The Impact of Studies of Natural Products on Chemical Industry

I regard it as a great honour to be able to speak to you at this opening ceremony of the Symposium on The Chemistry of Natural Products. I would like to express my sincere and heartfelt thanks to the Australian Academy of Science, and especially to the Organizing Committee, for the invitation which they extended to me and which I accepted with great pleasure. This is my first visit to Australia, and I am delighted to have the opportunity of becoming personally acquainted with your country, for I have heard so many pleasant and charming things about Australia and its people. Until recently, Australian economic life was confined mainly to agriculture. Now it has entered a new phase, and far-reaching industrialization is developing rapidly. That may well be one of the reasons why the Organizing Committee invited me, as a man who has studied natural products for fifty years and who has been manufacturing some of them on an industrial scale for forty years, to illustrate the chemistry of natural products more from the practical, that is, from the industrial side. In this short address I can give only a few examples from an immensely large field, for almost the entire organic chemical industry originated in the study of natural products. One of the oldest branches of this industry, dating back one hundred years, is the dyestuffs industry. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, indigo and alizarin, both of vegetable origin, were the most important materials used for the dyeing of textile fibres. Baeyer worked for decades to elucidate the chemical constitution of indigo. In 1878 he achieved the first synthesis of indigo, but we know from another synthesis which he carried out subsequently that the process involved was wasteful. In 1890, Heumann of Zurich performed the first technically usable synthesis of indigo, based on the work of Baeyer. A similar course of events was followed in the case of the other important natural dyestuff, alizarin, the chemical constitution of which was elucidated by two pupils of Baeyer in 1868. These two young chemists, Graebe and Liebermann, also succeeded in synthesizing alizarin. Even the first artificial dyestuff, mauveine, which was prepared in 1856 by the extremely gifted chemist Perkin when he was seventeen years old, owes its origin indirectly to a natural substance. Perkin's teacher, Hoffmann, of the Royal College of Chemistry, suggested to him that he should attempt to synthesize quinine, which was highly valued because of its b.eneficial effects on malaria. In his preliminary studies Perkin discovered mauveine. This provided a basis for the world-wide development of the dyestuffs