Leo M. Christensen was born November 5, 1898 in Dow City, Iowa. His father was a Danish immigrant who fled to Nebraska to avoid conscription. Christensen's mother was a Dow City native, but had moved to Nebraska with her family's ranching operations. Though Leo was born in Iowa, the Christensen Family moved permanently to Kearney, Nebraska when he was nine years of age. In Kearney, Leo's father ran the shop at the local Boy's Reformatory, where his mother was the chief of the kitchen. Leo Christensen was employed in a drug store while attending Kearney High School, and stayed on briefly after graduating in 1917. After this he served briefly (less than a year) in the Army during World War I, but did not serve overseas.

Against his parents' wishes, Leo started at Iowa State College in 1918 where he received a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1923. He pursued his Ph.D. at Iowa State at Ames, receiving the degree in chemistry with a minor in bacteriology in 1926. He studied for this degree under Ellis Fulmer.

Leo Christensen married Eva Patterson on June 8, 1926. The Patterson family owned a farm near the Boy's Reformatory in Kearney, so Eva and Leo grew up together, meeting on the horse drawn school wagon.

In 1926, Christensen took a position as a biochemist for the Commercial Solvents Corporation of Terre Haute, Indiana. There his work was predominately experimental and focused on developing and refining methods to produce solvents by fermentation. His position was terminated with the closing of the plant at the beginning of the Depression in 1930. From 1931 to 1935 Christensen was on the chemistry faculty at Iowa State, resigning that position to become the Western Representative of the Chemical Foundation (later named the Chemical Foundation of Kansas). Sometime in 1936, Christensen moved within the company to become vice president and general manager of the Atchison Agrol Co., a subsidiary of the Chemical Foundation. In 1937, he is noted to have possibly been the secretary-treasurer of the Chemical Foundation as well as the director of a project at Atchinson, developing the "mold-bran method" for fermenting alcohol, and the production of commercial alcohol from farm products.

In December 1938, Christensen resigned from what had become the National Agrol Association and moved his family from Kansas to a home in Nebraska that Eva had purchased from her great grandmother. Eva and their three children - James, Martha, and Richard - lived there for two years.

Christensen chaired the Department of Agricultural Chemistry at the University of Idaho from 1939 to 1941 where he had hoped to revive the chemurgic movement, but was unsuccessful. In the winter of 1941, he returned to Nebraska to head the Department of Chemurgy at the University of Nebraska. The University of Nebraska Board of Regents appointed him research executive for the chemurgy project established and funded by recent action of the state legislature (see copy of Leg. Bill No. 462/Gilette Bill in papers). In 1945, he resigned in protest when the Board of Regents cut from the project's operating budget amounts Christensen considered essential to the continuation of his work. Specifically, he desired to build a small pilot plant for the processing of safflower, sesame, castor, and perilla in order to continue economic research gathered in the past four years' study of oil seeds. His resignation caused quite a stir in Nebraska, as well across the region, specifically in regards to the chemurgic movement.

During this time he helped to establish a safflower processing company at Morrill, Nevada, was vice-president of a Colorado solvents firm, and did consulting work at an Omaha alcohol plant and for the Farm Crops Processing Corp. In January 1945, he became a full-time consultant to the Farm Crops Processing Corp. According to James Christensen, his father made "a considerable amount of money" on war-time alcohol production and invested a large amount in the Gateway Co., a chemurgic company in Lincoln. Until 1951 Christensen was involved in numerous chemurgic projects and industries, holding numerous titles including director and vice president, Gateway Co., Red Cloud and Omaha, Nebraska; director and vice president Amboy Prod. Co., Red Cloud, Nebraska; director of the National Agrol Co. of Detroit, Michigan; and, director and vice president of Western Solvents Corp. in Longmont, Colorado. In 1951, the Gateway Company folded and Christensen was unemployed.

On April 30, 1952, Christensen was appointed the executive director of the Committee of 52 (which became the Omaha Industrial Foundation in 1954). This group was established to cooperate with other agencies in promoting the development and advancement of industrial economy in the Omaha area. In its first year of work the organization developed a planned industrial district southwest of Omaha and located $20 million of new factories in the district. Christensen allowed his post as director to expire on December 31, 1954, publicly stating a desire to resume a private engineering practice. After leaving, however, Christensen suffered from depression and found it difficult to continue his work. He died at the age of 56, on February 10, 1955, of a heart ailment in Kearney, near his farm in Miller, Nebraska.

Leo M. Christensen was, by profession and personal passion, a chemurgist. A chemurgist is a practitioner of chemurgy, or, a branch of chemistry that deals with the industrial application of organic raw materials - particularly those from farm products. William J. Hale (see collection 176) used the term "chemurgist" in the beginning of his 1934 text Farm Chemurgic, to describe the use and potential benefit from the use of organic materials - notably farm and agricultural products - for industrial applications. It was not considered by many scientific professionals of the day to be a standard term for describing industrial chemistry from organic matter. By the late 1960s, "biochemical engineering" replaced "chemurgy" as the label used to describe natural product chemistry with industrial applications.

*This brief biography was written largely with the assistance and research materials of David Wright and was supplemented by information gleaned from the scrapbooks of newsclippings found in this collection.