10 Well, I’ve packed up and am ready to head out to Chicago. Sadly, I’ll only be there for Monday’s shit – since I’m traveling on my own dime. I’m not so sure what I’ll be seeing, though I imagine I’ll be attending Dave Evan’s talk, since he’s the shit. It’s unlikely I can make it to the conference before the start of the H. C. Brown Award, which means I’ll miss Eric Jacobsen, another favorite of mine. The only other one I’d have interest in is seeing Julius Rebek show off his cavitands. I’ve had an interest in that sort of supramolecular such-and-such for a long time… indeed, I may start looking to post-doc in groups which do supramolecular chemistry and get out of the total synthesis game altogether.
ACS Schedule that I may actually follow
| 8:30 AM | �Introductory Remarks McCormick Place Lakeside -- Room E450 A/B, Level 4, Oral | |
| 8:35 AM | Understanding selective yet general chiral catalysts | Eric N. Jacobsen |
| 9:20 AM | N-Heterocyclic carbenes in catalysis and other reactions | Frank Glorius |
| 10:05 AM | Design and synthesis of selective DPP-4 inhibitors: Discovery of JANUVIA� (sitagliptin), a new treatment for type 2 diabetes | Ann E. Weber |
| 10:50 AM | �Introduction of Awardee | |
| 11:00 AM | Award Address (Herbert C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods, sponsored by The Herbert C. Brown Award Endowment). Two decades of research on the Diels-Alder reaction | David A. Evans |
| 1:30 PM | �Introductory Remarks McCormick Place Lakeside -- Room E451A/B, Level 4, Oral | |
| 1:35 PM | Reversible encapsulation | Julius Rebek Jr. |
| 2:20 PM | Fabrication of anisotropic materials via molecular self-organization | Suk-Wah Tam-Chang |
| 3:05 PM | Bioinspired supramolecular polymer chemistry | Steven C. Zimmerman |
| 3:50 PM | �Introduction of Awardee | |
| 4:00 PM | Award Address (Ronald Breslow Award for Achievement in Biomimetic Chemistry, sponsored by The Ronald Breslow Endowment). Molecular recognition in chemistry and biology | Fran�ois Diederich |
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That was also the thing about Dylan… both of you guys go to too many talks by famous people. All that most of them do is rehash their old chemistry but in a more accessible format (if they are good talkers) and the talks last for a loooong time because they are famous. They are not going to mention anything new, but they should if they already have tenure. Maybe Cear is the cause (C”ordova-F”ear; new term made up by me!).
I find I’m much better served by going to the 15 minute talks on the first two days since that is where the interesting and new stuff is presented. It’s kind of hit and miss though.
I went to all the short talks at the ACS in SF. This year I’ve got one day and I didn’t find any of the short talks germane or interesting to me.
I do know that mentioning the big names in your blog elicits more web hits.
Hey Eugene, for lack of a better term, who are your favorite underrated (non-star) chemists?
I agree that the smaller sessions are often a better choice, especially when you have already read the papers of the big whigs. I skipped out of the Cope talks once because I’d seen most of the stuff. The colloids session that I wandered into was most enjoyable.
Oh, I just meant students and post-docs mostly. That’s where all the interesting and unpublished research is usually presented (even though it means that it will be published in just a few months). But since they are students and post-docs and some have unpolished presentation skills, it’s mostly hit and miss. Even some underrated but really good PIs that I’ve seen have talked about stuff that was mostly already published during their 15-20 minutes. I’ll try to think of some that I enjoyed.
As a first try, I really enjoyed the Yandulov talk. He’s working very hard on a challenging problem (catalytic fluorination) with very limited success as a new assistant professor, and his talk left me with a sense that some breakthroughs are possible in the area since he is a good speaker and knows how to build up anticipation. Six months later a JACS article came out. He needs a few more though. I also want to say that I really enjoyed the Walter Thiel talk on the theoretical side of things, but he’s a big name and half of the stuff he talked about has been published. I got the sense that Justin DuBois’ students are really good by only going to the talks of his students on the organic side of things. And I guess DuBois is great too by connection.
I feel that Yandulov’s paper on reductive elimination of C-F bonds will be hailed as groundbreaking in years, as the process becomes more developed. It’s very pertinent to my own research (that I’m finishing up, ]this[ close to my BS/MS!), and if I was continuing on in academia, I would spend a lot of time on it in conjunction with my other projects. He’s really on to something with that work, and the catalytic formation of C-F bonds will probably be huge in the next few years. Where did he talk? I was at SF last year, but I wasn’t aware of him at the time.
Well, it’s the only paper on C-F bond formation that uses DFT rationale to justify creating a system and that’s had some success. The results from the Sanford group are brute force experimental tinkering. Yandulov’s talk was pretty good and basically it explained why he chose to focus on Pd and the ligands based on the likely lowest energy mechanism he calculated for the reaction. It ran a little long though, so when they told him to finish up, he quickly said that, “I have this result (by the way)…” and then put up acknowledgements. I think he got a 10% yield at the time for his reductive elimination to form C-F bonds and it was way higher than that by the time the actual paper came out. He also left rather quickly after his talk was done looking very determined and stressed out. The talk was in San Francisco. I’m not sure how I ended up at that particular one, but I went to a lot of talks there.
Unfortunately (for him, I guess), the JACS paper I saw only had a 10% yield of 4-fluoronitrobenzene. That’s still pretty impressive. I actually came upon the topic a few weeks ago in a discussion with my organometallics professor, who was talking about efforts to do C-F bond activation. The lightbulb that went off was along the lines of “Well, if oxidative addition of C-F bonds is hard, then reductive elimination should be pretty easy, right?” SciFinder search, found Yandulov, and I’ve kind of been obsessed with it since. I find his approach to be better than Sanford’s for reasons besides lack of brute force; namely, he’s in the position to be creating a far more general reaction than the directed, substrate-controlled examples Sanford has published.
That’s kind of a problem I have with this attention to C-H activation in general, actually. It’s useful and way cool, but it will never be general because if it was, then you’d run the risk of inserting into every C-H bond possible. I’d rather have to install a halide onto my arene first, which will almost always be more simple than constructing the necessary scaffold for some of these reactions, and then functionalize that.
Yes, especially self-assembly which you can just cross your arms and watch.
If selfassembly were that simple! Afterwards theres always the question, what to do with the selfassembled molecules.