Eugène Auguste Nicolas Millon (24 April 1812 – 22 October 1867) was a French chemist and physician. He is remembered in the name of Millon's reagent which reacts with tyrosine in proteins to form a brown precipitate. The reagent is used for determination of the presence of soluble proteins.
Millon was born in Saint-Seine-l'Abbaye and after his education, he taught briefly at the Collège Rollin after before training in medicine at the military hospital at Val-de-Grâce from 1832 to 1835. After serving for a while in the army he left surgery to study pharmacy and chemistry and became a pharmacist in 1838, serving from 1850 to 1865 in Algeria. His most well-known contribution was the reaction of mercury and nitric acid with egg albumen which produces a white precipitate that turns red on heating. His other contributions were on compounds of chlorine and iodine including the acids. He examined salts in blood.[1] [2] [3]
An Algerian stamp commemorating him was released in 1954.[4]