Chemical Education Today
In This Issue
Celebrating 75 Years! The Cover: Bioorganic Chemistry This month’s cover shows heme superimposed on red blood cells, apropos of our Viewpoints paper about bioorganic chemistry by Ronald Breslow. Breslow points out that there are natural and unnatural aspects of this subject. Chemists deal with substances that nature has produced, learning their properties, their structures, and how to make them. And chemists have modified the substances of nature or struck out into completely new territory, synthesizing a variety of compounds that are of immeasurable benefit to humankind. Some of the molecules and much of this story appear beginning on page 705 䊕.
In keeping with the subject of our Viewpoints paper, this month has a variety of papers that link chemistry and biology. Labianca (page 719 䊕) profiles rohypnol, the “date-rape drug”, showing how its properties have led to criminal use. Teachers of biochemistry courses will be interested in the papers by León et al. (page 731), which describes a Webbased approach to structural analysis and modeling of proteins, and by Jakubowski and Owen (page 734), who have developed an innovative sequence of topics for a biochemistry course that is based on the logic of chemistry. The advantages of a multidisciplinary course cluster involving introductory chemistry and biology are described by Wolfson et al. (page 737 䊕). Both students and faculty make connections between the two subjects that neither made before. Farrell, Roat, and Ross (page 739) describe a course, centered around applications of inorganic chemistry in biology, that aims to satisfy the broader educational interests of chemistry graduate students. Two laboratory experiments involve biochemistry. Pope et al. (page 761) describe an enzyme assay that uses foodstuffs and their chemistry so that students can investigate biochemical principles of nutrition. Olmo et al. (page 762) have developed advanced-level experiments in which 䊕 students analyze and designates detect non-Barticles of DNA secondary special interest structures. to high school teachers.
Chemistry, Energy, and Light Three papers deal with the interactions of light with matter. Yu and Chan (page 750) show how to demonstrate photocatalytic degradation of dichloromethane, which provides a means of introducing this new technique for treatNASA
Chemistry and Biology
ment of air and water pollution. Smestad and Grätzel (page 752) explain how to fabricate a solar cell from TiO2, natural anthocyanin dyes extracted from berries, and SnO2-coated glass plates. Students who are concerned about how much UV radiation their skin and eyes absorb will be interested in the experiments involving sunscreens and sunglasses described by Abney and Scalettar (page 757).
656) describes what your editorial staff were doing at the meeting. Meetings of the New England Association of Chemistry Teachers are always filled with interesting content, and a report from one of them by Jensen begins on page 679. Jensen asks whether chemistry has a logical structure and proceeds to develop such a structure— one that differs from what we might have expected. Wilson (page 671) provides a preview of the program for this summer’s 15th Biennial Conference on Chemical Education, to be held at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. This conference will include a celebration and birthday cake for this Journal ’s 75th anniversary. See you there!
Meetings, Meetings, Meetings Beginning on page 665, one of our editors, Nancy Gettys, reports on a fascinating look into the future by several prominent chemists that was presented at the Spring ACS Meeting in Dallas. A summary report on the meeting by Wildeman, Kelter, and Freilich begins on page 669. It includes information about this year’s awards symposium, all of whose speakers are pictured on this page. News from Journal House (page
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 75 No. 6 June 1998 • Journal of Chemical Education
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