Scientist of the Decade Robert Bums Woodward

Scientist of the Decade Robert Bums Woodward (ipij-ip jp) 

Woodward began his career as instructor at Harvard in autumn 1937 and remained there until he died. He is renowned for brilliant syntheses of natural products. With his first student, William von Eggers Doering, Woodward published in 1944 what was considered at the time the first total synthesis of quinine. He was an early advocate of instrumentation, developing useful rules for ultraviolet spectroscopy. The 28-year-old Woodward employed combustion calorimetry to successfully argue against Sir Robert Robinson s 

The structure known, but not yet accessible by synthesis, is to the chemist what the unclimbed mountain, the uncharted sea, the untilled field, the unreached planet, are to other men. 

Early in his quest for vitamin B,2, Woodward noted the curious stereochemistries of some rearrangements and consulted a gifted young theoretician, Roald Hoffmann, a Harvard Junior Eellow. The Woodward-Hoffmann rules were published in 1965 and started a revolution in the way chemists treated concerted reactions such as the Diels-Alder 

Had Woodward not died at a relatively young age, he would certainly have shared the Nobel Prize with Hoffmann and Fukui. Moreover, a good argument could be made for sharing in a third Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on ferrocene (see chapter 6). 

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