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2008 ACS NATIONAL AWARD WINNERS Recipients are HONORED FOR CONTRIBUTIONS of major significance to chemistry
ACS AWARD FOR CREATIVE WORK IN FLUORINE CHEMISTRY Sponsored by SynQuest Laboratories Inc. and Honeywell Dennis P. Curran believes that his interest in chemistry is genetic: Both his brother, Kevin, and his father, Bill, who is a 50-year American Chemical Society member, are organic chemists. Though his daughter Kelly is an undergraduate history major, his older daughter, Molly, completed a bachelor’s degree in engineering and a master’s degree in engineering management, and she took organic chemistry “for fun,” according to her grandmother, Jane. Curran’s father never pushed him to chemistry, Jane says. She adds, “I bought him his Curran chemistry set.” Curran, 54, began his path in chemistry in 1971 at Boston College, where he was inspired by T. Ross Kelly, his “Introduc-
tory Organic Chemistry” professor. He completed a Ph.D. at the University of Rochester and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and is now a Distinguished Service Professor and Bayer Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Curran says his interest in fluorine chemistry arose after reading a “spectacular” Science article (1994, 266, 72) by István T. Horváth and József Rábai, on catalytic chemical transformations using a fluorous biphase system. Curran’s research group has projects in organic radical chemistry, but he says they have always had problems separating organotin reagents from their products. Horváth and Rábai’s article inspired him to learn about organofluorine chemistry, which he found could help his group’s research. “Once we started doing offbeat but simple experiments and getting exciting results, I was hooked,” Curran says. Although Curran initially considered himself an “outsider,” his excitement about fluorine chemistry has had a great deal of impact on the field. His contributions to fluorous chemistry include the creation of a fluorous solid-phase extraction technique and the introduction of many new fluorous protecting groups, scavengers, reagents, and catalysts. G. K. Surya Prakash, the George A. & Judith A. Olah Nobel Laureate Chair in Hydrocarbon Chemistry at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, says Curran “has shown the creativity to consistently take the fluorous field in new directions.” He adds that other groups have made many “innovative and potentially very important contributions,” such as oligosaccharide synthesis with fluorous microarrays, “which follow directly from concepts and COURT ESY OF DE NNIS CURRAN
FOLLOWING is the second set of vignettes of recipients of awards administered by the American Chemical Society for 2008. C&EN will publish the vignettes of the remaining recipients in January and February issues. A profile of Gabor Somorjai, the 2008 Priestley Medalist, is scheduled to appear in the April 7 issue of C&EN, along with his award address. Most of the award recipients will be honored at an awards ceremony that will be held on Tuesday, April 8, in conjunction with the 235th ACS national meeting in New Orleans. However, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar awardees will be honored at the 236th ACS national meeting in Philadelphia, Aug. 17-21.
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techniques that Curran introduced and pioneered.” “The original uses of fluorous chemistry in small-molecule synthesis and separation have expanded dramatically in recent years to biomolecule synthesis, natural products isolation, proteomics, microarrays, and others,” Curran says. Because of this expansion, he has been able to commercialize his discoveries in fluorous chemistry: In 2000, he started a company called Fluorous Technologies, which provides tags, scavengers, reagents, and custom compounds and services. Curran is an ISI Highly Cited Researcher, among the top 100 in chemistry, and holds many awards, including the 2000 ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry and the 1998 Janssen Prize for Creativity in Organic Synthesis. He has published 358 articles, has 29 patents and dozens more pending, cowrote the book “Stereochemistry of Radical Reactions: Concepts, Guidelines, and Synthetic Applications,” and has edited or coedited four other books, including the “Handbook of Fluorous Chemistry.” The award address will be presented before the Division of Fluorine Chemistry.—KENNETH MOORE
ACS AWARD FOR CREATIVE INVENTION Sponsored by ACS Corporation Associates Wide-ranging technology developments stemming from a breadth of knowledge are what stand out from the work of Adam Heller, professor emeritus of chemical engineering at the University of Texas, Austin. His ability to integrate different elements into novel and useful applications has garnered him the award for creative invention. “His inventions have profoundly impacted the quality of public health care, and in fact, it is from this that Heller derives the most satisfaction: producing technological advances that directly improve the daily lives of millions,” says Roger T. Bonnecaze, chairman of UT’s chemical engineering department. With regard to his achievements, other colleagues call Heller one of the most accomplished engineers in the world. In the 1970s, Heller and James J. Auborn at GTE Laboratories built the first lithium thionyl chloride battery. Today it is used
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ERNEST GUENTHER AWARD IN THE CHEMISTRY OF NATURAL PRODUCTS Sponsored by Givaudan Having a plant species named after you is a rare tribute, but David G. I. Kingston has been twice honored in this way. Adding to these accolades, the Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University professor is this year’s award recipient. Kingston, 69, was born in Croydon, a suburb of London. Honing his chemistry skills as a young boy by building explosives that he field-tested in the nearby countryside, Kingston became interested in natural products chemistry as Kingston
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an undergraduate student at Cambridge University. In particular, Nobel Laureate and chemistry professor at Cambridge Alexander Lord Todd first piqued Kingston’s interest in natural products with his lectures about how the structure of cholesterol that was initially reported had been debunked. As time went on, Kingston says, he also found the long-term goals of natural product chemistry—finding therapies in the natural world and contributing to human health—aligned with his Christian faith. After receiving a Ph.D. from Cambridge, Kingston eventually landed a tenured position in the chemistry department at Virginia Tech. He also served 15 years as an associate editor at the Journal of Natural Products. Kingston is best known for his systematic study of the behemoth molecule paclitaxel, marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb as Taxol. He has “investigated almost every functional group on the taxane ring system for its effect on the drug’s activity,” says Virginia Tech colleague Joseph S. Merola. “Those advances have provided some excellent insights into the taxane structure-activity relationship and required overcoming some challenging synthetic hurdles,” adds George R. Pettit, a medicinal chemist at Arizona State University. Kingston and his collaborators also identified the correct binding conformation of paclitaxel with the protein tubulin, which provides insight about how the drug seizes the machinery of rapidly dividing cancer cells. From this work, he has developed and patented paclitaxel analogs that enhance this association. Kingston also isolated more than 200 bioactive natural products from the forest and coral reefs of Suriname and Madagascar, as a project leader of the International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG) program funded by the Fogarty International Center. Kingston’s work also provided part of the justification for establishing the Central Suriname Nature Reserve, which protects 1.6 million hectares of forest, Merola notes. “The productivity of DaVIRGINIA T ECH
Heller received a master’s degree in chemistry and physics in 1957 and a doctorate in chemistry in 1961, both from Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Following postdoctoral work, he joined GTE Laboratories and then moved to AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1975. There he headed the electronic materials research department between 1977 and 1988. He was appointed to the Ernest Cockrell Sr. Chair in Engineering at UT Austin in 1988 and became a UT research professor in 2002. Heller has won numerous awards and medals, including the ACS Chemistry of Materials Award; both the Spiers and the Faraday Medals of the Royal Society of Chemistry; the Fresenius Gold Medal of the Society of German Chemists; and the Vittorio De Nora Medal of the Electrochemical Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a fellow of the Electrochemical Society. The award address will be presented before the Division of Analytical Chemistry and the Division of Physical Chemistry.— COU RTESY OF A DA M HELLER
in neurostimulators to alleviate pain and treat epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease, as well as in drug infusion devices for treating cancer, cerebral palsy, and diabetes. The battery design also finds wide use in defense and communications applications. Heller then developed the first photoelectrochemical cells that convert sunlight into electrical power with efficiencies greater than 10%. He also created the first cells that could just as efficiently convert sunlight into chemical energy stored as hydrogen. Subsequent work in pho- Heller tocatalysis by Heller and then-UT postdoctoral fellow Yaron Paz led to windows that clean themselves of deposited organic grime under sunlight. Along with an understanding of the photocatalytic oxidation process, he developed, with coworkers Michael V. Pishko and his own son, Ephraim, at E. Heller & Co., the binders needed to retain titanium dioxide catalyst particles on the surfaces. More recently, Heller established the field of “enzyme wiring,” in which conducting hydrogels electrically connect immobilized redox enzymes to electrodes. Through these connections, enzymes catalyze electrochemical reactions and measure the associated current. He put this phenomenon to practical use in designing highly sensitive, miniaturized glucose oxidase-based biosensors, particularly for diabetes management. At TheraSense, a company he and Ephraim founded in 1996, Heller, with his son and Ben Feldman, created FreeStyle, a glucose-monitoring microcoulometer requiring only 300 nL of blood, the smallest mass-manufactured microfluidic device. Heller also built the research prototypes of FreeStyle Navigator, a miniature, subcutaneously implanted continuous monitor based on enzyme wiring. In 2004, Abbott Laboratories acquired the company for $1.2 billion. Heller has worked on other enzyme wiring applications, such as oxygen-reducing, glucose-oxidizing, membraneless biofuel cells. These micrometer-sized cells are the smallest ever built, consisting of two wired enzymes coated onto 7-μm-diameter carbon fibers. They are designed to power subcutaneous sensors and devices.
ACS AWARD IN CHEMISTRY OF MATERIALS Sponsored by E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Co. Thomas E. Mallouk got a C in freshman
chemistry at Yale University in 1972, but it didn’t hold him back. As materials scientist Geoffrey A. Ozin of the University of Toronto sees it, Mallouk “currently stands among the top rank of inorganic chemists in the world.” By winning this year’s award, Mallouk, 53, joins a stellar list of innovators whose collective triumphs have expanded many material and technology categories, including superconductors, quantum dots, conductive polymers, and medical implants. “What characterizes Tom is his breadth of activities, ranging from photochemistry, to vectorial electron transport, to clever design of nanobjects and nanomaterials,” observes Michael D. Ward, a crystal engineer who is in the process of assembling the Molecular Design Institute at New York University, which he also directs.
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University’s department of chemistry, where he now is DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry & Physics. To date he has about 280 publications to his name, including, he says, “a few good ones.” In the mix are eight issued patents, including one for a pollution remediation technology based on nanoscale, soil-penetrating iron particles that detoxify pollutants including persistent chlorinated hydrocarbons and dangerous metals such as chromium(IV). Mallouk cofounded the Robbinsville, N.J.-based company Princeton Nanotech to commercialize NanoFe, the groundwater treatment process based on the technology. He may have looked like a C student in chemistry at first, but, claims Mallouk, “I am getting better at it.” The award address will be presented before the Division of Inorganic Chemistry.—IVAN AMATO
ACS AWARD IN ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY Sponsored by the Battelle Memorial Institute R. Mark Wightman, 60, the W. R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will be honored for his work developing and applying microscopic electrodes. “Wightman has profoundly influenced electrochemical exploration of previously inaccessible domains of time and physical space,” says Royce W. Murray, a fellow electrochemist and a Kenan Professor of Chemistry at UNC. “The act of making a tiny, tiny electrode, with dimensions smaller than the distance that molecules diffuse in a typical voltammetric experiment, has highly significant fundamental and practical consequences that have reverberated throughout the electrochemistry and electroanalytical chemistry community since Wightman’s seminal paper appeared in 1980,” Murray says. Wightman has used those tiny electrodes to study the release and uptake of neurotransmitCOURT ESY O F R. MARK WIGHTMAN
Mallouk “developed the ink-jet approach to making large arrays of catalysts with different compositions,” Ward says, and developed an “elegant approach” to map the activity of quaternary alloys—complex families of catalysts and other solids whose members are composed of various proportions of four different elements. When asked what work he is proudest of, Mallouk points to the overarching theme of his contributions: “In the end, the work we have done of most consequence is learning how to make things,” he says. That could characterize the raison d’être of most chemists, but Mallouk was an early adopter and innovator of a mental framework in which the sequence from individual molecules to molecular assemblies to materials is considered in an integrated and seamless way. When he was a student in the 1970s and early ’80s, he recalls, “solid-state chemistry and molecular chemistry didn’t intersect so much.” Mallouk earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Brown (to which he had transferred from Yale) in 1977 under the tutelage of Aaron Wold, whose fervor for solid-state chemistry, Mallouk says, proved irresistible. “You could grind things up and put them in a furnace and something amazing would come out,” he says with his signature enthusiasm. “I could see the power and richness of solid-state chemistry from this.” In 1983, he received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. There, he worked on solid-state fluorides and intercalation compounds with doctoral adviser Neil Bartlett, whose “deliberate, rational vision of what you could make” also left a lasting mark on Mallouk’s own scientific style. From graduate school, Mallouk segued into a postdoc position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then an eight-year stint at the University of Texas, Austin. In 1993, he landed a professorship in Pennsylvania State Wightman COU RTESY OF THOM AS M A LLOU K
vid’s ICBG program, in some of the least hospitable parts of the planet for scientific research, is nothing short of remarkable. Its success is a tribute to his insight, perseverance, and belief in the importance of natural product research,” adds Jon Clardy, a biological chemist at Harvard University. A former ICBG collaborator, James Miller, now dean and vice president of science at the New York Botanical Garden, named a tree found in Peru and Ecuador Cordia kingstoniana after Kingston, while Richard Spjut, a plant collector with World Botanical Associates, named a new yew tree—the genus that be- Mallouk queathed paclitaxel—found in China, Taxus kingstonii. Kingston was also the recipient of the 1999 Research Achievement Award given by the American Society of Pharmacognosy and the 2002 winner of the Outstanding Scientist of Virginia award. The award address will be presented before the Division of Organic Chemistry.—SARAH EVERTS
Excellence and Influence
Founded in 1879 and published weekly, JACS is the flagship journal of the American Chemical Society and the preeminent journal in the field of chemistry. Providing fundamental research essential to that field over the past 129 years, JACS has long-been recognized as the pinnacle for published research in chemistry for its commitment to excellence in published research and peer-review. It is that same commitment over more than a century that has influenced generations of chemists and the field of chemistry itself. It is the mission of the journal to stay at the forefront as emerging fields and disciplines blend into chemistry at the interface of chemistry and biology and beyond.
With more than a quarter million total citations in 2006 and an impact factor of 7.696—the highest in its history—JACS is the most cited, most respected, and most influential journal in chemistry
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ters at single synapses. The size of the electrodes permits the monitoring of events at physiologically and behaviorally relevant time scales. Wightman was the first to detect catecholamine release from single vesicles with subsecond time resolution. He has also used such electrodes to measure neurotransmitters in active rats. “In vivo electroanalytical experiments in the Wightman laboratories have helped to rewrite much of our understanding of dopamine dynamics, metabolism, and storage,” says Andrew G. Ewing, currently the Marie Curie Chair of Analytical Chemistry at Gothenburg University in Sweden and a former Wightman grad student. “It is a truism that living processes are based on chemistry,” says Richard N. Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science at Stanford University, “but it requires the utmost ingenuity to find ways of measuring what is happening in such complex systems.” “The significance of Wightman’s neurobiology research is validated by the fact that numerous people in the field are moving to adopt his microelectrode techniques,” Murray says. “His science has thus not only had a significant impact on analytical chemistry but also on other fields.” In 1968, Wightman received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Erskine College in Due West, S.C. Working with Murray, he received a doctoral degree from UNC, in 1974. His postdoctoral work with Ralph N. Adams, at the University of Kansas, sparked his interest in biological applications. He began his independent research career as an assistant professor of chemistry at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1976. He was promoted to associate professor and full professor in 1982 and 1985, respectively. In 1989, he moved to UNC. Wightman has received many awards, including the Chemical Instrumentation and Electrochemistry Awards from the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry, the Faraday Medal from the Electrochemistry Group of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and the R. N. Adams Award in Bioanalytical Chemistry from the Pittsburgh Conference. The award address will be delivered before the Division of Analytical Chemistry.—CELIA ARNAUD
