Wiesner was born in 1919 in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He received his PhD in Prague where he studied polarography at Bulovka Hospital. He came to the University of New Brunswick in 1948 where he developed Canada’s leading school of natural products chemistry — the extraction and characterization of naturally occurring chemicals from plants and animals. His former students are found at most of the major chemistry schools in Canada. He determined the chemical structure and synthesis of very complicated alkaloids and made major contributions to the fields of terpenoids and steroids.

Sources: The Canadian Encyclopedia Year 2000 ed.