This is just a quick note to say that Albert Hofmann, the chemist who first discovered LSD, has died at the grand old age of 102. He was something of a legend among modern-day medicinal chemists, not least because he decided to test out his discovery on himself.
You can find a report on his life on the Great Beyond blog.
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
What is it that chemists really have on the brain? To answer the question, try clicking on this link to a book review in the New York Times, and have a look at the molecular structure to see if anything leaps out at you.
So what did you see? If you're anything like the chemist that wrote in to the New York Times to complain, you'll have spotted that some of the carbon atoms appear to have formed five bonds. Fair enough. But did you notice that the molecule is actually spelling out the word 'sex'?
Credit goes to the Newsmakers section of Science for telling this story of a chemist who was prepared to admit that he missed the point. I have to say, I think I'd have missed the point of the graphic too...
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
If you’re at a party, and a non-chemist asks what your work involves, what do you say? Let’s assume that you get beyond the “I’m a research chemist” stage, and your friend actually wants to hear some details. How do you explain your project in terms that joe public will understand?
I ask this because, having just completed two years as a News & Views editor for Nature, I’ve found that seemingly simple chemical concepts can be misunderstood by scientists from other disciplines. Here’s an example: catalysts. All that most people understand about catalysts is that they speed up reactions. They don’t know – or they have forgotten – that a defining characteristic of catalysts is that they’re used in small quantities.
This lack of insight seems remarkable, especially in biologists, who clearly know a lot about enzymes. But I know from experience that my biologist colleagues don’t know what is meant by ‘a catalytic quantity’ of material. Much less do they understand why a catalytic reaction is preferable to a stoichiometric one (and let’s not get started on the word ‘stoichiometric’). You may think that they’re being remarkably obtuse – but try asking a friend from another discipline about catalysts, and you’ll be surprised at what they don't know.
Does any of this matter? Well, if we want chemistry to have the same respect and recognition as biology, physics and the geosciences (with their headline-grabbing genomes, exoplanets and predictions of climate change), then yes it does. When was the last time a breakthrough in chemistry made it to the front page of a national newspaper?
Frankly, it’s always going to be an uphill battle. We’re never going to see the headline “Catalyst distinguishes between enantiotopic protons” on the front page of the New York Times. In fact, we shouldn’t necessarily expect people to remember everything about chemistry that they were taught at high school - with catalysts being a prime example of this. But we shouldn't give up trying to explain our work. I know from experience that complex concepts, such as enantiotopicity, can be explained to non-chemists in terms they understand. It just takes a little more effort than you might expect.
Andy
Andy Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
This is just a quick blog to mention a thought-provoking article that Peter Murray-Rust wrote for Nature recently, which discusses chemists' contributions to open-access data and software. The article is now available for free, for a limited period of a month - so if you haven't seen it, click here to have a look.
I'd love to hear your thoughts about this - do you agree with Peter that all chemistry data and software should be open access?
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
I just got back from my holiday in Thailand, which was very nice apart from an unfortunate bout of food poisoning. Anyway, I thought you might be interested in seeing this article from the Bangkok Post, which highlights just how crucial chemicals are in the real world (not that you’ll need much convincing). In particular, it demonstrates the importance of fertilizers.
Thailand is the world’s leading exporter of rubber, but crop yields are expected to be lower this year. The reason? It seems that a lot of the fertilizers being supplied to Thai rubber plantations are fake or sub-standard, despite the fact that the costs of fertilizers have doubled over the past year. This is causing much hardship for Thai rubber farmers, and presumably could have a knock-on effect for global rubber supplies and prices.
Everyone is aware of the consequences of fake drugs flooding the pharmaceutical market, but I hadn’t realized that a similar situation existed for fertilizers. The implications for the rubber industry and for farmers in particular are made clear in the Bangkok Post article, but if the problem extends to food-crop farming in developing countries, then the effects could be even more dire. Has anyone else heard of this problem?
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
The London offices of Nature are blighted by viruses at the moment – I’ve currently got the worst cold that I’ve had in years, and several other scourges are also rampant, including the notorious norovirus (otherwise known as the ‘winter vomiting bug’). With the recent news that avian flu has apparently now been brought to the UK by migrating birds, I decided to see how chemists have been dabbling in the world of viruses.
So let’s start with avian flu. A fascinating paper in Nature Biotechnology uncovers what would need to happen at a molecular level for the virus to become transmissible between humans (subscribers can see the paper here, but there's also a C & EN article about it here). Infection is mediated by the binding of hemagglutinin (HA) proteins on the virus to sugars on HA receptors in the host. Ram Sasisekharan and his team have found that the shape formed by the carbohydrates is all important: the sugars on avian HA receptors form a cone-shape, but human sugars are arranged more like umbrellas. So, if the virus can mutate to bind to our ‘umbrellas’, we could be in trouble. Sasisekharan’s discovery might provide a way of checking whether new mutants of the virus could cause a human pandemic. None of this research would have been possible without recent advances in carbohydrate synthesis and mass spectrometry.
Those of you interested in nanotechnology may be interested to hear of a report in ACS Nano, which describes how quantum dots can be attached to cowpea mosaic virus to construct a minuscule memory device (click here for the paper). Mihri Ozkan and her group show that the resulting hybrid particles demonstrate reversible, bistable electrical behaviour, suitable for repeated write-read-erase cycles. Mind boggling stuff. I like the idea of making cyborg viruses, as long as they don’t give me a cold.
Meanwhile, John Robinson and his group report in Angewandte Chemie on the use of synthetic virus-like particles (subcribers can read the paper here). These star-like structures self-assemble from lipopeptides, and the authors have attached synthetic antigens to them. When injected into rabbits, the antigen-carrying particles trigger an immune response – the rabbits generate antibodies to the antigens. The authors hope that their particles have a bright future in the design of synthetic vaccines. I hope so too. Perhaps they can find a vaccine for the common cold. For now, I’ll just have to keep taking the paracetamol.
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
I recently discovered the astonishing fact that Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood film actress from the 1940s, was also the co-inventor of an early form of the spread spectrum technique, which is key to wireless communication technology. This got me thinking about whether any chemists had also enjoyed success in completely different fields.
Of course, there are many chemists who have artistic talents. Perhaps most notably, Roald Hoffman has published books of poems. And there are at east two accomplished magicians – David Leigh and Koji Nakanishi both enjoy performing impromptu magic tricks at chemistry conferences. But all of these guys would be recognized first and foremost as scientists.
There are also several famous people with a chemistry background. The writer Primo Levi is a well-known example. I’m sure many of you have read his work, including The Periodic Table - a collection of short stories, each relating to a different element. Margaret Thatcher had a brief career as a chemist, before she became a politician. She was, apparently, part of a team that developed the first soft frozen ice cream. But did you know that Dolph Lundgren has a degree in chemical engineering, and won a scholarship to MIT? (Although he quit after two weeks to become an actor.)
But none of these people made a lasting contribution to science, so they’re not really up there with Hedy Lamarr. But I did find one chemist who I think probably is. A round of applause please, for Alexander Borodin – world famous composer (perhaps most notably for his opera, Prince Igor) and chemist credited as having discovered the Borodin reaction (also known as the Hunsdiecker reaction).
So there you have it. In my opinion, Borodin gets the award for the most notable chemist also famous in an unrelated field. Or do you know better?
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
I was searched by the police again this morning. Not that this happens all the time, but I’ve been searched at Kings Cross station three times over the last two years, as part of some recently introduced anti-terrorism scheme. I don’t really mind, although given that there are 77.5 million passengers passing through Kings Cross every year, I can’t help but feel I’m bucking the statistical average (for more mind-boggling London Transport facts, click here)
This got me thinking about how the situation in the Middle East ripples out to affect everyone, and in particular, how it affects chemists. For example, the Department of Homeland Security in the USA recently announced a list of 300 chemicals that require regulation to deter terrorism. The list includes several commonly used chemicals, such as ammonia and chlorine. US universities and other research sites will now be required to make inventories of these chemicals if they have more than the DHS-approved quantities. This may be something of a logistical nightmare, but it could have been worse – acetone was originally proposed to be on the list. How many chemistry departments are there that don’t use acetone?
Perhaps more worrying is the effect of the war on funding. Several US academics that I’ve spoken to have said that government funding for research has been squeezed, because money is being diverted in other directions. But then again, this might depend on the area you work in; biosensors for detecting toxins such as ricin are a hot topic nowadays, with interest not just from government funding bodies, but also from business. But as David Russell (a UK chemist who works in this area) pointed out in a recent interview in Chemistry World, it’s a shame that more people aren’t interested in biosensors for cholera. Subscribers to Science might be interested in reading the following open letter to the NIH on the theme of funding for security-related research, and the NIH’s response.
And then there are more personal cases, such as the recent example in the UK where a man labelled as a potential terrorist has been prevented from taking basic-level chemistry classes (Nature subscribers can read our news report about this here.)
So has the war against terror affected your working life? Has security at chemistry departments increased in recent years? Or are you seeing any trends in areas of research that attract funding? I’d be interested to know.
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
What’s the worst thing about interviews for chemistry jobs? With recruitment for the Chief Editor of Nature Chemistry in full swing, I’ve been thinking about this recently - and no, that doesn’t mean that I’ve applied for the job…
In particular, I was thinking about one of the most contentious and feared aspects of chemistry interviews (in the UK at least) – the technical questions. This is where interviewees are grilled about any aspect of chemistry; for organic chemists this usually means that you’re presented with a target molecule and asked to come up with one (or more) synthetic routes on the spot. In many respects, this is fair enough. But the whole thing can be very arbitrary.
As regular readers may know, I was unlucky enough to work at an industrial site that was closed down, so my colleagues and I suddenly found ourselves going through lots of technical interviews. Several trends immediately became apparent. The first was that we would always be asked about the pKa values of acids and bases. We’d also frequently be asked to write out mechanisms of reactions such as the Swern oxidation. Many people felt that this sort of thing had no bearing on how they performed in a lab, it was just a memory test.
But the worst thing was when interviewers were inflexible on synthesis questions. One company in particular asked people how they would make a certain diamide. There are, of course, many ways to do this, but if the hapless interviewee didn’t suggest an Ugi reaction, they were deemed to have got the answer wrong. Now the Ugi reaction is a wonderful thing, but it certainly wouldn’t be the first option that springs to my mind for such a target.
So, what do you think – are technical questions a reasonable way to assess chemists for jobs? Or should candidates just be asked to put on a lab coat and do a recrystallization? And what’s the most bizarre thing that you’ve been asked at an interview? The most random question I got was about redshift and the expansion of the universe...
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
Well, I guess you’ve all heard the news by now that Gerhard Ertl has won the Nobel Prize in chemistry this year. This is, in my opinion, a thoroughly deserved award, which recognizes Ertl’s achievements in surface chemistry. He is one of the fathers of the area, famous for his seminal work on hydrogen adsorption to metal surfaces, the mechanism of the Haber-Bosch process and the oxidation of carbon monoxide on platinum. The Nobel Prize website has an excellent summary of his work here.
So did any of you predict the result? Top marks must surely go to Paul at ChemBark, who did indeed include Ertl on his shortlist of possible winners. I imagine all eyes will be on ChemBark next year for more top tips.
Of course, no Nobel prize can go by without some controversy, and some people are questioning why Gabor Somorjai (who was jointly awarded the Wolf Prize for chemistry with Ertl in 1998) wasn’t also honoured. But then again, the Nobel judges always seem to come in for criticism – I remember in previous years they were knocked for including too many winners…
I’ll be curious to see how much coverage the chemistry prize gets in the national press. The prize for medicine certainly attracted a lot of attention in the UK (but of course, one of the prizewinners was a Brit). The physics prize seems to have had less coverage, despite being branded as “The Physics of the iPod”. This year’s chemistry prize has perhaps the most obvious real-world relevance of recent Nobel awards for the subject - but will that be enough to inspire the press?
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
Are chemists anally retentive when it comes to chemical structures? Making sure that structures are error-free is certainly vital for a chemistry paper (and for an editor, one of the biggest headaches of the job). Just one wedge bond displayed as a hash could completely confuse the take-home message of a paper.
So imagine how annoying it would be if you saw a structure being repeatedly published with errors in it, and in lots of different places. This is just what has happened to Ian Fleming.
Back in 1967, he published a paper in Nature that finally nailed the absolute configuration of the structure of chlorophyll (Nature subscribers can see the paper here – it’s well worth a look). Yet he reckons that since then, whenever he has seen the structure reproduced, there is a 50:50 chance that the stereochemistry will be wrong.
Over the years, he’s tried to correct this where possible, including, on one occasion, an incorrect structure on a book cover. But it still happens. Out of curiosity, I had a look at the structure on Wikipedia - and sure enough, it was wrong (see for yourself, but be quick; I’ll contact them shortly to get it corrected). The actual structure can be found here at PubChem.
Who knows how often this happens? But then again, if a structure appears somewhere that isn’t necessarily directed at chemists (such as in the Wikipedia entry), does it really matter? Is it just the chemist’s equivalent of getting upset about the incorrect use of an apostrophe? I think it does matter - especially in sources on the web, which are increasingly being mined for technical information. But if you think I should just take a cold shower and calm down, by all means let me know.
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate editor, Nature).
Which chemical sends a shiver down your spine? Every chemist has their own personal least-favourite - in fact, I know some chemists that flatly refuse to use certain chemicals.
Much of this comes from personal experience – for example, I’ve seen two cases of diazonium salts blowing up, which was enough to put me off them. And I’m not keen on anything pyrophoric; one of my most stressful days in the lab involved 100 grams of diethyl zinc, which instantly ignites into bright blue flames upon contact with air.
Other compounds intimidate by reputation alone. Cyanide is a good example, although toxic chemicals never scared me much. I was surprised when an industrial student working for me didn’t want to use carbon monoxide, but this was because she’d heard tales of people dying after inhaling fumes from defective gas fires.
So what’s my all time worst fear? Hydrofluoric acid – the zombie flesh-eater of the chemical world. I only ever had to use this once, but without a doubt it was the experiment that brought me out in the coldest sweat. But with the recent news that the US Environmental Protection Agency are being presented with evidence that tetrahydrofuran may be carcinogenic (C&E News subscribers can click here for a brief report), perhaps the chemicals we should really be scared of are the solvents.
So what are your least-favourite reagents?
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
The last day of an ACS meeting is weird. Lots of people have gone already, so the cavernous convention center starts to feel a bit empty. On top of that, everywhere you look people are dismantling all the conference stands, pulling up the carpet, and, for some reason, wrapping up displays in cling-film. It reminded me of a restaurant I went to once, where I was trying to finish my dessert but the waiters were putting their coats on and turning off the lights.
It's been a great trip, but I'm ready to go home. My abiding memories will be:
An analytical speaker, who claimed that he loved mass spectrometry, then peppered his talk with phrases like "Mass spectrometry tells lies" and "Mass spectrometry data is like having a map of hell".
Another guy describing an assay with fruitflies, in which he described the fruitfiles that couldn't learn to avoid electric shocks as 'Republicans'.
The lady who spiced up her talk by showing a picture of herself dressed as a salt cellar, with a large strawberry on her head. (There was a very good reason for this, but there's not enough space here to explain.)
So, farewell to Boston - here's hoping, like Katherine, that British Airways have some functional planes. Oh, and can the last person to leave the convention center please remember to turn the lights off?
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate editor, Nature)
Even though there are reportedly 14,000 people at this meeting, I'm always amazed at how small the chemistry community can be. I've bumped into lots of my ex-colleagues from when I was in industry, and they all have different stories to tell.
Some of these people are working in the pharmaceutical industry, which is having a tough time at the moment. There's a lot of anxiety about jobs, which seems particularly cruel given that some of these people have only just recovered from being made redundant elsewhere.
Still, big pharma seems to be doing a lot better than agrochemistry. A friend of mine who used to work in that area says that there are very few agrochemistry R&D presentations at this meeting, which basically reflects the state of the industry. Genetically modified crops and lower price margins have taken their toll, and the industry seems to be in real decline.
Finally, some thoughts from a process chemist. He comments that there seems to be no appreciation of environmental concerns in most of the lectures that he's seen. Green chemistry is a noble thing, but he says that the simplest way of helping the environment would be to phase out certain solvents - such as dichloromethane or benzene. At least one big pharma company will be doing this in the next few years. My friend believes that the top academic chemists should set an example by using more environment-friendly solvents, but they rarely do.
What do you think? Do the big name chemists have a responsibility to be green?
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate editor, Nature)
As much as I've enjoyed my forays into analytical and flavour chemistry, yesterday afternoon I had a relapse and attended the Arthur C. Cope session on organic chemistry in the cathedral-sized ballroom. Actually, the cathedral analogy doesn't seem a bad one, as sometimes it does feel as if there's a certain amount of worshipping going on.
I really enjoyed this session because it had an ecelectic mix of topics. Highlights for me included Kenneth Shea's talk on how to build polyethylene molecules from single-carbon units, in a living polymerization reaction involving ylides and diazoalkanes. In this way, he's made some unusual polymers - such as chains with high steric congestion that can't be prepared using traditional methods for polyolefin preparation.
I also liked Leonard MacGillivray's presentation on solid-phase organic reactions. He co-crystallizes pairs of organic compounds to form lattices in which hydrogen-bonding aligns the molecules in a perfect orientation for reaction - specifically, photodimerization reactions between alkenes to form cyclobutanes. Because the lattice holds the molecules in very specific orientations, the stereochemistry of the process is precisely controlled.
But my favourites were Dave Macmillan and Andre Charette. Charette described his work on the preparation of chiral amines by adding organozinc reagents to N-phosphinoylimines. Now I've always been a bit dubious about dialkylzinc compounds, because they're a pain to make. But Charette has thought of this, and has developed a relatively simple way to make them from zinc methoxide - so top marks for thinking of the practicalities.
MacMillan discussed his work on SOMO-activation reactions using organocatalysis. I liked the way that he gave much of the credit for this idea to his co-worker, Teresa Beeson. His group are currently developing new reactions using SOMO-activation, so expect to see enantioselective alpha-halogenation of aldehydes, vinylation reactions, and the enentioselective alkylation of cyclic ketones (which apparently requires a completely different catalyst to the one currently published).
All in all it was a top session. The only down-side was the way that people in the audience would get up and leave as soon as the speaker they were interested in had finished. I know that people have to focus on lectures in their own fields to get the most out of these meetings, but if they'd stuck around for the whole session I think they'd have found the variety of topics refreshing and stimulating.
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate editor, Nature)
One of the great things about ACS meetings is the incredible breadth of topics that are covered. In my quest to learn about branches of chemistry that are unfamiliar to me, this morning I attended a session of the division of agricutural and food chemistry. To be precise, the lectures were all about interactions between taste and smell.
I've always been intrigued by flavour chemistry, and the way that the body senses chemicals and interprets them as smells and tastes. So this session was a real eye-opener. I have to say that there wasn't much that you could really describe as chemistry - not a chemical structure in sight, in fact. But here are some interesting factoids that you might be interested in.
First off, have you ever stopped to think about why some smells seem sweet or sour, when sweet and sour are tastes? Its all to do with associations in the brain. The associations become so hard-wired that if you smell something like strawberry while you're eating something sweet, then the taste becomes sweeter. And if you smell caramel while you're eating something bitter, the taste seems less bitter. Perhaps most remarkably, sweet smells can even improve your tolerance to pain.
The attention you pay to a taste can also affect your enjoyment of that taste - the more you try to analyse a flavour, the less you enjoy it. Which suggests that professional wine tasters enjoy wine less than joe public. And one final thought - if all this is true, then coffee will smell different depending on whether or not you use sugar. Speaking of which, it's time for my latest caffeine fix...
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
I'm an organic chemist at heart, but for this meeting I've decided to explore beyond the wonders of total synthesis. So this morning, I attended one of the analytical chemistry sessions - and it was fascinating.
I opted for a session on metabolomics. For those of you who think this sounds like a rude word, let me tell you that it's the study of metabolites as markers for disease (or at least that's one application; it's impossible to do justice to the full range of possibilities in one blog entry).
The session began with a talk by Lily Tong, from Greg Stephanopoulous' lab. They were able to identify metabolites that are upregulated in patients that die of kidney failure. In this way, they were able to devise an accurate model to predict patients at most risk from the disease. Impressive stuff.
Rima Kaddurah-Daouk described a study of plasma taken from people with schizophrenia, and showed that each of three commonly-used antipsychotic drugs produces its own pattern of lipid-metabolite perturbation. This provides further evidence of the so-called 'lipid hypothesis' of schizophrenia, which suggests that the disease is not just caused by disturbances to neurotransmitters.
And finally, the award for gross presentation of the day goes to Andy Ewing, who is using fruitflies as models to study the effects of alcohol intoxication and dependence. This involves harvesting fruitflies' heads, and we were treated to some lovely pictures of his special fruitfly-head masher in action.
It's been a while since I looked at how metabolomics is progressing, and I was impressed at how far the field has come over the last few years. And now that I know fruitflies get drunk, I'll never look at them the same way again.
Andy
Andy Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
People often say to me that travelling must be one of the perks of the job, but, oh boy, there are times when I beg to differ. I tried so hard to check-in online, but the British Airways system kept chucking me out. So I tried to use the electronic check-in kiosks at Heathrow airport, but after queuing for 30 minutes, the machine refused to give me a boarding pass. I was told to join a nearby queue for the actual check-in desks, where I waited for an hour, before being told that, actually, it was the wrong queue.
When I eventually got my boarding pass, I then had to stand in front of an x-ray machine in security, striking different poses (turn to the left, hands in the air, turn to the right, hands down...) I know security is important in these troubled times, but I couldn't help thinking that they were just making me dance the Timewarp in slow motion, and taking pictures of me in my underwear with their x-ray camera. I imagine the images will be on YouTube by now.
The plane was late, and once we'd boarded, we were told we'd have to wait for an hour for a take-off slot. Eventually we trundled to the runway, whereupon the plane immediately turned around and went back to the gate, because a passenger had taken ill. The stricken passenger was removed, and we had to wait for his luggage to be located in the hold and removed. Then the plane had to be re-fuelled, and we waited for another take-off slot. After three hours on the plane, we finally took off.
It could have been worse; some of my friends from the Royal Society of Chemistry had their flight to Boston cancelled. And at least I didn't have to watch any films about penguins this time.
Thanks for letting me get that off my chest - on with the ACS meeting...
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
Controversies about the preparation of heavy elements are nothing new. While browsing through a 50-year-old issue of Nature, I came across a report describing the preparation of element-102 (Nature subscribers can see the report here). This described a multinational effort performed at The Nobel Institute of Physics, Stockholm, in which curium atoms were fused with carbon-13 atoms. The new element was named ‘Nobelium’ in honour of its place of birth.
Unfortunately, they were wrong. A year later, in 1958, the physicist Albert Ghiorso and his colleagues at Berkeley unambiguously identified nobelium-254 (the product of bombarding curium with carbon-12). They decided to retain the name of the new element - otherwise I suppose it might have become ‘Ghiorsium’, which somehow isn’t quite the same.
Speaking of dubious elements, I also recently stumbled across a spoof version of the periodic table (it comes in three parts: click here, here and here to see each section), which is worth a look if you fancy a break from the bench. This came from a BBC TV programme called ‘Look Around You’, which made fun of school science programmes from the 1970s. The rest of the web site is worth a look too – there are a few quizzes you can do, including one on iron. The answer to the question “The human body contains enough iron to make what?” was particularly illuminating.
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
This is my final blog from the RSC symposium on synthesis in organic chemistry, and it’s been great. The undoubted highlight came last night, when Ian Fleming (now an emeritus professor) gave a brilliant overview of his career, describing all the influences that culminated in his famous work on the use of silyl groups in organic synthesis.
Starting from his work as grad student, he presented the highs (and occasional lows) of his career with wit and candour. He began his working life in the 1950s, at a time when state-of-the-art spectroscopy meant IR and combustion analysis was often the linchpin of your analytical data. NMR had only just been invented and was only to be used “if you were desperate”, as he put it. And if you did get an NMR, you needed good eyesight, because the resulting spectra were smaller than dollar bills. Even a couple of decades later, 10 g of sample were still required for a carbon-13 NMR experiment.
It was a fascinating story, peppered with amusing anecdotes – for example, as a grad student, he had to cover all his samples with watch glasses, to stop his PhD supervisor from absent-mindedly tipping ash into them from his pipe. And it was fascinating to get the inside story of some of the historic achievements in organic chemistry – such as Woodward’s synthesis of vitamin B12.
Fleming spoke for 90 minutes and was rewarded with a standing ovation – not something that I’ve ever seen before at a chemistry conference. It was an evocative description of a bygone era, delivered by one of the last remaining gentleman chemists, and I felt privileged to witness it.
So, thumbs up to Cambridge. The next meeting in this series will be in two years time – I heartily recommend it, and I hope I’ll see you all there!
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
WARNING! This blog entry contains a joke with chemical content! Those of a nervous disposition may want to look away.
For those who didn’t read my last entry, I’m currently at an RSC symposium on organic chemistry, held in Cambridge (UK, not MA). It’s traditional for UK conferences to be held at universities, apparently so the delegates can be shocked at the quality of the food. Last night was particularly cruel, because all the tables were laid out with wine glasses, creating an expectation of alcohol. Sadly, no wine was actually forthcoming, so the delegates had to face the evening lecture unfortified.
Still, we’ve had some cracking talks. Today, Varinder Aggarwal presented some powerful chemistry for homologating boronic esters; this allows carbon chains to be ‘grown’ with control over the relative and absolute stereochemistry. This work has yet to be published, but he reckons the paper will be ready later this year - so keep your eyes peeled.
Shu Kobayashi discussed various topics in catalysis, ranging from scandium complexes that enable carbon-carbon bond formations to be performed in water (click here for an example), to lab-on-a-chip hydrogenations that are performed in channels coated with polymer-encapsulated palladium. And Dean Toste gave an overview of his work on gold catalysis – a truly amazing lecture, delivered with such aplomb and rapidity that it was difficult to tell when he drew breath.
So who told the chemistry joke? It was Amos B. Smith III, at the evening lecture last night. Dithiane groups feature heavily in his work, and he was questioned about the best way of removing them. This prompted the following gag:
Why are there 32 methods for removing dithianes?
Because none of them work…
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
I don’t seem to be having much luck at conferences recently. At the ACS meeting in Chicago earlier this year, I was given a hotel room without a bed. Yesterday, I turned up for an RSC symposium on organic synthesis and there wasn't even a room for me. At this rate, I’m assuming that when I arrive in Boston for the autumn ACS meeting I’ll discover that my hotel doesn’t exist.
Anyway, once the small issue of my accommodation was sorted out, I had a fun evening catching up with some familiar faces until very late in the night. I’m now experiencing that familiar conference feeling of being very tired but totally wired on coffee.
The lectures this morning kicked off in fine style with Steve Davies. You could hear the scratching of pens on paper coming from all around as he described lots of useful synthetic organic chemistry reactions (including an amazingly stereoselective variant of the Horner-Wadsworth-Emmons reaction – I’ll post the details of the paper once it gets published). Incidentally, I’ve commented before that chemists often seem to have splendid hair, but Steve’s must surely win all the prizes…
Another highlight was Ben List’s talk on new strategies in organocatalysis, including some very neat ideas on chiral Bronsted acid cataysis using phosphoric acid derivatives – see this paper for an example. Contributing to the truly international flavour of the symposium, Goverdhan Mehta from the Indian Institute of Science presented some of his total syntheses of biologically active natural products. Worryingly, he began by defending total synthesis, which he thinks is being marginalized – does anyone agree with him?
OK, that’s plenty for now, but I’ll update you on other interesting stuff tomorrow.
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
While standing on the tube platform this morning (trying to ignore the general unpleasantness associated with London’s public transport system), an advert caught my eye. It featured a model wearing a T-shirt with a periodic table on it. For a brief moment, I was overcome with the notion that chemistry had become fashionable, possibly even sexy.
Further evidence of the chemistry-fashion interface is, admittedly, rather scarce. A few years ago, a manufacturer of safety glasses came up with a new streamlined design, incorporating brightly coloured arms and so on. I thought this was pretty ridiculous – it’s very difficult to make safety equipment look trendy. But they went down a storm with my colleagues. I was even criticised during a safety inspection for not wearing the ‘cool’ version of the safety specs (and not for safety reasons - this is not a joke…)
Other than that, my university’s chemistry society had a few rather sad T-shirts emblazoned with slogans such as “Chemists have solutions” and “Tickle a chemist and see the reaction”. But who knows? Maybe chemical elements could become the new iconic brands? Fashionistas wearing ‘Sb’ logos could look down on their less up-to-date friends, who are still wearing last year’s ‘Cs’ jeans. Where would it all end? Any other ideas?
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
I was chatting to an old friend recently, who used to work as a research chemist for a multinational company - until she lost her job as part of a downsizing campaign. She now works for a much smaller biotech business. I knew that she had taken a while to settle down, so I asked if she’d like to go back to another global corporation.
“No way,” she said, “those companies don’t want or respect people of my age.” She’s in her mid-forties. To my mind that’s young, but she pointed out that none of her downsized colleagues of a similar age (or older) secured jobs in global companies. Yet they were snapped up by smaller businesses.
So why the apparent difference in attitude between small and big business? It seems that the smaller companies were flexible enough to make room for more experienced chemists, whereas the bigger companies, despite their greater wealth and relative security, were not. Instead, the multinationals grabbed the younger people – who were certainly highly employable, but who had lower salary expectations.
So which businesses have the right strategy? I think it might be the smaller ones. Although they’re paying more for the experienced staff than they would have done for the younger people, they expect to get a lot of bang for their bucks. If you ask me, those multinationals don’t know what they’re missing.
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
[In lieu of profiles, the contributors to this blog have decided to do their own Reactions pieces, and first up is Andy...]
1. What made you want to be a chemist?
I think what got me truly hooked was getting a chemistry set as a child. The very first experiment I did, I managed to blow up the reaction flask, which I’m now somewhat ashamed to admit I thought was pretty exciting. (Note to budding chemists: blowing up reaction flasks is not cool or clever).
2. If you weren’t a chemist/Nature Editor and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?
In my spare time I sing with a choir - not as dull as it sounds, since we specialize in tongue-in-cheek arrangements of pop songs (which I compose) alongside the more serious stuff. So, if money was no concern, I’d like to train as a proper musician and try to make a career out of it.
3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?
By making useful things. I know a lot of chemists in the pharmaceutical industry who chose that career because they wanted to make something that could benefit society. Imagine being the chemist who made the first successful drug for Alzheimer’s disease – what a difference you’d have made.
4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with – and why?
How about Henrietta Lacks, who gave the world the first immortalized cell line (the ubiquitous HeLa cells)? She never knew that her cells made such a huge contribution to medicine and biological research, and I’d love to know what she thought about it.
5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?
About a year and a half ago, but I don’t recall what it was. I was an industrial synthetic organic chemist, and the company I worked for closed down my site, making about 350 people redundant. The experiment I was working on at the time didn’t stick in my mind, probably because I had other things to worry about.
6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?
I’d go for a couple of peculiarly British options. The book would be Behind The Scenes At The Museum by Kate Atkinson, which is a tragicomic examination of family life, written mostly from a child’s point of view. The CD would be Tropical Brainstorm, the final album from the much-underrated singer/songwriter Kirsty MacColl. (But I’d also like to take my Massive Attack CDs, especially the Blue Lines album).
Andy Mitchinson is an Associate Editor for Nature and a regular contributor to the Sceptical Chymist.
A paper in PNAS has just caught my eye, because it emphasizes a problem common in natural product research – where do these funky molecules really originate?
This collaborative effort looks at alkaloids — including the synthetically challenging pumiliotoxins — that are isolated from Oophaga pumilio poison frogs. But these toxic amphibians don’t make the alkaloids themselves. It turns out that they get them by eating mites. What’s more, these mites contain lots of new alkaloids that hadn’t previously been discovered.
This reminded me of a story I once heard about another famous natural product, epibatidine, which was also isolated from a frog. Someone had the bright idea of farming the frogs, so that the precious compound could be harvested. But the farmed frogs didn’t have any epibatidine in their skins, because they hadn’t been eating the right food. Bang goes another brilliant idea…
So the next time you see a natural product synthesis, think of the story behind the compound, and the complex biological chains that originally led to it. Not forgetting of course, the unsung heroes who chase insects all over Costa Rica to work out the links of these chains.
Andy
PS If you're interested in other tales of natural product isolation, have a look at this paper in Angewandte Chemie which reports the identification of Platencin (an antibiotic structurally related to platensimycin, which was reported in Nature last year).
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
I was chatting recently with an academic friend about the merits of homogeneous gold catalysis in organic chemistry (inspired by our recent review on the subject), and he expressed the opinion that it was just platinum chemistry in disguise. Then he surprised me by saying “But we need gold chemistry, because we’re going to run out of platinum in a few years time.” On further questioning, he said that the demand for platinum has increased enormously (not least because it is used in catalytic converters in cars), so that Earth’s limited supplies are running out. He believes that the same applies to rhodium, for much the same reasons.
This reminded me of various random snippets that I’ve heard about other ‘endangered’ elements. For example, the US stockpiles helium and the Netherlands has been recycling it for years. Indium is incredibly useful as a component of indium tin oxide — an optically transparent electrical conductor — but supplies are low and alternatives are needed.
Even the price of copper has shot up recently, because of the increased demand in rapidly developing economies such as China and India. There have been reports in the UK of copper wiring and pipes being stolen from building sites, and even from train tracks and people’s homes. I don’t think there’s any danger of Earth’s copper supplies running out — it’s far more abundant than the other elements mentioned — but it’s interesting to see that previously uneconomical sources are now being seriously considered for exploitation (for example, see the recent article on deep sea mining in Chemistry World).
Intriguing stuff, and maybe something that we should be seriously thinking about. Does anyone know of other useful elements that might be running out?
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
So, I was in a delicatessan last week that was proudly announcing its range of Himalayan sea salt, making a big deal about how pure it was. They then went on to comment that the bright pink colour of the salt was due to its high iron content. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
Not very important in the grand scheme of things, I know, but I'd like to think that our food producers and retailers would be a bit more careful about how they use words like 'pure'. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest...
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
So the ACS conference is no more. Actually, it feels like it's been winding down since Tuesday, what with all the big banners saying "See you at the next meeting", the posters advertising taxi services to the airport, and people wandering around with their luggage. I think it's a shame that so many people have already gone home by the last day, especially for those who are still presenting. They may not be the biggest names, but it doesn't seem fair that their potential audience is reduced before they even start.
As I mentioned before, this was my first ACS, and I think it's lived up to expectations. I've enjoyed the chemistry (of course) but also the people watching. It seems that more senior chemists are predisposed towards facial hair (especially splendid moustaches), whereas the younger crowd are rebelling by generally being clean-shaved (although a trendy goatee beard is permitted).
Technology now allows for some mind-blowing multi-media presentations, but also inevitably to a random scattering of pop-up error messages. Still, I've enjoyed some of the visual humour. My favourite was the speaker who, when discussing the various organisms that have had their genomes sequenced, provided an image of each species. There was a picture of fruit-fly, a worm, and a chimpanzee. And right next to the chimp, representing humanity, there was George Bush. Say no more.
Anyway, I'll be flying back home tomorrow (oh joy, another 8 hour flight with nothing to do but watch films about penguins. Why is it always penguins?), and then I'm going to lie down in a darkened room for a week. Really.
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
Having bravely explored the wilds of inorganic chemistry, I decided to meander back to the more familiar territory of organic synthesis, by way of some organometallic chemistry. Braving the overly effective air-conditioning, I shivered through a terrific session in honour of David Milstein. I enjoyed listening to Ilan Marek, who gave a beautifully clear account of some pretty hardcore asymmetric organic synthesis, involving lots of zinc, copper and lithium species. Milstein himself gave a historical overview of his work, including his cool stuff on carbon-carbon bond activation.
But my favourite speaker was Bob Bergman, who wowed the crowd with his latest research on reactions mediated by nanovessels (or cavitands). I love this work - Nature covered some of it in a News & Views article by Julius Rebek last year. Bergman described unpublished results showing that uncharged organic bases (tertiary amines) are actually trapped by cavitands as protonated ammonium cations. This means that acid-catalysed reactions can be perfomed in basic solution! Very nice indeed. Don't forget that we have a News & Views feature article on C-H activation by Bergman in the March 22nd issue of Nature.
It was, all in all, a brilliant day, which ended with that traditional conference activity, a long night in the bar. As a result I'm now feeling a bit like a run-down battery, but that's also traditional after a few days. Time to stoke myself up with coffee, I think...
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature).
My background is in organic chemistry, but the great thing about a meeting like this is that I can learn new things. So yesterday, I decided to explore the strange (to me) world of inorganic chemistry. Frankly, I had no idea what I would discover. I half expected the inorganic attendees to fall silent when I walked into the room, staring at me with hostile eyes, before announcing "We don't like organic chemists in these parts". I think the jetlag is making me paranoid.
But no, it was all cool and I saw some great stuff. Naively, I would never have expected to see an enzyme crystal structure outside of a drug discovery seminar. But then I discovered bioinorganic chemistry, and there were active sites everywhere. John Lipscomb and Steve Lippard gave some cracking talks about the metal species found in enzymes, such as Rieske dioxygenases and bacterial multicomponent monooxgenases. These proteins can be thought of as the original C-H activation specialists. On a similar vein, Thomas Rauchfuss is doing some amazing chemistry to model the active site of hydrogenases.
What I really liked about these sessions was that the lecture rooms were smaller (it was standing room only for Lippard's talk), and the debate was lively. Every talk inspired interesting discussion, and I was impressed by the spirit of academic engagement, which I hadn't really encountered elsewhere. So, if you're sticking closely to your own areas, why not go foraging in foreign territory? You might like what you find.
Andy
Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)
I have a confession to make - this is my first time. Even though I've been to conferences all over the world, somehow I've never made it to a national ACS meeting, until now. For the bene