Intro | Chemistry | Sources | Affects History | History affects | Poor Countries | Undesired Effects | Substitutes | Conclusion
- Natural Source: The Cinchona Tree
- It was not generally known which plant Quinine came from.
- In 1735, a French botanist discovered the source as Cinchona tree.
- Harvesting the bark of Chinchona then became major industry.
- High demand and low supply drove prices up.
- Isolating and identifying the molecule became a big research field.
“High in the Andes, between three thousand and nine thousand feet above sea level, there grows a tree whose bark contains an alkaloid molecule, without which the world would be a very different place today”.
Napoleon’s Buttons: P.332
- Synthetic Makeup:
“No matter how much the evidence points to the correctness of a proposed structure, to be absolutely sure it is correct, you have to synthesize the molecule by an independent route”.
Napoleon’s Buttons: P.340
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- Quinine is belived to be first isolated in 1792, maybe in its impure form.
- In 1820, French researchers Joseph Pelletier and Joseph Caventou identified and purified quinine.
- Structure of quinine not fully understood until 2oth century.
- First attempts to synthetize were unsuccessful.
- In 1856, English chemist William Perkin combined allyltoluidine with 3 oxygens to make quinine.
- He thought: 2C10H13N + 3O = C20H24N2O2 + H2O.
- Instead, he made “mauve” and a lot of “money”.
- In 1944 Robert Woodward and William Doering of Harvard presumably completed the synthesis of quinine.
- They were able to convert a quinoline derivative into a molecule that, allegedely, was successfully transformed into quinine in 1918.
- The report about this earlier work, however, could not be ascertained.
- Finally, in 2001, Gilbert Stork from Columbia University and coworkers were able to synthesize quinine by going through all the steps themselves