Otto Richard Gottlieb (August 31, 1920 – June 19, 2011) was a Czechoslovak-born naturalized Brazilian chemist and scientist of Jewish origin.
[1] He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999 for studies on the chemical structure of plants, which allow us to analyze the state of preservation of several ecosystems.
Later on, he decided to join to one of the most prestigious research group on natural products, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
Gottlieb was always fascinated by the vast and exuberant chemical composition of the Amazon rainforest, so he returned to Brazil in 1961 to take the position of Technologist in the Institute of Agricultural Chemistry (IAC), where he was responsible for major discoveries such as Aniba rosaeodora.
Gottlieb mapped hundreds of species and established indices for their behavior, making it possible to measure the biodiversity of ecosystems.