Guest post by JessTheChemist
In 1965 Robert Burns Woodward won the Nobel prize for chemistry for the synthesis of complex organic molecules, including natural products such as cholesterol, strychnine, chlorophyll, cephalosporin, and colchicine. Unusually, Woodward won the prize for excellence in the field of organic chemistry, and not for a specific chemical reaction. Not unlike many organic chemists I know, Woodward was extremely dedicated to his work. Rumour has it that Woodward first crystallized the steroid Christmasterol on Christmas day. I commend the work ethic but I really hope that none of you are working on Christmas day!
Woodward began his university life in 1933 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A year later he was excluded because he neglected his studies. Another year later he was readmitted and in 1936 he received his Bachelor of Science degree. Astonishingly, it took just one more year for him to gain his doctorate from the same institution.
Avery A. Ashdown was Woodward’s graduate advisor, although it is said that Woodward took little direction from his superior. Ashdown also supervised Charles Pedersen during his Master’s degree and, although his professors encouraged him to pursue a Ph.D. at MIT, Pedersen decided to begin a career in industry at DuPont instead. Pedersen was very successful at Dupont and during his time there he carried out research in to the syntheses of crown ethers. This work led to a Nobel prize in chemistry in 1987 with Donald J. Cram and Jean-Marie Lehn for their work on molecules with structure specific interactions. Interestingly, Pedersen is one of a few people to win a Nobel prize in the sciences without having a PhD.
Another of Woodward’s Nobel connections is Ronald Breslow who he advised during his PhD at Harvard University. Among Breslow’s former graduate students is Robert Grubbs who won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2005, along with Richard R. Schrock and Yves Chauvin, for his work in the field of olefin metathesis. Through Grubbs, Woodward is also connected to K. Barry Sharpless, who won the Nobel prize in chemistry in 2001 with William S. Knowles and Ryōji Noyori for their work on stereoselective chemical reactions.
As an undergraduate chemist, the first time I came across the name Woodward was during a lecture on pericylic chemistry where the Woodward-Hoffman rules were being described. These rules were based on observations that Woodward had made during synthesis of vitamin B12. Woodward presented his ideas based on his experiences as a synthetic organic chemist and his colleague, Roald Hoffman, confirmed these ideas with theoretical calculations. In 1981 Hoffmann won the Nobel prize in chemistry along with Kenichi Fukui ‘for their theories, developed independently, concerning the course of chemical reactions’.Many believe that Woodward would have won a second Nobel for his contribution to these rules, but he passed away just two years earlier and Nobel prizes cannot be awarded posthumously.
As you can see, Woodward is connected to many great scientists, too many to mention here! if you want a further insight into the world of Woodward, head over to the B.R.S.M. blog (a fellow contributor to Chemistry World) for this post on Woodward’s work. Finally, to find out if Woodward or any other laureates are connected to you, have a peek at academictree.org and find your connections.
