Laboratory In Paris: NASA also continued development of an orbiting laboratory, which would probably consist of an empty second stage of a Saturn I launch vehicle. As many as six astronauts would inhabit the laboratory at one time, each man re-maining in orbit for as long as 56 days. The laboratory was to be used for carrying out experiments in physics, biology, and astronomy.
Dr. Robert B. Woodward, instructor in chemistry at Harvard University, and Dr. William E. Doering, instructor in organic chemistry at Columbia University, published in the May 1944 issue of the Journal of the American Chemical Society an article entitled "The Total Synthesis of Quinine." At last came the answer to this problem : quinine could be made artificially in the laboratory. Since the first isolation of the alkaloid in 1820 in a laboratory in Paris by Pierre J. Pelletier and Joseph B. Caventou, other chemists have been trying to synthesize the drug. The work by Woodward and Doering, in the research laboratories of the Polaroid Corporation in Cambridge, Mass., is a fitting climax to a century and a quarter of chemical research in this field.
These germanates have been found to transform to new denser phases at much lower pressures than the corresponding silicates. Therefore, substituting germanium for silicon in laboratory experiments is a useful technique for predicting how silicates might behave at the much higher pressures that cannot be achieved in a laboratory.
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