Chemical Synthesis

Robert Woodward and William Doering are the chemists who are regarded to be the first to synthesis quinine. In a way this is true, but another chemist named Paul Rabe tried to synthesis quinine from quinotoxine in 1918. It is claimed that he achieved this transformation but there was very little documentation of it. The one thing, which is known, is the Rabe hadn't considered the stereochemistry of quinine. So he had produced a racemic mixture of isomers of quinine.

So it seems Woodward and Doering didn't completely establish the synthesis of quinine from starting materials. They just used Rabe's start and finished the process off and therefore producing the first synthetic quinine.

After Woodward and Doering synthesized quinine many years pass before any more developments occurred in quinine synthesis. Then in the 1960's a chemist named Stork devised a new method of how to synthesise quinine by using retro synthetic analysis.

Woodward's synthesis and Storks synthesis are both shown below.


Stork had devised the first stereo specific total synthesis of quinine. But it was a very complicated process and therefore has never been used as a commercial route to synthesise quinine. Still to the present day the majority of quinine, which is used medicinally, is extracted from cinchona bark.