Dr. Vodoz was born in Switzerland in 1922 and attended the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He studied organic chemistry in the Department of Natural Sciences there under Professor Ruzicka in 1947.
Since 1948, Dr. vodoz has been employoed with Firmenich in Switzerland, initially in chemical production, later in flavor production. Dr Vodoz is currently the head of the Department for Flavors and Perfumes Legislation and is actively involved in numerous European legislative organizations.
When I started my career as a flavor chemist, some 25 years ago, our industry was still living, in the golden years of innocence or, if you prefer, of innocuousness. Flavors were hardly regulated at all so far as their composition was concerned. And how could they have been? There was little analytical knowledge of their composition and no possibility of their control through gas liquid chromatography, for instance, which had just been invented. Natural flavors, being extracted from natural edible materials and used at dosages inversely proportional to their factor of concentration, were obviously no more toxic than, or just as safe as, the original edible material. Artificial flavoring substances, on the other hand, were used at such low dosages that nobody thought they could endanger human health.
