Justus von Liebig was born in Darmstadt, Germany on 12 May 1803. His father was a chemical manufacturer whose shop had a small laboratory in which the young Liebig loved to perform experiments. After studying pharmacy for six months, he went on to acquire a degree in chemistry from the University of Bonn and a doctorate from the University of Erlangen in Bavaria in 1822.

Liebig is widely credited as one of the founders of agricultural chemistry. He made crucial contributions to the analysis of organic compounds, which included work on silver fulminate, a salt of fulminic acid. Lieber collaborated with another German chemist, Friedrich Wöhler, who was studying cyanic acid, and together the two men established that cyanic acid and fulminic acid were two different compounds with the same composition. This concept of “isomerism” was later recognized by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius. Liebig also discovered that nitrogen was an essential plant nutrient and was the first person to invent a nitrogen-based fertilizer. He also devised the Law of the Minimum, which states that growth is dictated not by total nutrients available, but by the scarcest nutrient (the limiting factor).

Liebig was made a baron in 1845. He died in Munich on April 18 1873.