The Chemistry of Organic Dielectrics (1957).