LAUSR

My surprise was due to Padwa’s claim that it was Robert Robinson and not R. B. Woodward who should be credited for solving the structure of strychnine. My astonishment increased substantially after discussing this distinction with Padwa. I described to him the history of Robinson’s and Woodward’s publications of the late 1940s. As I will elucidate further below, it was Woodward and not Robinson whose assignment of strychnine’s structure was made unambiguously, unequivocally, and irreversibly. But the facts as I presented them to Padwa were unpersuasive to him. Yet as a result of our discussions, I came to understand that there was some validity to Padwa’s position. Shortly thereafter, I came across a 1958 memoir written by Rolf Huisgen, the eminent Munich chemist, on the occasion of his 1958 Heinrich Wieland Memorial Lecture. Huisgen wrote: “The establishment of the structural formula of strychnine on the basis of the large mass of experimental data is due mainly to Sir Robert Robinson. R. B. Woodward’s synthesis corroborated it.” I knew Huisgen well. Indeed, I had edited Husigen’s autobiography published by ACS Books. Huisgen was obsessive about data, logic, words, and conclusions. My careful analysis of Huisgen's words suggests that Huisgen had refrained from making a public credit allocation. Here are the historical facts. The isolation of crystalline strychnine in 1819 by Pierre-Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Bienaime ́ Caventou is of historical importance in that it was the first demonstration that “acid-fixing [alkaloids] are produced in the vegetable kingdom.” For the next 130 years, many chemists, including the most elite organic chemists of the field, attempted to determine the structure of strychnine. More than 270 scientific publications appeared before the definitive structure was determined in 1946−1947. Between 1910 and 1947, Robinson proposed numerous structures for strychnine, beginning as a graduate student at the University of Manchester (1906−1909) with his professor William Henry Perkin, Jr. and, ultimately, at Oxford University where Robinson succeeded Perkin as the Waynflete Professor of Chemistry. Several examples of Robinson’s proposed structures for strychnine are shown immediately below.