Arranged by his supervisor, he switched to a tannery in Pécs in southern Hungary, which specialised in fine leather, in December 1935 and later worked in Simontornya.
[2] As the threat of war in Europe increased, he emigrated to the United States in 1938, working first as a packer of leather and later as a foreman in a tannery in Ayer, Massachusetts.
In July 1950 he was appointed assistant professor at the University of Hawaii, and decided to set off for a "nebulous future" on the island with his fiancée Alice Dash.
They married at Harvard on September 5 and travelled from San Francisco to Hawaii on the passenger ship SS Lurline.
He recognised that Hawaii, with its largely unexplored endemic flora, offered good opportunities for research into biodiversity and natural products.
For example, he did research on the kava plant with Rudolf Hänsel from the Free University of Berlin, but soon turned his attention to the chemical ecology of marine ecosystems.
[5] Later, Scheuer participated in the "War on Cancer" proclaimed by U.S. President Richard Nixon and developed drugs based on substances he had extracted from Elysia rufescens, a sea slug.