Asima Chatterjee Was Awarded the First D.Sc. Given to a Woman by an Indian University in 1944, Isolated 20 New Alkaloids From 50 Plant Species and Presided Over the Indian Science Congress in 1975

The University of Calcutta awarded Asima Chatterjee its D.Sc., the Doctor of Science degree, in 1944, for research on plant compounds called indole alkaloids and coumarins. The memoir of her published by the Indian National Science Academy records that she was the first woman to obtain a D.Sc. from any Indian university.

What followed is documented by the bodies that honoured her. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) gave her its Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize in 1961, and the citation says she had investigated 50 plant species from 12 botanical families and isolated 20 new alkaloids from them. From 1962 to 1982 she held the University of Calcutta’s Khaira chair of chemistry. She presided over the 62nd Indian Science Congress in New Delhi in January 1975, received the Padma Bhushan that year, and sat in the Rajya Sabha as a nominated member from 1982 to 1990.

A chemistry honours class in a co-educational college

Born in Calcutta on 23 September 1917, Chatterjee was the elder of two children of Indranarayan Mukherjee and Kamala Devi. Her father was a medical doctor, and SC Pakrashi, one of her early research students, writes that she probably took her interest in medicinal plants from him.

Bethune Collegiate School gave her a matriculation pass in 1932 and Bethune College her intermediate science certificate in 1934. Scottish Church College followed in 1936, when she graduated with honours in chemistry. According to the memoir, it was the only college in Kolkata where women could then study chemistry honours. Elders in her orthodox joint family objected to a co-educational college, and her mother’s determination got her through the door.

The M.Sc. at the University of Calcutta came in 1938, with organic chemistry as the special paper, and she began research under Prafulla Kumar Bose, whom the memoir calls one of the pioneer natural product chemists of India. Her teacher Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray created a fellowship of Rs 75 for her out of the salary he donated to the university each month, the memoir adds. Lady Brabourne College in Calcutta took her on in 1940 as the founder-head of its chemistry department. The D.Sc. followed in 1944, together with an honorary lectureship in chemistry at the university.

Wisconsin, Pasadena and Zurich

Study leave from Lady Brabourne College took her abroad in 1947, with her eleven-month-old daughter and a governess. At the University of Wisconsin she worked with L M Parks on naturally occurring glycosides, sugar-bearing plant compounds. Pasadena came next, where she worked at the California Institute of Technology with L Zechmeister on carotenoids and provitamin A; the memoir says the Watumull Fellowship recognised that work.

Zurich, in 1949 and 1950, was the third stop. There she worked with Paul Karrer, winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize in Chemistry according to Asish De’s Resonance review of her career, on biologically active indole alkaloids. Alkaloids are nitrogen-containing compounds that plants make and that often act on the body, and the indole kind stayed her main subject for the rest of her working life.

Back in Calcutta in 1950, she resumed research on alkaloids and coumarins. Pakrashi describes the conditions. Before he joined her, he writes, she had a grant of Rs 300 a year and three college teachers as part-time research students. Plant material had to be milled at a Jadavpur University workshop, ultraviolet measurements were made on equipment at the neighbouring Bose Institute, and solvents were borrowed from another professor’s laboratory.

What the plant chemistry established

Her work on the alkaloids of the plant Rauwolfia canescens began in 1938, the memoir says, and her studies of rauwolscine, its main alkaloid, helped to work out the structure of reserpine and related alkaloids. De adds that she showed rauwolscine had the same basic framework as reserpine and deserpidine, and that she isolated flexicorine, a new dimeric alkaloid built from two linked indole units, from a second Rauwolfia species.

Rauwolfia, Vinca, Alstonia, Rhazya and Kopsia are the genera the memoir names for her pioneering alkaloid work, and more than twenty new alkaloids came from Alstonia species alone. From Rhazya stricta her group isolated geissoschizine, described as a key precursor in the way plants build indole alkaloids. Sarpagine’s correct three-dimensional arrangement of atoms was first suggested by her group. Her Vinca work was chemistry too: from Vinca major and from Alstonia venenata she isolated venoterpine, a compound whose presence alongside indole alkaloids supported the accepted theory of how plants make them.

Coumarins, a family of fragrant plant compounds, were her other early subject, starting in 1940 with the structure of luvangetin from Luvanga scandens. The memoir also credits her with a method that uses periodic acid to locate certain double bonds in a molecule, which she showed to be a good alternative to a standard method called ozonolysis. Asish De counts 328 research papers and the supervision of 59 Ph.D. and 3 D.Sc. students, while Pakrashi and the Indian Academy of Sciences exhibit say around 400 papers.

The chair, the department and the Congress

In 1954 the University of Calcutta made her Reader in chemistry, the department’s only reader’s post at the time according to the memoir. Eight years later she became the Kumar Guruprasad Singh Khaira Professor of Chemistry, and Pakrashi writes that she was the first woman scientist to hold a chair at any university in India. She stayed in that chair until 1982 and headed the department from 1969 to 1979.

The department grew while she led it. A University Grants Commission special assistance programme for natural product chemistry, sanctioned in 1972 with Chatterjee as honorary coordinator, became a Centre of Advanced Studies in 1985, and the memoir says she kept the coordinator’s post until 2003. Between 1975 and 1978 the organic section received the first phase of UNESCO and UN Development Programme assistance for equipment and for training abroad, with a second phase to 1982. No other organic chemistry department in the country received such assistance then, the memoir says.

Election as a Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy came in 1960, and the Indian Academy of Sciences followed in 1975. In January 1975 she was General President of the 62nd Indian Science Congress in New Delhi. The exhibit of the Indian Academy of Sciences gives the title of her presidential address as “Science and Technology in India: Present and Future”, and the memoir quotes one line from it: “Universities constitute the backbone of Scientific and Technological Training”. Pakrashi and the exhibit record her as the first woman to be elected to that post. A Padma Bhushan followed in 1975, listed in the Ministry of Home Affairs directory under science and engineering for West Bengal.

The President of India nominated her to the Rajya Sabha as a scientist. The Secretariat’s biographical record puts her service at 18 February 1982 to 13 April 1984 and again 9 May 1984 to 8 May 1990. A Secretariat booklet on nominated members records that in 1983, in a discussion on poor telephone service, she suggested that the government send more satellites into space to improve connectivity.

Marsilin, Ayush 56 and Ayush 64

Her 1961 Bhatnagar citation already mentions “an antiepileptic long chain ester” among her isolations. From the water fern Marsilea minuta, the memoir says, she isolated marsilin, a sedative and anticonvulsant, worked out its structure, and studied its action over decades with clinical trials at a hospital for crippled children in Calcutta, in collaboration with her brother, the physician Sarashi Ranjan Mukherjee. It says marsilin is used with Nardostachys jatamansi under the code name Ayush 56, covered by Indian Patent No. 141170 of 14 July 1976. De’s review states that marsilin “showed pronounced therapeutic effect” in epilepsy and lists a 1968 paper on the Marsilea work in Science and Culture. The patent holder, the Central Council for Research in Ayurveda and Siddha (CCRAS), told Down To Earth in 1996 that it had developed and patented Ayush 56 for epilepsy.

Ayush 64, an antimalarial made from parts of four herbs, is another drug the memoir credits to Chatterjee, under patent 568/Del/70 of 7 August 1979, also held by CCRAS. The Academy exhibit names the plants as Alstonia scholaris, Swertia chirata, Picrorhiza kurroa and Caesalpinia crista. In its release of 3 May 2021 the Ministry of Ayush credits CCRAS as the developer and says the formulation was originally developed in 1980 for malaria; the release adds that the Ministry announced the drug’s repurposing for COVID-19 at a press conference on 29 April 2021.

Published studies give a more measured picture of Ayush 64. Alt News, reviewing the record in January 2019, described a CCRAS study of 55 malaria cases from 1981 that reported an 80 per cent response but had no control group. It also summarised a phase II randomised trial in vivax malaria by N Valecha and colleagues in Current Science in 2000, which followed patients for 28 days and found a cure rate below 50 per cent with Ayush 64 against 100 per cent with chloroquine. A 2023 PLoS ONE paper on COVID-19 randomised 140 hospitalised adults to standard care with or without Ayush 64 and reported a mean of 6.45 days from randomisation to clinical recovery against 8.26 days; its authors flag the open-label design as a concern and say a phase III trial is needed. None of the sources opened for this article reports a controlled human trial of Ayush 56. This section reports patents and published studies and is not guidance on treating any condition. For how such trials are read, see tuput’s piece on what trials show about Ayurvedic claims.

Two treatises and an institute in Salt Lake

Chatterjee edited and rewrote Bharater Bonousadhi, a Bengali treatise on Indian medicinal plants originally compiled by K P Biswas, in six volumes published by Calcutta University Press (volumes 1 to 5 in 1973, volume 6 in 1977). Calcutta University gave her its Bhuban Mohini Das Gold Medal in 1981 for it. She was also principal editor of The Treatise on Indian Medicinal Plants, a six-volume English work from CSIR; the memoir lists first editions of volumes 2 to 6 between 1992 and 2001. At the request of Satyendra Nath Bose, she also wrote a Bengali chemistry book for secondary school students, published by his Bangiya Bijnan Parishad.

One of her large projects was a research institute. She had long wanted one for Indian medicinal plants, with an Ayurvedic hospital attached, the memoir says, and the then West Bengal government gave land in Salt Lake while the Union Health Ministry gave a Rs 4 crore building grant. Pakrashi calls it a Centre-State collaboration under CCRAS. CCRAS says the institute began in 1971 as the Regional Research Institute (Ayurveda) at Jagannath Dutta Lane and moved into its own building at Bidhannagar, Kolkata, in 1997. It is now the Central Ayurveda Research Institute, with six departments including a hospital, chemistry and pharmacology. Pakrashi writes that she nurtured it as honorary principal coordinator until the end of her life. A week before she slipped into a coma, the memoir says, the Mayor of Kolkata visited her at home and conferred the title of honoured citizen of the city.

Where the sources differ

A few dates are not the same everywhere. The memoir, Pakrashi and the Academy exhibit put her M.Sc. in 1938; De’s review says 1940. The paper counts differ, as given above. For her death, the heading of the memoir gives 24 November 2006 and another biographical page gives 23 November, while the Indian Academy of Sciences archive entries and its fellows’ portal give 22 November 2006.