Antoni Ballester i Nolla (16 May 1920-15 February 2017)

Abstract

On 15 February 2017, the Catalan chemist Antoni Ballester i Nolla left us after a long illness. Born in Mont-Roig del Camp in 1920, he moved to Barcelona in the 1930s when his father, a state school teacher, was posted to the capital. A man committed to free-dom, Ballester volunteered at the age of 17 to defend the Spanish Republic against fascist aggression. He suffered the shameful refugee camps in the south of France until he was able to return to Barcelona. At the end of the Spanish civil war, he obtained a doctorate in Chemistry and Biological Sciences with an excellent cum laude mark for his doctoral thesis. His fondness for learning and his curiosity about the behaviour of natural phenomena led him to closely observe these processes from a very young age. At the age of 10, he published his first article in a local newspaper in Reus under the title An abnormal July, in which he considered why it was cold in the middle of summer. He married Assumpció, a biologist and had a son, two grandchildren and three great-grandchildren