Asima Chatterjee was an Indian organic chemist and phytochemist whose career linked the chemistry of Indian medicinal plants with the modern study of alkaloids, coumarins, and terpenoids. Born Asima Mookerjee in Calcutta on 23 September 1917, she grew up in a household in which scientific curiosity was encouraged. Her father, Indra Narayan Mookerjee, was a medical doctor with a strong interest in botany, and that combination of clinical concern and plant knowledge shaped her later choice of problems. At a time when few women in India pursued science beyond school, she entered the Scottish Church College of the University of Calcutta and graduated with honours in chemistry in 1936. She took her master’s degree in organic chemistry from the same university in 1938 and then began doctoral research that led, in 1944, to the Doctor of Science degree. She was the first woman to receive a D.Sc. from an Indian university. Her doctoral work, carried out under P. K. Bose, a pioneer of natural-product chemistry in India, and in an environment associated with figures such as Prafulla Chandra Ray, concerned plant products and synthetic organic chemistry.
Even before the doctorate was awarded she had begun teaching. In 1940 she joined Lady Brabourne College in Calcutta as the founder-head of its chemistry department, establishing laboratory instruction for women students in a city where such openings were still rare. After the war she spent several years abroad. At the University of Wisconsin she worked with L. M. Parks on naturally occurring glycosides. At the California Institute of Technology she studied carotenoids and provitamins with L. Zechmeister. In Zurich she worked with the Nobel laureate Paul Karrer on biologically active alkaloids. Those stays fixed the direction of her research. When she returned to India in 1950 she turned systematically to the chemistry of Indian medicinal plants, with alkaloids and coumarins at the centre.
Her academic base became the Department of Pure Chemistry at the University of Calcutta. She was appointed reader in 1954 and, in 1962, Khaira Professor of Chemistry, a chair she held until 1982. She was the first woman scientist to occupy a university chair in India. From that position she built a school of natural-product chemistry that trained a large number of students and published extensively in Indian and foreign journals. Estimates of her output place the number of research papers near four hundred, together with many review articles. Much of that work entered textbooks on alkaloid and coumarin chemistry.
The scientific substance of her career lay in structure, stereochemistry, and synthesis. She initiated the chemical investigation of the alkaloids of Rauwolfia canescens and contributed to the elucidation of the structures and stereochemistry of ajmalicine and sarpagine; she was among the first to propose the correct stereo-configuration of sarpagine. She examined nearly all the principal types of indole alkaloids and achieved a stereospecific synthesis of rauwolscine, the major alkaloid of Rauwolfia canescens. Isolation and characterisation of geissoschizine from Rhazya stricta clarified a key intermediate in the biogenesis of indole alkaloids. Parallel work on vinca alkaloids, compounds related to those of Catharanthus roseus, connected her laboratory to the chemistry underlying certain anti-cancer agents, although the clinical drugs themselves were developed elsewhere. She also studied the action of Lewis acids on prenylated coumarins, devised simpler routes to complex coumarin systems, and elucidated the structure of luvangetin isolated from Luvunga scandens. In mechanistic organic chemistry she investigated the acid-catalysed hydramine fission of phenylethanolamines and introduced the use of periodic acid to detect and locate terminal and exocyclic double bonds, offering an alternative to ozonolysis for that purpose.
Alongside structural work she pursued the medicinal use of plant extracts. With collaborators she developed an anti-epileptic preparation, Ayush-56, from the pteridophyte Marsilea minuta; the formulation was patented and has been marketed commercially. Anti-malarial preparations were developed from plants including Alstonia scholaris, Swertia chirata, Picrorhiza kurroa, and Caesalpinia crista. These efforts were an attempt to place traditional Indian materia medica on a chemical footing rather than to replace it with wholly synthetic drugs. She edited and revised the six-volume Bharatiya Banaushadhi for the University of Calcutta and served as chief editor of the six-volume Treatise on Indian Medicinal Plants published by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. After formal retirement she continued as honorary programme coordinator of a special assistance programme in natural-product chemistry, remaining active into the early years of the new century.
Public recognition followed the scientific record. She was elected a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy in 1960. In 1961 she received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in chemical sciences, the first woman to do so. In 1975 she was awarded the Padma Bhushan and, in the same year, became the first woman to serve as General President of the Indian Science Congress Association. From 1984 to 1990 she was a nominated member of the Rajya Sabha. She died in Kolkata on 22 November 2006.
Her importance is not only that she was first in several institutional roles. Those firsts mattered in a scientific culture that had few women in senior laboratories, but the lasting contribution was the body of structural and medicinal chemistry she produced from Indian plants. By treating alkaloids, coumarins, and terpenoids as problems of constitution, stereochemistry, and synthesis, and by carrying selected extracts through to usable drugs, she helped establish natural-product chemistry as a serious research field in independent India and left a documented map of compounds that later workers could refine.