Editorial pubs.acs.org/OPRD
Sad Times for Process Chemistry
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LUMBERTUS (BERT) HULSHOF (1946−2013) AND C. SOMESWARA RAO (1934−2013) It is my sad duty to inform readers of the death of two wellknown process chemists, Dr. Bert Hulshof from The Netherlands who passed away 14 October and Dr. C. Someswara Rao from India who died 29 September this year. Both had long careers in process chemistry, and both had dedicated their time, in the past few years, to producing very long and comprehensive books on the subject of process research and development. I first met Bert Hulshof over 20 years ago when he was working for DSM-Andeno in Venlo. He subsequently became known to many chemists and engineers for his excellent lectures on the subject of “Surprises in Scale Up”, i.e. what goes wrong when a process is taken from the laboratory to plant. This topic was based on his collection of about 240 scale-up problems which he had collected over a 30-year period and which formed the basis for a lecture course at the University of Eindhoven. Subsequently, Bert dedicated his last years to converting this collection into a book, Right First Time in Fine Chemical Process Scale Up which was published by Scientific Update earlier this year (ISBN 978-0-9533994-1-3). This book explains how to avoid scale-up problems by the design of the chemistry and the process, and analyzes the 240+ incidents to see how the problems could have been avoided in the first place. Bert believed that it should be possible to go from lab to large plant without an intermediate pilot plant if the process is designed correctly and the kinetics and mechanisms of the processes are understoodin fact a combined chemical and chemical engineering approach. Bert was a very pleasant person to work with, having a great sense of humour, and he will be missed by all who worked with him. Dr. Someswara Rao will also be remembered by process chemists, who never had the chance to meet him, as the author of a mammoth tome entitled The Chemistry of Process Development in the Fine Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industry. The second edition of this most useful book was published in 2006 (ISBN 978-0-4703199-5-6) and contains over 2000 pages. One can imagine how long it took this dedicated author to compile this unique work, which contains thousands of useful references, with a substantial number to Organic Process Research & Development (OPR&D) papers. This is a book that should be in every process chemist’s library and would be useful to academic organic chemists, too, in both teaching and research. I had the opportunity to meet the author only once, during a consultancy trip to India, and found him a wonderful person with whom to interact; he was highly knowledgeable, but quiet and very humble. His organic chemistry knowledge was phenomenal, but perhaps to be expected after the amount of reading he must have done to write the book. He was a pleasure to work with, and I am sorry I did not have more opportunities to meet him again. As with Bert, he will be missed by all those who had the opportunity to interact with him. © XXXX American Chemical Society
The process chemistry community is very fortunate that these two stalwarts of process chemistry were dedicated not only to doing good process chemistry in their careers but also to writing important books in a subject which has only a small library of relevant works. Through their diligent and timeconsuming writings, they both enhanced the literature of process chemistry and for that we should all give thanks.
Trevor Laird, Editor
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dx.doi.org/10.1021/op400311d | Org. Process Res. Dev. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
