Copyright 2009
Volume 28, Number 6, March 23, 2009
American Chemical Society
Editor’s Page Introduction to the Editor’s Cover Essay on the Grignard Reagents My historical essays have gotten rather longslong enough to make them more difficult and time-consuming to produce and long enough, I am afraid, to try the patience of most readers. The obvious solution: write shorter essays, and this is what I will do. Such “mini-essays” will not cover their subject as broadly and will of necessity be selective in how they treat their topic. Take the subject of the short essay in the present issue of Organometallics, the Grignard reagents. The development of these versatile reagents since their discovery by Victor Grignard 109 years ago has a rich, varied, and very interesting history. I could have written a long, multipart essay about them and related organomagnesium compounds. Instead, I chose to write a short essay in which I cover some selected topics that I hope will be of interest to our readers. First, the nature of the Grignard reagents in the solid state (one of the important, pioneering contributions of Robert Rundle and his students at Iowa State University to structural organometallic chemistry) and in ethereal solution (where we meet Wilhelm Schlenk again, a protagonist in Part 2 of my most recent essay on organoalkali-metal chemistry, and Eugene Ashby of the Georgia Institute of Technology, whose brilliant contributions in the 1960s straightened out the rather confused, and, as it turned out, erroneous picture of what the Grignard reagents were in such solvents). Second, I treat two aspects of Grignard reagent reactivity of current interest: (1) Paul Knochel’s recent preparation of very interesting and unusual aryl Grignard reagents that contain reactive functional groups and (2) the use of Grignard reagents in transition-metal-catalyzed, synthetically very useful cross-coupling reactions with organic halides, reactions which, although now 65 years old, still are the subjects of active research today. The cover molecule is the diethyl etherate of ethylmagnesium bromide, whose molecular and crystal structure, as determined in an X-ray diffraction study, was reported by Lloyd Guggenberger and Robert Rundle in 1964. My thanks, as always, to Professor Arnold L. Rheingold for the cover figure.
Dietmar Seyferth Editor OM900087V
10.1021/om900087v CCC: $40.75 2009 American Chemical Society Publication on Web 03/16/2009
