Free News & Views!

Posted on 11 Dec 2008 by andrew mitchinson

I’ve managed to wangle free access for everyone to a News & Views article about a chemistry paper in this week’s issue of Nature. You can access the News & Views article here, but hurry, because it’s only available for one week, starting today.

The article is written by Karl Hansen, one of the Directors of Process Chemistry at Amgen, and describes a great piece of organic methodology from Varinder Aggarwal’s group. Briefly, the work describes a simple enantioselective method for making chiral tertiary alcohols. The really cool thing about it is that both enantiomers of the target alcohol can be made easily from the same starting material, without using any fancy catalysts or weird reagents. As Hansen points out, the method should be extremely useful for medicinal chemists in particular.

This free-access thing is a bit of an experiment, so do take advantage – if it’s a success, then I should be able to persuade the powers that be to provide more News & Views articles for free in the future. The paper itself is available by subscription only; but if you are a subscriber, then you can access the paper here.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

The Sceptical Twitterer?

Posted on 09 Dec 2008 by Catherine Goodman

One of the most frequent questions I am asked at conferences is ‘what do you do all day?’ It’s always hard to envision what someone else’s job is like; this is probably particularly true with me because I’m outside of the ‘normal’ scientific careers of academia and industry. I thought one simple way to try to tell you all what my day is like would be to give you a blow-by-blow account. So, here goes! Hope it’s not too boring…

8:53 – Sorting through some random notes, trying to figure out what I need to tackle first. I’m putting together an agenda for a meeting tomorrow, so that probably takes priority.

9:24 – Got distracted answering an email from someone who disagrees with a decision we made. Also, Josh just got back in the office and is telling us the news from London.

9:57 – Finished email, working on agenda.

10:26 – Finished agenda. Now I’ve got to send an email about a review I had sort-of commissioned and then need to read several papers.

11:00 – Sent email. Then I talked to Joanne about PubChem and what conferences we might go to next year. Really time to read papers!

11:31 – Debating the merits of a paper. Initial feeling is that sugars are cool.

11:58 – A mini-rant: If there is an article that compromises the novelty of your work, please don’t wait until the final paragraph of your 18 page paper to mention it. Needless to say, I recommended rejection. Now reading a second one.

12:28 – Got an awesome review outline from an author for my upcoming focus issue. Very excited! Also had to answer some questions about proofs of an article, and read a couple of papers as possible research highlights. One is not super exciting, one has potential.

1:01 – having lunch; heading to editorial team meeting.

1:57 – lots of stuff to talk about! Now headed to QC meeting of December issue.

3:03 – QC meeting is done, and we continued the editorial meeting. We had to decide what meetings to go to next year and it’s hard to pick! Now done with meetings for the day.

3:37 – Hopefully commissioned a News & Views, and did some other random things. Time flies!

4:02 – Making some notes on the review outline from earlier. Also wrote back to someone who has a cool story they want to submit to us.

4:33 – Drowning in production details. It would be better if our production team was in the same office with us.

5:04 – Looking for companies that might want to sponsor a new thing we’re doing. Also reading a paper. It would go faster if I picked one instead of doing both, probably!

5:39 – Computer malfunction + working on the last form I have to prepare for that meeting tomorrow. Phew!

6:00 – Sent an email to yet another person about something they’re writing for us. And, it’s nearly time to go home so I can pretend to have a ‘real’ life. So, in terms of whether this was a typical day: today was very productive in terms of doing long-term stuff, and working on some projects, but I really didn’t make much progress on the manuscripts, or get to look for referees at all. As a result, I’ll take some papers home to read overnight and plan to devote much more time to our submissions tomorrow.

Pretty glamorous, huh?!

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

NChem Research Highlights: Bryostatin, dendrimers and rowing microparticles

Posted on 08 Dec 2008 by Neil Withers

A busy week in the Nature Chemistry office: Anne has just returned from a tour of Japanese universities, Stu is about to head off to Bath for Catalysis and Sensing for our Environment 08, Gav’s already in Grenoble for ElecMol 08, Steve’s visiting Harvard tomorrow and I’m off to a symposium in honour of Professor the Lord Lewis of Newnham at the Royal Society on Thursday and Friday. Phew! But we’ve still time to bring you a dose of Research Highlights.

Total synthesis can be mind-bogglingly difficult, so why not just go and marvel at bryostatin 16?

Dendrimers, I imagine, are probably normally a big writhing mass of chemistry, but these pyrene dendrimers sound a lot more…staid. Thanks to the stiffness of the dendron units themselves, the whole thing is pretty rigid.

Another article that really needs a movie…swimming microparticles! Although rowing is quite a good way to get your head round it. A big particle (the boat) is linked to a smaller one (the oar). They’re magnetic, so a precessing magnetic field makes them rotate (errr, the rower? Bear with me!). In a bulk solvent, they’d just happily rotate, but when they’re close to a surface, the viscosity gradient means that the oar ‘grips’ the the gloopier liquid and the particle/boat moves.

And finally…some shameless slapping of our own backs. According to this post over at Nascent, we almost totally rule! Well, we’re in joint second place for the chemistry blog most linked from the blogs registered at nature.com blogs.

Thanks for linking,

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Reactions – Cristina Lagunas

Posted on 05 Dec 2008 by Neil Withers

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

A fascination for discovering new things. I remember watching, at an early age, an old movie about Marie Curie, and I was hooked by her passion for research. I had a very good chemistry teacher in secondary school and I really enjoyed learning about the structure of the atom and MO theory. As an undergraduate, I enjoyed the inorganic and coordination chemistry labs and my supervisors further inspired me to do research.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be – and why?

I’d probably had done a maths degree, which was the other subject I loved in secondary school. With a maths degree, I think I would still have pursued an academic career.

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

Energy and the environment are our two very challenging issues at the moment. Chemistry and chemists are central to both.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with – and why?

Given my answer to question 1, it’ll have to be Marie Curie. She was a truly remarkable woman at a time when women weren’t even allowed to vote: two Nobel prizes (Physics, shared with husband Pierre and H. Becquerel, in 1903; and Chemistry in 1911) for her research on radiation and the discovery of elements such as radium and polonium; first female professor at the Sorbonne. The Curies believed in sharing scientific knowledge freely and never patented anything; and they warned about the danger of radioactive substances in the wrong hands. Marie relentlessly promoted the use of x-rays in medicine, but overlooked the dangers of radioactivity to health. I would like to know if she had done anything different, given what we know today.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab – and what was it?

I haven’t done a full experiment from beginning to end for three or four years, but I do get into the lab and ‘help’ my students with their work now and then. The last time: a couple of weeks ago, helping a new PhD student to set up a reaction with nBuLi.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

I think I’ll take the Spanish classic El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (or Don Quijote for short), by Cervantes. It has tragedy, comedy and adventure in equal quantities; and I haven’t actually read it properly (only in ‘bits’ in secondary school). A desert island will be a good place to cross it from the ‘to read’ books. Besides, it’s set in my native region of La Mancha, so it’ll remind me of home. As for a CD, I may take Unplugged by Eric Clapton. I don’t seem to get tired of listening to the songs.

Cristina Lagunas is in the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast, and works on luminescent metal complexes, in particular gold, and on molecular sensors. She is also involved in multidisciplinary research in electrochemistry and catalysis in ionic liquids.

Materials Girl: Old school, new school

Posted on 03 Dec 2008 by Stuart Cantrill

Posted on behalf of Materials Girl

Fourth year as an undergrad reminds me of being a high-school senior, only more complicated with the wider range of post-graduation options. Still, the ultimate goal generally remains the same: to secure a source of income while pursuing personal interests. (This poses an interesting question regarding why people even go to college – to get a better job, for the pure joy of learning, because it’s expected, to avoid the real world? Aside from the last part, I fell in the category of “all of the above”).

In the high school days, seniors were expected to spend their time applying to colleges, taking standardized tests (ugh), battling senioritis, and trying not stress out over academics and the future. Now, it seems that continuing education past a Bachelor’s is less expected outside of scientific circles – even to the point of being looked down on by uninformed individuals. “You’re graduating already?! Are you going to work or do grad school?” is posed almost as an afterthought. Apparently, old, moldy college students aren’t interesting to the general public. They’re interested in what school I attend (meaning the accompanying sports teams), and perhaps my major. Upon hearing, “chemistry and materials science” I am often written off as just another nerd or pre-med. Nevermind the organic concentration!

The hardships of graduate school and research go tragically unnoticed by the masses. However, what really matters is that we exist, we do good work, we make a difference, and we are happy. Or so I tell myself…

NChem Research Highlights: Twisting, diversity and order from disorder

Posted on 01 Dec 2008 by Neil Withers

Monday = Research Highlights.

What actually happens when molecules isomerise? How do the atoms really move? I’ve never really thought about how little I know about it, so it was interesting to read how stilbene (two benzene rings linked by double-bonded carbon atoms) twists as it changes from cis to trans. It’s just a shame there’s no movie with the article!

As I’m sure many of you know (and as more organic colleagues have told me), making complicated organic molecules can, apparently, be a rather time-consuming and tricky business. Removing tongue from cheek, being able to sample as large a portion of ‘chemical space’ as possible is crucially important in drug discovery. Now, using only 6 simple reactions (hence Steve’s ‘Six degrees of separation’ headline) a team at Leeds have been able to generate over 80 different scaffolds.

Molecules adsorbed on a surface are unlikely to align themselves in periodic, crystalline array. But using a molecule that can bond in defined ways resulted in a hexagonal ‘hole’ appearing no matter how the molecules themselves were arranged. This resulted in the holes forming an ordered array while the actual molecules had no order.

I’m afraid the chemistry blogosphere/world of news has run dry for the “And finally…” section this week, so you’ll have to put up with this shocking joke:

Why do white bears dissolve in water?

Because they’re polar.

I do apologise – any better ones gratefully received!