More Quinidine

Two 28-year-old chemists created a mild sensation last year by quietly announcing their discovery of a way to synthesize quinine, a problem that had baffled scientists for 90 years (TIME, May 15). Last week, sprawling before a desk in a cluttered laboratory at Columbia University, boyish, grinning Dr. William von Eggers Doering modestly admitted that he and his partner, Harvard's Dr. Robert Burns Woodward, had been at it again. This time they had found a way to produce large quantities of quinidine, a war-scarce drug widely used for heart ailments.

The new Woodward-Doering process is not a synthesis. It is a method of extracting quinidine (hitherto derived chiefly from a variety of the cinchona tree, growing only in Java) from quinine itself. Since widely used atabrine has largely displaced quinine in the treatment of malaria, part of the stockpile of quinine can thus be turned to good use by converting it to the scarcer drug.

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