letter to President Bill Clinton express ing concern that the Commerce Depart ment may have been lobbying to pre vent an EU ban on the sale of soft vinyl toys. Such efforts, they wrote, would "represent an unwarranted intrusion into the ability of other countries to make their own decisions about public health risks." Bette Hileman
BF Goodrich increases its stake in aerospace BF Goodrich, Richfield, Ohio, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Char lotte, N.C.-based aerospace firm Coltec Industries for $2.2 billion in stock and the assumption of debt. Following com pletion of the deal in March, Goodrich will move its corporate headquarters to Charlotte, although it will leave chemi cal operations in place in Brecksville, Ohio. The acquisition reinforces Goodrich's aerospace segment and adds engineered industrial products to its portfolio of businesses. However, it does not signal a move away from specialty chemicals, which still have excellent growth pros pects, says a Goodrich spokesman. The new Goodrich will have about $5.5 billion in projected sales for 1998, including Coltec's $1.5 billion. Coltec derives about half of its revenues from the manufacture of aerospace systems including landing gears, flight control equipment, and fuel systems. The other half comes from the manufacture of industrial products including diesel engines, self-lubricating bearings, and compressors. "This merger significantly enhances BF Goodrich's aerospace business," says David L. Burner, Goodrich chairman and chief executive officer. "And with Col tec's high-margin engineered industrial products business, we are adding an im portant third leg that balances our aero space and performance materials portfo lios and enhances our excellent pros pects for continued growth." The performance materials operations have more than $1.2 billion in sales and in cludes Goodrich's specialty plastics and specialty additives units as well as the Freedom Chemical intermediates and ad ditives businesses acquired in March (C&EN, March 23, page 14).
Although the acquisition does not add to Goodrich's chemical operations, Coltec's Garlock Sealing Technologies unit supplies chemical industry custom ers with process sealing products, and its Quincy Compressors unit supplies the industry with compressors and vac uum pumps. By moving its corporate headquar ters from Ohio to North Carolina, Good rich expects to eliminate about 150 of 250 corporate jobs at the two compa nies. Goodrich now employs about 130 people at its headquarters. In addition, Goodrich expects to move its aero space headquarters—with its 40 jobs— from Montrose, Ohio, to Charlotte. Combining the two companies should result in savings of about $60 million per year by 2001, says Goodrich. More than 3,000 Goodrich jobs remain in Ohio, where the firm was a major tire manufacturer until it exited that busi ness 10 years ago. Marc Reisch
Found: Optical activity's missing link? Imagine adding to a reaction a com pound that has just a smidgen more of one of its enantiomers than another. You wouldn't expect to isolate a product with a large enantiomeric excess. But that's what Japanese chemists claim they can do with a new system that amplifies slight enantiomeric imbalances [/. Am. Chem. Soc, 120, 12157 (1998)]. If confirmed, the findings of chemis-
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try professor Kenso Soai and his col leagues at the Science University of To kyo could bolster the theory that circu larly polarized light (CPL) from stars is the source of homochirality in Earth's bi ological systems (C&EN, Aug. 3, page 6). Chemists know that CPL can selectively destroy one enantiomer in a racemic mixture. But "a very laige gap exists be tween the low ee [enantiomeric excess] induced by CPL and high ee of naturally occurring chiral molecules," Soai tells C&EN. He and his coworkers believe their system fills that gap. The new work is an extension of an asymmetric autocatalytic reaction previ ously reported by Soai [Nature, 378, 767 (1995)]. In the presence of a pyrimidine alcohol with 2% ee, treating pyrimidine5-carbaldehyde with diisopropylzinc yields the same chiral alcohol with up to 88% ee. The enantioselective reac tion involves a chiral catalyst generated from the initial alcohol, the researchers suggest. As the reaction proceeds, the chiral product acts as a catalyst for its own formation. Now the researchers report that oth er chiral compounds with small ee can serve as chiral initiators for the same alkylation reaction. For example, adding L-leucine with 2% ee (which can be ob tained by photolysis of racemic leucine with CPL) gives product alcohol that is highly enriched in the R enantiomer. Conversely, addition of D-leucine with a low ee gives the S alcohol in high ee. Other chiral compounds with very low ee also work as initiators, they say, in cluding valine, methyl mandelate, and even simple 2-butanol. "If their experimental results are con firmed, it's really a fantastic system," comments Jay S. Siegel, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, who has written on the ori gins of homochirality. "It's unlikely that these particular reaction conditions—an organometallic reagent, toluene as sol vent—could be found in prebiotic condi tions. Nonetheless, the work does show a chemical example of a mathematical model of amplification that's been around for a long time." Siegel stresses that he would like to see experiments that would provide mechanistic details of the extraordinary amplification Soai reports. "None of these processes can work by convention al mechanisms," he says. "They require some feedback or cooperativity among the molecules." Pamela Zurer NOVEMBER 30, 1998 C&EN 9
