Robert Woodward was nominated for the Nobel Prize 111 times before winning
Between 1946 and 1965 the American chemist Robert Burns Woodward was put forward for the Nobel Prize 111 times. When he finally won, in 1965, he used his lecture to describe building the antibiotic cephalosporin, claiming he had pushed his team so the synthesis would be finished in time for the ceremony.
Born in Boston on 10 April 1917, Woodward lost his father to the 1918 influenza pandemic. As a schoolboy he worked through most of the experiments in Ludwig Gattermann's standard organic chemistry textbook, and in 1928 he persuaded the German consul-general in Boston to obtain original German research papers for him. At MIT he neglected his courses so badly that he was excluded in 1934, yet after readmission he earned his bachelor's degree in 1936 and a doctorate just a year later.
His early fame came from using new instruments. In the early 1940s he drew on ultraviolet spectroscopy to devise what became Woodward's rules for working out molecular structures, sparing chemists much of the old laborious degradation work. In 1944, with William von Eggers Doering, he reported a synthesis of quinine. It was hailed as a wartime breakthrough, but the route was far too long for practical production; its real significance was as a landmark in the art of synthesis.
He went on to assemble a remarkable list of natural products, including cholesterol, cortisone, strychnine and chlorophyll, applying principles of reaction mechanism developed by Christopher Ingold and Robert Robinson as a predictive guide. Colleagues described some targets as impossible before he made them, and his work made elegance a goal of the field. In the early 1950s he and Geoffrey Wilkinson proposed the structure of ferrocene, an iron-containing compound that helped launch organometallic chemistry.
His greatest project was vitamin B12, the most complex natural product yet attempted, undertaken with Albert Eschenmoser in Zurich and a team of nearly one hundred students and postdocs; it was published in 1973. Observations made along the way led Woodward and Roald Hoffmann to formulate the Woodward-Hoffmann rules, based on the symmetry of molecular orbitals. Woodward died in his sleep of a heart attack on 8 July 1979, while working on a synthesis of erythromycin.
Source: Robert Burns Woodward
