Robert Burns Woodward
Ja man organiskās ķīmijas laukā būtu elks, tad tas noteikti būtu Robert Burns Woodward - iespējams dižākais sintētiķis, kas jelkad dzīvojis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bur
A student of his said about him:
I owe a lot to R. B. Woodward. He showed me that one could attack difficult problems without a clear idea of their outcome, but with confidence that intelligence and effort would solve them. He showed me the beauty of modern organic chemistry, and the relevance to the field of detailed careful reasoning. He showed me that one does not need to specialize. Woodward made great contributions to the strategy of synthesis, to the deduction of difficult structures, to the invention of new chemistry, and to theoretical aspects as well. He taught his students by example the satisfaction that comes from total immersion in our science. I treasure the memory of my association with this remarkable chemist.
About terramycin(antibiotika, kuras struktūra tolaik bija nezināma), Woodward's colleague and Nobel Laureate Derek Barton said:
The most brilliant analysis ever done on a structural puzzle was surely the solution (1953) of the terramycin problem. It was a problem of great industrial importance, and hence many able chemists had performed an enormous amount of work trying to determine the structure. There seemed to be too much data to resolve the problem, because a significant number of observations, although experimentally correct, were very misleading. Woodward took a large piece of cardboard, wrote on it all the facts and, by thought alone, deduced the correct structure for terramycin. Nobody else could have done that at the time.
Woodward was known to be a workaholic and devoted almost all his time to chemistry. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of chemistry, and an extraordinary memory for detail. The pace of his scientific activity soon outstripped his capacity to publish all experimental details, and much of the work he participated was published even till a few years after his death.
Tā arī neviens kopš viņa nav atkārtojis monumentālo B12 vitamīna sintēzi... anybody up for the challenge?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bur
A student of his said about him:
I owe a lot to R. B. Woodward. He showed me that one could attack difficult problems without a clear idea of their outcome, but with confidence that intelligence and effort would solve them. He showed me the beauty of modern organic chemistry, and the relevance to the field of detailed careful reasoning. He showed me that one does not need to specialize. Woodward made great contributions to the strategy of synthesis, to the deduction of difficult structures, to the invention of new chemistry, and to theoretical aspects as well. He taught his students by example the satisfaction that comes from total immersion in our science. I treasure the memory of my association with this remarkable chemist.
About terramycin(antibiotika, kuras struktūra tolaik bija nezināma), Woodward's colleague and Nobel Laureate Derek Barton said:
The most brilliant analysis ever done on a structural puzzle was surely the solution (1953) of the terramycin problem. It was a problem of great industrial importance, and hence many able chemists had performed an enormous amount of work trying to determine the structure. There seemed to be too much data to resolve the problem, because a significant number of observations, although experimentally correct, were very misleading. Woodward took a large piece of cardboard, wrote on it all the facts and, by thought alone, deduced the correct structure for terramycin. Nobody else could have done that at the time.
Woodward was known to be a workaholic and devoted almost all his time to chemistry. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of chemistry, and an extraordinary memory for detail. The pace of his scientific activity soon outstripped his capacity to publish all experimental details, and much of the work he participated was published even till a few years after his death.
Tā arī neviens kopš viņa nav atkārtojis monumentālo B12 vitamīna sintēzi... anybody up for the challenge?