Abstract
THE yellow crystalline pigment lapachol, found in Bethabarra wood (from West Africa) as well as in several South American timbers, provided the late Dr. S. C. Hooker, the eminent American sugar technologist, with an absorbing problem in chemical structure which lasted a lifetime and has given us an admirable model of chemical research, based upon highly skilled technique, close observation, patience and careful deduction. The publication during the present year of no fewer than eleven posthumous papers by Dr. Hooker in the American Chemical Journal after a silence of forty years must have come as a complete surprise to organic chemists. But the work to which Dr. Hooker was so devotedly attached was interrupted by his long period of activity in industry. On his retirement in 1915, he resumed the problems which had remained untouched since 1896, and he was reluctant to publish prematurely the numerous results which he was able to collect in the last twenty years of his life.
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Hooker's Work on Lapachol and Related Compounds. Nature 138, 1047 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/1381047b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1381047b0