Prev. Article Next Article Table of Contents

Article

Percy Julian, Robert Robinson, and the Identity of Eserethole

Citing Articles

Your current credentials do not allow retrieval of the full text.

Purchase the full-text

PDF/HTML,
figures/images,
references and tables,
(where available)

Addison Ault

Department of Chemistry, Cornell College, Mount Vernon, IA 52314

J. Chem. Educ., 2008, 85 (11), p 1524

DOI: 10.1021/ed085p1524

Publication Date (Web): November 1, 2008

Section:

History, Education, and Documentation

Abstract

The Nova production Percy Julian—Forgotten Genius included the very public disagreement between Percy Julian, an unknown American chemist, and Robert Robinson, possibly the best known organic chemist of the day, as to the identity of "eserethole", the key intermediate for the synthesis of the alkaloid physostigmine. The Nova production, however, left three important chemical questions left unanswered. The first unanswered question was: How was it possible that "eserethole" could be misidentified? Since Julian's eserethole was the "real eserethole", the second unanswered question was: What was the true identity of Robinson's "false eserethole"? The third unanswered question was: How could the "false eserethole" have been formed in Robinson's experiments? In this article I present the answers to the first two questions, and I offer a possible explanation for the third.

Keywords (Audience):

Second-Year Undergraduate

Keywords (Domain):

History / Philosophy

Keywords (Pedagogy):

Textbooks / Reference Books

Keywords (Subject):

Constitutional Isomers

View: Hi-Res PDF | PDF w/ Links

Citing Articles

Citation data is made available by participants in CrossRef's Cited-by Linking service. For a more comprehensive list of citations to this article, users are encouraged to perform a search in SciFinder.

This article has been cited by 1 ACS Journal articles (1 most recent appear below).

Molecular Models of Natural Products
William F. Coleman
Journal of Chemical Education2008 85 (11), 1584
- Molecular Models of Natural Products
  William F. Coleman
  Journal of Chemical Education2008 85 (11), 1584
  This month’s Featured Molecules focus on natural products and include blattellquinone, a sex pheromone secreted by female German cockroaches to attract males, and (R)-limonene, a secondary metabolite found in citrus fruit peels.
  Abstract | Hi-Res PDF | PDF w/ Links