Chakravarti and the strychnine story

摘要

R.N. (Ram Narayan) Chakravarti (1916-2007) was an Indian chemist who spent two years in the Late 1940s working on the structure of the alkaloid strychnine at Oxford with Sir Robert Robinson. Chakravarti returned to India and worked at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine before becoming Director of the Indian Institute of Experimental Medicine. Robinson visited him when he was at the Indian Science Congress in 1950 but they failed to meet up when Robinson spent a few days in Delhi in 1960 on his way to the IUPAC Natural Products Congress in Australia. However, both were great letter writers and they exchanged more than 200 letters over three decades.