Woodward. Robert

American chemist Robert Woodward, recipient of the 1965 Nobel Prize in chemistry, for his outstanding achievements in the art of organic synthesis.  

Woodward was born on April 10, 1917, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, Arthur Woodward, died of influenza eighteen months later. His mother, Margaret Burns Woodward, remarried, and the family eventually settled in Quincy, Massachusetts. Young Woodward fell in love with chemistry while doing experiments with his boyhood pals in Quincy He ate, drank, and slept chemistry and dreamed up ways to synthesize the anti-malarial drug quinine. 

At age sixteen Woodward entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and raced through their chemistry studies in record time It took him three years to get his B.S. degree (in 1936), and only one to get his Ph.D. (in 1937). After a summer stint at the University of Illinois, Woodward joined the chemistry department at Harvard University, where, for the next forty-two years, he urged chemists worldwide to accept the creative challenges that organic synthesis had introduced. 

Woodward was always attracted to molecules with novel structures or interesting biological activities. He attacked the synthesis of steroids during his years at MIT, and with American chemist Bill Doering in 1944, he published the paper that described the fulfillment of his boyhood dreams the synthesis of quinine. What Woodward and Doering actually reported was the twenty-step synthesis of a qtiinotoxine, a molecule whose conversion into quinine had been reported by the German chemist Paul Rabe in 1918. Rabe s reported synthesis of quinine was later discredited, but that in no way diminished the impact of Woodward s beautifully planned synthesis of quinotoxine. 

Woodward saw organic synthesis as a way to advance science and to solve practical problems. One need only look to his vitamin Bj2 work to illustrate this. A reaction that Woodward had planned to use as part of the early stages of the synthesis of vitamin B12 gave a prodnct with nnexpected stereochemistry, leading the perplexed Woodward to look for similar reactions in the organic literatnre. He found them, and with Roald Hoffmann, a theoretical chemist at Harvard, formulated what are now known as the Woodward-Hoffmann mles for the conservation of orbital symmetry. These rules explained the ontcomes of a series of seemingly unrelated chemical reactions and correctly predicted the outcomes of many others. For his con-tribntions to the orbital symmetry rules, Hoffmann shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Kenichi Fukui of Japan, who had reached similar conclnsions independently. Woodward died before the 1981 Nobel Prize was awarded, and had he lived longer, he certainly would have received his second Nobel Prize. 

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Weight-weight calculations, 226 Werner, Alfred, 393 Wintergreen, oil of, 340 Wollaston, W. H., 258 Wondering Why, 5, 8,16, 155 Woodward, Robert Burns, 435 Work, 114... 

Woodward, Robert W. (1917-1979). Nobel Prize 1965 for his brilliant syntheses of such compounds as cholesterol, quinine, chlorophyll, and cobalamin. 

Woodward, Robert B. 1956. "Synthesis." In A.R. Todd, ed. Perspectives in Organic Chemistry (pp. 155-184). New York Interscience Publishers. 

Woodward, Robert B., Hoffman, Ronald 1970. The Conservation of Orbital Symmetry. Weinheim Verlag Chemie. 

Woodward, Robert Burns (1963). Art and Science in the Synthesis of Organic Compounds Retrospect and Prospect. In Pointers and Pathways in Research, ed. Maeve O Connor. Bombay CIBA of India. 

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