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Many medicines started as plants. Turning a leaf or root into a known molecule, with a structure you can draw and test, is slow and exacting chemistry. Asima Chatterjee did it for decades, often with very little money, and built a research school in natural-product chemistry in Calcutta. This post covers her life, what her work involved and the organic chemistry ideas behind it that you will meet in Class 11 and 12.
Who was Asima Chatterjee?
The Indian Academy of Sciences' exhibit on her life records that she was born Asima Mukherjee in Calcutta on 23 September 1917. She graduated with honours in chemistry from Scottish Church College in 1936 and went on to postgraduate study at the University College of Science, Calcutta.
In 1940 she joined Lady Brabourne College, Calcutta, as the founding head of its chemistry department. In 1944 the University of Calcutta awarded her a Doctor of Science, the first such degree given to a woman by an Indian university.
In 1947 she went abroad on study leave. She worked on glycosides at the University of Wisconsin, on carotenoids at the California Institute of Technology, and from 1949 to 1950 with Paul Karrer at the University of Zurich on biologically active indole alkaloids. The exhibit calls that last subject her "life long interest".
What are alkaloids, and why study them?
Alkaloids are nitrogen-containing compounds made by plants, and many have strong effects on the body. Indole alkaloids contain an indole ring: a benzene ring fused to a five-membered ring that holds a nitrogen atom.
Chatterjee started the chemical study of the alkaloids of Rauwolfia canescens, and wrote a review of Rauwolfia alkaloids for an international series on natural products in 1953. With Sunilkumar Talapatra she reported the alkaloids of the roots of four Rauwolfia species in 1955. The Academy lists among her contributions work on the structure and stereochemistry of the alkaloids ajmalicine and sarpagine, and the first suggested stereo-configuration of sarpagine.
How does a natural-product chemist work?
The general workflow has four steps, and each connects to something in your syllabus:
Extract. Grind the plant and pull compounds out with solvents. Alkaloids, being basic, can be separated from neutral compounds using acid and base, the same acid–base ideas you meet in ionic equilibrium.
Separate. Use techniques such as chromatography to isolate single compounds from the mixture.
Find the structure. Combine chemical reactions with spectroscopy to work out which atoms are joined, then the three-dimensional arrangement. Our guide to stereoisomerism in organic chemistry covers the configurations involved.
Test. Check what the compound does in a biological system.
A student who joined her group early described the conditions. "Before I joined her, she had a grant of Rs 300/- p.a. and three college teachers as part time research students," recalled S. C. Pakrashi in the Academy's exhibit. They had to travel to other institutions to mill plant material and take UV measurements.
What did her research produce?
According to the Academy, she developed the anti-epileptic drug Ayush-56 from the plant Marsilea minuta, and anti-malarial preparations from plants including Alstonia scholaris. She published around 400 papers. She also compiled, as principal editor, The Treatise on Indian Medicinal Plants in six volumes, and wrote a Bengali chemistry book for secondary school students at the request of Satyendra Nath Bose.
Recognition followed. She received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for 1961 in chemistry. In 1975 she was the first woman elected General President of the Indian Science Congress, at its 62nd session in New Delhi. The Government of India's Padma Awards notification for 1975 lists her, as Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University College of Science, Calcutta, among the Padma Bhushan recipients. She was later nominated to the Rajya Sabha.
Learning the chemistry behind her work
If reaction mechanisms and stereochemistry feel like memorising, our post on understanding organic chemistry mechanisms shows how to reason through them instead. When a specific idea, such as why an amine is basic, is the gap, the Fermi Concept Library covers every concept in chemistry with its own lesson, so you can fix that one idea and return to the problem.
What can a student learn from how Asima Chatterjee worked?
Work with what is around you. She built a career on plants used in Indian traditional medicine and asked what molecules were inside them.
Do not wait for perfect conditions. Her group borrowed equipment and solvents and kept going.
Teach as well as research. She wrote for school students as well as for journals.
Try it now: draw the indole ring from memory, label the nitrogen, and explain in one sentence why a molecule containing it can act as a base.
