The Discovery of Quinine
Quinine has been referred to as "Jesuits' bark,"
"cardinal's bark," and "sacred bark."
Its name stems from its use in 1630 by Jesuit missionaries in the Andes (a
mountain range in western South America). A legend suggests earlier use by
the native population. According to the legend, an Indian with a high
fever was lost in an Andean jungle. When he drank from a pool of stagnant
(standing) water, he found it tasted bitter. Realizing it had been
contaminated by the surrounding quina-quina trees he thought he was
poisoned. But his fever abated, and thereafter his village used extracts
made from quina-quina bark to treat fevers.
The legend of quinine's discovery accepted in Europe involves the
Countess of Chinchon, who had visited Peru. While in Peru the countess
contracted a fever which was cured by the bark of a tree. Returning to
Spain with the bark, she introduced quinine to Europe in 1638. In 1742
Swedish botanist Carol Linnaeus (1707-1778) called the tree
"Cinchona" in her honor. The legend is a bit faulty. In
fact, the Countess never had malaria and died in Colombia before reaching
Spain.
Synthesizing Quinine
Malaria is a lethal disease worldwide. Because it is so widespread, the
potential value of quinine inspired research into its synthesis. In 1820
French chemist Pierre-Joseph Pelletier (1788-1842) and Joseph-Bienaime
Caventou (1795-1877) isolated quinine from cinchona bark. In 1908, P. Rabe
theorized the correct chemical structure of quinine. This structure was
not confirmed, however, until 1944 when American chemist Robert Burns
Woodward (1917-1989; 1965 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry) and William von
Eggers Doering first successfully synthesized the chemical. This was an
amazing achievement of synthetic organic chemistry, but of little
commercial value as the cost of the process was too high to be practical.
In the beginning of the twentieth century most of the naturally produced
quinine originated in Java, now part of Indonesia. During World War I
(1914-1918), Germany was cut off from supplies of quinine and developed
the synthetic substitute Atabrine. By 1942 when the United States entered
World War II (1939-1945), the Javanese plantations were controlled by
Japan. American soldiers fighting in North Africa and the South Pacific
islands were devastated by malaria. White pills taken from captured
Italian soldiers were sent back to the United States. They were found to
be the synthetic antimalarial drug chloroquine. The drug was manufactured
by the same German lab as Atabrine. The United States was then able to
synthesize several tons of its own before the end of the war.
Today, both chloroquine and Atabrine are used to prevent malaria. There
are areas of the world, however, where malaria parasites have developed a
resistance to synthetic drugs. Vietnam is one of those areas. For those
cases, quinine is still effective in malaria treatment.