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...
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