Robert Robinson (1886-1975)

British chemist, born near Chesterfield (England). He studied at the University of Manchester under William Henry Perkin Jr. and was professor in Sydney, Liverpool, St Andrews, Manchester and London before holding, from 1930 to 1955, the Waynflete Chair of Chemistry at the University of Oxford.

His main field was natural products: flower pigments (anthocyanins) and, above all, alkaloids, many of whose structures he deduced and synthesized. His synthesis of tropinone (1917), in a single step and under conditions similar to those of the cell, is a classic. In 1935 he described with William Rapson the Robinson annulation, which became a fundamental method for building six-membered rings, for example in the synthesis of steroids.

He also contributed to the electronic theory of organic chemistry: he popularized curved arrows for moving electron pairs and the circle for the aromatic sextet. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1947, was President of the Royal Society and, outside the laboratory, an excellent mountaineer and chess player. He died in 1975.