Day three of the Belgian Organic Synthesis Symposium, and the heat wave continues. That means there have been plenty of excuses for conference attendees to drink Belgian beer, as the title of this blog implies. But we were also treated to a spectacular talk today by Kenichiro Itami, who presented (among other things) his latest research towards the bottom-up synthesis of carbon nanotubes.

Itami’s grand strategy is to prepare nanorings of benzenes, known as cycloparaphenylenes (CPPs), then to stack them up into cylinders and join them together in aromatization reactions – hey presto, you get a carbon nanotube. He’s not the only person pursuing this strategy, as both Carolyn Bertozzi and Shigeru Yamago seem to be trying the same thing.

The first problem to overcome in this approach was how to make the inherently ring-strained CPPs – Bertozzi published her solution in 2008 (you can see the abstract for the JACS paper here), closely followed by Itami in 2009 (in Angewandte, abstract here), then by Yamago this year (also in Angewandte, abstract here). Itami is now concentrating on finding a scaleable route for making CPPs, so that he has sufficient material to attempt the all-important aromatization reaction. He’s not quite there yet, but he has come up with an impressively concise synthesis of a CPP, and just needs to optimize the yields.

In the mean time, he’s also devised a general, modular synthesis that allows access to CPPs of different sizes, and he presented some rather beautiful crystal structures of a CPP – interestingly, the molecules stack up in much the way you would need them to if you wanted to fuse them together into a nanotube.

No doubt Bertozzi and Yamago are also making advances of their own, so I’ll certainly be following the progress in the race for a bottom-up synthesis of carbon nanotubes.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

I’m currently on lunch break after a very stimulating morning of discussion about the future of UK science. The Tomorrow’s Giants conference, co-organised by the 350-year-old Royal Society and the ‘mere stripling’ of Nature (just 140 years old), is taking place in the studiously unremarkable Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank.

I’ll publish a number of posts on the subject over the coming days, but to kick things off, here are the highlights from the opening speech by Sir Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society and Astronomer Royal.

Sir Martin began by dedining the main purpose of the conference as looking beyond the short-term horizon to what science will be like a decade from now, or further even than that. He quipped that the younger people in the audience have even more ahead of them than they expect, due to the promise of life extension research.

Predicting the future is always a messy business, as Rees (author of Our Final Century) knows as well as anybody. So he started out with a series of predictions for science that he thinks are almost certain:

• Science will become even more internationally directed than it is today.
• There will be a shift of the world’s intellectual centre of gravity towards Asia.
• We will see huge enhancements in computer power, with two equally huge consequences: first, the capability to analyse and datamine huge datasets, available to everyone; second, an ever greater role of computer simulation in science (we already do this in, for example, astronomy)
• Particularly in the biomedical area, advances will produce ever more challenges for ethics and policy. We may discover that some doors are best left closed.
• More fluid interaction with the public

He went on to argue for the continued freedom of scientists to, as much as possible, follow their own research path and act autonomously in deciding research direction. When making such a choice, a scientist is ‘staking much of their career, so it’s not frivolous’.

There will, he said, be changes in higher education brought about by new technology. For example, lectures delivered over the internet. Universities that rely purely on teaching may have a diminished or even no role in the future.

He was positive about the state of UK science. The UK remains a preferred place to do research, depending on the measurement used, we’re either first or second in the world. USA, Germany, France and countries of the far East have all made good gestures, both in rhetoric and substance towards supporting science. We therefore need to make sure we raise our game. The sums used to finance UK research are trifling compared to the overall budget, and compared with bank bonuses.

Nature Editor Phil Campbell then took to the podium to toast the Royal Society’s grand anniversary (strangely, Sir Martin Rees didn’t even mention the RS). Then, speaking of the audience, “Many of you are the people who will make that future unpredictable. We hope some of you are Tomorrow’s Giants.”

More on the sessions tomorrow.