Robert Burns Woodward belongs to the record of chemistry as one of those whose work outlasted the questions that prompted it.
Robert Burns Woodward was born at Boston in 1917. His recorded nationality is United States. He was educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Quincy High School.
Twentieth-century science was collaborative, expensive and political: the questions were pursued by teams, and the answers had consequences that reached well past the laboratory.
The institutions that housed his research were Harvard University, where the work centred on organic chemistry.
Chemistry is a discipline of purification: most of its history is the work of separating one thing from another.
The United States setting is not incidental. National academies, funding and language decided which findings travelled and which stayed local, in this period as in ours.
Formal recognition came in the shape of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1965), Davy Medal (1959), National Medal of Science (1964) and Copley Medal (1978).
The measure that matters is durability. Results that survive re-examination become the floor of a discipline, and it is on that floor that everything afterwards is built.
Death came in 1979, at 62. By then the contribution had passed into the settled body of chemistry, where it is used without being credited - the surest sign that it was right.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry — 1965
- Davy Medal — 1959
- National Medal of Science — 1964
- Copley Medal — 1978
- Foreign Member of the Royal Society — 1956
- Held posts at Harvard University
- Educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Quincy High School
- Fields of research: organic chemistry
