Asima Chatterjee

Asima Chatterjee was born in Calcutta in 1917, the daughter of a doctor who encouraged her to study. She read chemistry at the University of Calcutta at a time when almost no women did, and she has been described as the only woman in her lecture theatre. She took a master's degree in 1938 and, working with almost no facilities, a doctorate of science in 1944, the first awarded to a woman by an Indian university.

Her subject was the chemistry of the plants used in Indian traditional medicine: what the active compounds actually were, how they were structured, and whether they did what tradition claimed. This required separating tiny quantities of complex molecules from kilos of leaves and bark with equipment that a European laboratory would have thrown away. She spent short periods abroad, in Wisconsin, Caltech and Zurich, and then came home to Calcutta for good.

The work took decades. She isolated and characterised alkaloids from the periwinkle, which were later important in cancer chemotherapy, and from the devil tree. Two drugs came out of her department: an anti-epileptic derived from a small water fern, and an antimalarial from a mixture of plant extracts, both of which went into production in India.

She founded the chemistry department at Lady Brabourne College for women, held a chair at Calcutta for twenty years, was nominated to the upper house of Parliament, and died in 2006 at 89, having published more than 400 papers.