Archive by category | Andrew Mitchinson

Showing their metal

Sadly it’s my final day in Paris, but the conference has finished in fine style with a selection of talks largely focusing on organometallic chemistry and catalysts. I have a soft spot for organometallic chemistry, and so too did the audience it seems, since the lecture theatre was full, even though many attendees were probably slightly hungover from last night’s conference dinner.  Read more

Chemists take on immunology

Day two of my conference in sunny Paris, and the talks moved on this afternoon to biological chemistry. Long-term readers of this blog will know that I’m not a chemical biologist, so this will be a relatively brief overview of the topics discussed – but what topics!  Read more

I love Paris

No, I don’t mean Ms Hilton. I’m at the Tenth Tetrahedron Symposium in Paris, celebrating 50 years of Tetrahedron Letters with a stunning programme of speakers – a real who’s who of organic chemists. If you ever have the chance to attend a conference in Paris, you’ve got to go, if only because it’s a foodie’s paradise. The three-course lunch was sensational, and the mini-desserts they’ve been dishing out during coffee breaks are to die for.  Read more

Chemist’s choice

We’ve done it again — only this time it’s bigger than before. Following on from an experiment a couple of months ago, in which we made a News & Views article on organic synthesis freely available for a week, we’re now bringing you an entire collection of News & Views pieces, covering a diverse range of chemistry. You can find everything here, and once again the content is as free as the birds (at least, it will be for two months).  Read more

Credit crunching

It seems like we’ve had endless headlines screaming about the collapsing world economy. Scary times for everyone. If you’re one of the many chemists who has been made redundant recently in the ‘restructuring’ of big pharma (or indeed if you’ve been made redundant from any sector), hang on in there. I know exactly what it’s like – I won’t offer any trite homilies, especially when the job market looks so bleak, but I wish you luck for the future.  Read more

ACS: Philadelphia 2008 – Love Train

The ACS meeting is over, so I guess it’s time for me to climb aboard the love train and head for home. Oh, alright then, it’ll be a cramped flight to the UK, I was just trying to squeeze in a reference to the Philly sound before I left.  Read more

ACS – Thanks for the memories

I’ve been attending so many interesting sessions that it’s been difficult to find time to blog, but I’m going to redress the balance now. First off, I just wanted to mention a terrific talk yesterday from John Bercaw, which gave an update on his work on the mechanism of the Shilov reaction. If you’re not familiar with this reaction, it was one of the seminal discoveries that underpins modern C-H activation chemistry. Unfortunately, it’s stoichiometric, but Bercaw is hoping to make a catalytic version that will provide a practical method of converting alkanes into alcohols. That goal is still some way off, but he’s found some promising water-compatible catalysts (water compatibility will be essential) that look like a good step in the right direction. I was particularly impressed by his obviously meticulous approach to research – if anyone can crack this problem, then he can.  Read more

ACS – Movie stars

As is traditional for any editor from a Nature journal attending an ACS meeting, let me begin by telling you my own personal trauma in getting here – my plane didn’t have any water in the restrooms for washing your hands. Instead, the airline company improvised by putting out bottles of drinking water for us to use. But I’ll swear that, by the end of the journey, they were using sparkling water in some of the restrooms. Presumably if they’d got really stuck in first class, they’d have started using the champagne.  Read more