[2] Bach grew up in Boryspil to a wine distillery technician's family of Jewish origin as Abel (Abram) Lipmanovich Bak.

During that period, he wrote his celebrated revolutionary book Tsar Hunger, which played an important role in spreading the ideas of scientific socialism in Russia.

In 1885, after Narodnaya Volya was crushed, Bach emigrated to Paris to engage in scientific and literary work in the Montieur Scientifique journal.

In 1890, he started experimental studies in the laboratory of Professor Paul Schützenberger, a well-known chemist at the Collège de France in Paris, which he followed in 1891 to a research trip in the United States.

Swiss scientists showed respect for Bach: the Geneva Society of Physical and Natural Sciences elected him its chairman for the year 1916. built up an international reputation in medical and agricultural chemistry for his research on catalysis and photosynthesis.

Bach's scientific focus was the study of the assimilation of carbon dioxide as well as the mechanism of oxidation to peroxides.

Bach's initial works in the 1890s were devoted to the chemical mechanism of assimilation of carbon dioxide by green plants.

In his works devoted to the biochemistry of photosynthesis, Bach, while agreeing with Baeyer in regard to the role of formaldehyde in the forming of sugar, gave a somewhat different interpretation of the mechanism itself.

A Bolshevik sympathizer, he moved back to Russia, 1917, and founded the Central Chemical Laboratory (the Karpov Physical Chemistry Institute from 1922), and remained there until his death.