A collection of 26 offprints of the chemical research

Various dates.. As issued.. Very good - fine.. 1] Recent Advances in the Chemistry of Natural Products. Nobel Lecture, 1965;
2] The Structure of Tetrodotoxin, [1964];
3] The Structure and Biogenesis of the Macrolides, a New Class of Products, [1956];
4] The Total Synthesis of Strychnine, 1955;
5] The Total Synthesis of Vitamin B12, [1973];
6] Recent Advances in the Chemistry of Natural Products, 1968;
7] Same, 1971;
8] The Total Synthesis of Quinine, 1945;
9] The Total Synthesis of Steroids, 1952;
10] The Constituions of Cevine and Some Related Alkaloids, 1954;
11] The Synthesis of Lanosterol, 1957;
12] The Total Synthesis of Lysergic Acid, 1956;
13] The Total Synthesis of Chlorophyll, 1960;
14] Totalsynthese des Chlorophylls* (based on the previous paper) [*Basel Chem. Gesell. - 1960];
15] The Mechanism of the Diels-Alder Reaction, 1959;
16] The Total Synthesis of Reserpine, 1958;
17] The Total Synthesis of Strychnine, 1963;
18] The Structure of Terramycin, 1953;
19] Selection Rules for Sigmatropic Reactions, 1965;
20] Stereochemistry of Electrocyclic Reactions, 1965;
21] Selection Rules for Concerted Cycloaddition Reactions, 1965;
22] The Structure of Magnamycin, 1965;
23] The Structure of Streptonigrin, 1963;
24] Orbital Symmetries and Orientational Effects in a Sgmatropic Reaction,1965;
25] Orbital Symmetries and Endo-Exo Relationships in Concerted Cycloaddition Reactions, 1965;
26] Roald Hoffmann, a signed presentation of a mimeograph of the Nobel Lecture for 1981 -"Building Bridges Between Inorganic and Organic Chemistry", [2 - cover title, verso blank], 58 pp. [recto and verso], some text illustrations.




He is considered to be the preeminent synthetic organic chemist of the twentieth century, having made many key contributions to the subject, especially in the synthesis of complex natural products and the determination of their molecular structure. He worked closely with Roald Hoffmann on theoretical studies of chemical reactions. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1965 (as was Hoffmann in 1981). He spent his career at Harvard. By the 1960s he was appointed Donner Professor of Science devoting the balance of his career to pure research, free of any teaching responsibility. Many of Woodward's syntheses were described as spectacular by his colleagues and before he did them it was thought by some that it would be impossible to create these substances in the lab. Woodward's syntheses were also described as having an element of art in them, and since then, synthetic chemists have always looked for elegance as well as utility in synthesis. His work also involved the exhaustive use of the then newly developed techniques of infrared spectroscopy and later, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Another important feature of Woodward's syntheses was their attention to stereochemistry or the particular configuration of molecules in three-dimensional space. Most natural products of medicinal importance are effective, for example as drugs, only when they possess a specific stereochemistry. This creates the demand for 'stereoselective synthesis', producing a compound with a defined stereochemistry. While today a typical synthetic route routinely involves such a procedure, Woodward was a pioneer in showing how, with exhaustive and rational planning, one could conduct reactions that were stereoselective. Many of his syntheses involved forcing a molecule into a certain configuration by installing rigid structural elements in it, another tactic that has become standard today. In this regard, especially his syntheses of reserpine and strychnine were landmarks. In the early 1960s, Woodward began work on what was the most complex natural product synthesized to date—vitamin B12. The work was finally published in 1973, and it marked a landmark in the history of organic chemistry. The synthesis included almost a hundred steps, and involved the characteristic rigorous planning and analyses that had always characterised Woodward's work. That same year, based on observations that Woodward had made during the B12 synthesis, he and Roald Hoffmann devised rules (now called the Woodward–Hoffmann rules) for elucidating the stereochemistry of the products of organic reactions. Woodward formulated his ideas (which were based on the symmetry properties of molecular orbitals) based on his experiences as a synthetic organic chemist.