Robert Burns Woodward

Woodward's particular insight in this synthesis was to realise that the German chemist Paul Rabe had converted a precursor of quinine called quinotoxine to quinine in 1905.

Hence, a synthesis of quinotoxine (which Woodward actually synthesized) would establish a route to synthesizing quinine.

When Woodward accomplished this feat, organic synthesis was still largely a matter of trial and error, and nobody thought that such complex structures could actually be constructed.

Woodward showed that organic synthesis could be made into a rational science, and that synthesis could be aided by well-established principles of reactivity and structure.

This synthesis was the first one in a series of exceedingly complicated and elegant syntheses that he would undertake.

Robert Burns Woodward (April 10, 1917 – July 8, 1979) was an American organic chemist.

He is considered by many to be the preeminent synthetic organic chemist of the twentieth century, having made many key contributions to the subject, especially in the synthesis of complex natural products and the determination of their molecular structure.

He worked closely with Roald Hoffmann on theoretical studies of chemical reactions.

Woodward was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on April 10, 1917.

He was the son of Margaret Burns (an immigrant from Scotland who claimed to be a descendant of the poet, Robert Burns) and her husband, Arthur Chester Woodward, himself the son of Roxbury apothecary, Harlow Elliot Woodward.

His father was one of the many victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic.

From a very early age, Woodward was attracted to and engaged in private study of chemistry while he attended a public primary school, and then Quincy High School, in Quincy, Massachusetts.

By the time he entered high school, he had already managed to perform most of the experiments in Ludwig Gattermann's then widely used textbook of experimental organic chemistry.

In 1928, Woodward contacted the Consul-General of the German consulate in Boston (Baron von Tippelskirch ), and through him, managed to obtain copies of a few original papers published in German journals.

Later, in his Cope lecture, he recalled how he had been fascinated when, among these papers, he chanced upon Diels and Alder's original communication about the Diels–Alder reaction.

Throughout his career, Woodward was to repeatedly and powerfully use and investigate this reaction, both in theoretical and experimental ways.

Culminating in the 1930s, the British chemists Christopher Ingold and Robert Robinson among others had investigated the mechanisms of organic reactions, and had come up with empirical rules which could predict reactivity of organic molecules.

Woodward was perhaps the first synthetic organic chemist who used these ideas as a predictive framework in synthesis.

Woodward's style was the inspiration for the work of hundreds of successive synthetic chemists who synthesized medicinally important and structurally complex natural products.

In 1933, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), but neglected his formal studies badly enough to be excluded at the end of the 1934 fall term.

MIT readmitted him in the 1935 fall term, and by 1936 he had received the Bachelor of Science degree.

Only one year later, MIT awarded him the doctorate, when his classmates were still graduating with their bachelor's degrees.

Woodward's doctoral work involved investigations related to the synthesis of the female sex hormone estrone.

MIT required that graduate students have research advisors.

Woodward's advisors were James Flack Norris and Avery Adrian Morton, although it is not clear whether he actually took any of their advice.

After a short postdoctoral stint at the University of Illinois, he took a Junior Fellowship at Harvard University from 1937 to 1938, and remained at Harvard in various capacities for the rest of his life.

The first major contribution of Woodward's career in the early 1940s was a series of papers describing the application of ultraviolet spectroscopy in the elucidation of the structure of natural products.

Woodward collected together a large amount of empirical data, and then devised a series of rules later called the Woodward's rules, which could be applied to finding out the structures of new natural substances, as well as non-natural synthesized molecules.

The expedient use of newly developed instrumental techniques was a characteristic Woodward exemplified throughout his career, and it marked a radical change from the extremely tedious and long chemical methods of structural elucidation that had been used until then.

During the late 1940s, Woodward synthesized many complex natural products including quinine, cholesterol, cortisone, strychnine, lysergic acid, reserpine, chlorophyll, cephalosporin, and colchicine.

With these, Woodward opened up a new era of synthesis, sometimes called the 'Woodwardian era' in which he showed that natural products could be synthesized by careful applications of the principles of physical organic chemistry, and by meticulous planning.

Many of Woodward's syntheses were described as spectacular by his colleagues and before he did them, it was thought by some that it would be impossible to create these substances in the lab.

Woodward's syntheses were also described as having an element of art in them, and since then, synthetic chemists have always looked for elegance as well as utility in synthesis.

His work also involved the exhaustive use of the then newly developed techniques of infrared spectroscopy and later, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

Another important feature of Woodward's syntheses was their attention to stereochemistry or the particular configuration of molecules in three-dimensional space.

In 1944, with his post doctoral researcher, William von Eggers Doering, Woodward reported the synthesis of the alkaloid quinine, used to treat malaria.

Although the synthesis was publicized as a breakthrough in procuring the hard to get medicinal compound from Japanese occupied southeast Asia, in reality it was too long and tedious to adopt on a practical scale.

Nevertheless, it was a landmark for chemical synthesis.

In the 1960s, Woodward was named Donner Professor of Science, a title that freed him from teaching formal courses so that he could devote his entire time to research.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1965.