Woodward's Accomplishments

Robert Burns Woodward was an American chemist best known for his syntheses of complex organic substances.2 Some of Woodward’s achievements in the field of structure determination organic chemistry include: penicillin (1945), patulin (1948), strychnine (1947), ferrocene (1952), cevine (1954), gliotoxin (1958), ellipticine (1959), calycanthine (1960), oleandomycin (1960), streptonigrin (1963), and tetrodotoxin (1964). He also first proposed the correct biosynthetic pathway to the steroid hormones in living organisms with American biochemist Konrad Bloch. Woodward is considered one the greatest synthetic organic chemists of our time. He has also made a variety of important accomplishments in the field of physical organic chemistry. Some of those
Quinine is a drug that had long been made from the bark of the cinchona tree, found in the Andes mountain range of South America. Japanese advances in the Pacific in 1942 had cut off Polaroid from its sources of quinine, a key ingredient in the production of its light polarizing sheets and films. In that year, Woodward and his Polaroid collaborators produced a chemically simple replacement for quinine. They used a coal tar derivative known as ben-zaldehyde. A number of chemicals are obtained from coal tar. Beginning with a simple molecule, Woodward added or removed carbon atoms until he formed the skeleton of the desired product. They completed the synthesis of their key intermediate, quinotoxine, in 1944. In 1951, Woodward completed one of the first total syntheses of the steroids cholesterol and cortisone. In 1954, syntheses of strychnine and lysergic acid(LSD) were announced, followed in 1956 by a synthesis of reserpine. On the basis of these feats he was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in
Woodward died from a heart attack on July 8, 1979 but not before teaching generations of chemists the fine art of organic synthesis. At the time of his death, Woodward was working on the synthesis of erythromycin, an antibiotic used to treat a wide variety of bacterial infections, such as respiratory tract infections, middle ear infections, and skin infections. During his tenure, Professor Woodward trained more than two hundred talented PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, many of whom later went on to distinguished careers. His work is undoubtedly a cornerstone of modern organic chemistry and continues to be used for the synthesis of