Modern NMR Approaches to the Structure Elucidation of Natural Products: Volume 1: Instrumentation and Software

Strychnine’s poisonous nature was known in 16^th century Europe, and the alkaloid was isolated in pure form for the first time in 1818. Then began a more than century-long quest to unravel the structure of strychnine that led to two Nobel prizes, clearly without the assistance of the modern spectroscopic methods to which we now have access. In his 1963 report of the synthesis, Woodward said, "The tangled skein of atoms which constitutes its molecule provided a fascinating structural problem ...