It was an odd day today. I was standing in line at the Wal-Mart when I began to hear a conversation about supramolecular chemistry. Curious, I sat down my box of tampons and Quaker Oats and had a listen to these fruit cakes. APPARENTLY supramolecular chemistry is always ‘we made enormous molecule X and put slightly less/more enormous molecule Y in/on/through/by/near it and the following chart shows a long list of craptastic things that no one will care about..’ Worthless, they say. Uch, little bitches are CATAGORIZING THINGS? Puhlease. I immediately went home and sprung to action to find the first JACs communication with some supramolecular chemistry in it. BAM, like a zenguy.gifdash of thunder I found Linda Shimizu’s JACs communication (2006, 128, 8122-8123) and it is the prototypical supramolecular chemistry article, right down to the obligatory Julius Rebek references. Shimizu designed these urea based macrocycles quite sometime ago and noted they had the ability to self assemble into long tubes. I recall reading this and saying ‘Hmmm. That’s stupid.’ I was chastised heavily by the lab Guru for my short sightedness. It was then that the Guru took me to the top of a local mountain and made me meditate and train with buckets of water and taught me the Lotus position and I became a reborn again chemist, complete with sense of self-righteous indignation toward biologists and a latent distrust of physics and those purporting to know how to apply it to chemistry. I was Zen with all chemistry.

itiswhatitis.JPGShimizu’s work is the fundamental essence of chemistry. She takes 2-cyclohexenone and it does a 2 + 2 cyclization. The damn thing is specific for only one dimeric conformation! The host dictates guest reactivity and the geometry of the transition state, and it does the reaction catalytically. This is where chemistry should be going: high atom economy, no clean up, reusable reagents and total stereospecificity. What is there not to love? Cynically I want to say big friggin deal, little Billy Waterhead is still retarded and if your tubes are only soluble in a Bose-Einstein condensate of DMSO, that isn’t going to help us at all. That latent cynicism is why I’m not yet Zen master. But, when all is said and done, the total synthesis of Suxmicockin B won’t be of any tangible value either (sorry boss). Sure, some of the clever steps on the way may make a difference, but in the end what honestly matters is that we have learned something and added it to the repository of information others will get new ideas from. So, if I roll my eyes when you start bashing other fields within chemistry, it’s because you’re a fuckin’ retard, chump. Lemme take you to the mountain and I’ll show you the way.