Editorial pubs.acs.org/OPRD
Trevor LairdProcess Chemistry Visionary
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e are writing on behalf of the OPR&D Editorial Board to express our feelings toward our good friend and former leader, Trevor. The first thing we learned is that writing editorials is difficult! We can now appreciate how much Trevor placed into the hundreds of editorials he wrote for OPR&D. It is also difficult to write without sounding as if we are at a funeral. Instead, some highlights of Trevor’s editorials are well-poised to picture and honor his great personality. These editorials mirror the colorful world of chemistry and of chemists who are not averse to the beauties of adjacent disciplines. With a keen eye, Trevor analyzed the safety culture (Org. Process Res. Dev. 2013, 17, 1572), and we specifically liked his comment “companies always measure the cost of doing something (e.g., training) but never measure the cost of not doing something.” Patents are the legal muscle of our industry. Trevor once shared some personal insight as expert witness when testifying in court and manifested on a side note that he actually likes “the cut and thrust of the debate” (Org. Process Res. Dev. 2012, 16, 715). We perceived Trevor as a person without fear, unfailingly grounded, ready to tackle many challenges. By his very nature and style, Trevor refreshingly disproves some chemist’s public conception of being an emotionless, blinkered geek by showing his inclination and talent for writing poems! He paraphrased in “In Verse Prayer” (Org. Process Res. Dev. 2012, 16, 1243) the value of a good, process-like workup. Finally, his impish British sense of humor came across in his editorial on one of his trips to a whisky distillery (Org. Process Res. Dev. 2012, 16, 715). For those old enough to recall the bad old days, it used to be difficult to publish process work. Few journals were forward enough to recognize that work at multikilogram scale required far more consideration and innovation than making a few milligrams of product. When I (J.P.) was looking to publish my first process manuscript, only J. Het. Chem., Tetrahedron, and Chem. & Ind. would regularly print process manuscripts. With the founding of OPR&D, Trevor changed all that. My (S.A.) industrial career started shortly after the first OPR&D manuscripts were published, and I perceived the articles as “enlightenment,” wondering why this journal was not widespread in academia at this time. More and more friends from academia testify that they like to choose articles from OPR&D in their classes to draw their student’s attention to chemistryold and most recentthat works as it has passed the most stringent robustness test which is safe scale-up. The number of journals and manuscripts is rising with gargantuan speed. Oftentimes, it seems that the reproducibility of synthetic work is adversely affected. Attributes like reproducibility, robustness, practicability, and ecofriendly processing are the heart and soul of OPR&D. So we give this short piece as a homage to Trevorlong may he and his journal exist!
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
Stefan Abele, Actelion Pharmaceuticals Ltd Jaan Pesti, NAL Pharma
© XXXX American Chemical Society
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.oprd.5b00218 Org. Process Res. Dev. XXXX, XXX, XXX−XXX
