Josef Michl

Josef Michl of Boulder, CO passed suddenly from natural causes in Prague, CZ on May 13th 2024 at the age of 85.  He is survived by his son John (Jenda) Michl, his grandson Mason Michl, as well as brother Jenda and sister Lida in Europe.  He was preceded in death by his son Joseph (Pepik) in 1977, daughter Gina in 2001, and wife Sara in 2018.  A traditional Czech funeral on June 2nd was well attended by lifelong friends, family, and a great many former students and colleagues.  A memorial service will be held in Boulder in mid August.  Known widely for his dedication to chemistry, he was a consummate and dedicated family man who particularly adored wilderness hiking and the study of languages and history.  His life cannot be justly summarized in the length of a typical obituary. 

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Josef never had any interest in retiring and was widely known in academia for his contributions to our understanding of chemistry.  He was a professor for 54 years, first at the University of Utah from 1970-1986, then at the University of Texas from 1986-1991, and at the University of Colorado since.  He concluded teaching what would be his last class a week before his passing.  He was editor-in-chief of chemical Reviews for 31 years, and runner up for president of the American Chemical Society in 2007.  His greatest professional contributions likely came from his research though, for which he was nominated for the Nobel Prize multiple times.  When asked about this, he would chuckle and note that there were a great many awards he did not win.  Instead of retiring in his 60s, at 68 he founded a second research group, in Prague, and began splitting his time between his chosen home of Boulder and the city he grew up in.  Not retiring worked well for him, as his current research included wild things including the use of magnets to treat lung tissue, fundamentally increasing the efficiency of PV cells, and 1 atom thick fabric with a variety of soon to be discovered properties.

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Some of his more notable discoveries included rewriting our understanding of photochemistry and photosynthesis, inventing nano scale molecular "tinkertoys" and rotors, and singlet fission and porphene as mentioned above.  There was no way he would ever have "finished" his work... what he discovered as it is will fuel countless chemists' careers for decades to come.  Though one of the most cited chemists ever (709 and counting in 2020), with a CV a mile long, he remained humble to his core and led a simple life. To illustrate, he was more than satisfied with his 25-year-old dented, rusty, and leprous appearing base model manual Honda sedan.  His only regrets with it were that it was not a Saab, and that he tried to order it with crank windows, but lamented that they were simply not available.  

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Josef's success and character were surely shaped by an extremely challenging childhood.  He was the oldest of four children, born with club feet on March 12th of 1939, three days before Hitler's army invaded Prague.  Unable to walk due to his deformation, he endured 8 surgeries by the time he was 14, during each of which bone was scraped from his shins to build him the heels he was born without.  Growing up during WWII brought many challenges as well, from a lack of food and clothes to barely surviving a bombing raid (by Americans who thought they were above Dresden).  When Russia's communist party took over, life became even more challenging when his father refused to join the party.  As punishment, the family's accounts were emptied and his father was removed from his position as a judge at the highest court of appeals and relegated to being a notary public in a distant town.  Not able to afford an express train ticket, he would ride three hours each way, and could only see his family on weekends.  To survive, his mother found some income sorting mushrooms, and Josef tutored older students.

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He decided to become a chemist in the fourth grade, after a class demonstration where dim embers suddenly burst into large flames.  He inherited a chemistry "lab" from an older boy in a neighboring flat, which he set up in a pantry with no ventilation.  There, he self-taught himself, beginning with a book titled "Experiments that do not fail".  He somehow survived episodes which included scarring himself with acid, dissolving a valuable silver spoon, making explosives, and causing the entire home to reek like rotten eggs for weeks.  A voracious reader, his appetite for knowledge was not limited to chemistry, nor was it satisfied in school.  He had many tales of teachers' varying responses when they discovered him trying to discreetly study other languages, history, or chemistry during their class.  At 80 he began studying Romanian and was fluent in his 14th language within a couple of years.

While precluded from most traditional sports due to weak ankles with much bone mass missing, after his final surgery he made up for lost time.  He toured the country by bicycle, hiked, and took up mountain climbing, eventually summitting the Matterhorn and Mt. Kilimanjaro, among many, many other peaks.  Like his father before him, he celebrated his 70th birthday by hiking across the Grand Canyon.  He never stopped hiking, with Tuesdays reserved for day long hikes in the Colorado mountains until the very end. He credits that many of his greatest epiphanies came while hiking in, and admiring, nature.

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He met his future wife as one of the few English speaking tour guides in Prague when she visited Europe as part of a youth tour group.  At the end of three days as their tour guide, he asked whether any would volunteer to send him American chemistry textbooks in exchange for records of Czech classical music.  Sara was impressed by his studious drive and accepted, leading to a friendship that blossomed years later when he was able to visit the US as a post-doctoral student. She would join him on camping tours of the American west, a land he had fallen in love with from the multitude of cowboy books he read as a teen.  In 1968 he was at a quantum chemistry summer camp in Norway when the Prague Spring was quashed by Russian tanks.  As a founding member of the primary political resistance, he would have been punished severely had he returned, which opened the door for him to marry Sara and begin a new life in America.  They were wed atop a mountain in Austria and honeymooned by traversing Finnish Lapland on cross country skis for two weeks.  They were a perfect match, and together toured the world in epic fashion.

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The world has lost a truly magnificent person in the flesh, but his legacy will forever live on through the massive network of students that he educated and inspired, and the unfathomable future knowledge that his life's work unlocked for others to discover.  No obituary can do him justice, and his impact on the world can never be measured.