Fritz Pregl was born in 1869, in Laibach, Austria (now Ljubljana, Republic of Slovenia), the only son of Friderike Schlacker and Raimund Pregl. Pregl earned his medical degree from the University of Graz in 1893; while he practiced medicine, he stayed at the university working in a chemistry laboratory. Pregl's interests turned towards organic chemistry and in 1904, he went to Germany to study chemistry with Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig and Emil Fischer in Berlin. Fischer was a 1902 Nobel laureate in organic chemistry for his sugar and purine research, and Ostwald, a physical chemist, would win the Nobel in 1909 for his work in catalysis.

Returning to Graz in 1905, Pregl renewed his prior research in bile and began protein investigations, having been intrigued by Fischer's recent work on the structure of proteins. In the course of his chemical investigations, Pregl continually came up against one problem: the methods of analysis employed...