Watch Out Angry Birds

One of the things that my students always have trouble with is recognizing that a collection of reagents in a flask will not react with each other.  They automatically assume some reaction must occur, and will come up with some crazy product.  The thing is, in vivo many functional groups and reagents can coexist.  It can be important to the chemist or biochemist to recognize the potential for reactivity or coexistence.

With this and many other issues in mind I have been trying to think of ways to help my students master organic chemistry.  One thought was to have the students make 3x5 cards of solvents, reagents, and molecules with one, two, three, etc. functional groups and families present.  The students would then draw from the decks to create collections of contents in a hypothetical flask.  They would then have to determine the possible reaction and the products that would be produced.

Realizing that 3x5 cards are so last century, I wonder if this could be done as an organic chemistry application.  Perhaps as T.S.Hall's Organic Reactions slot machine where the flask contents would be on the wheels.  Once the student has pulled the lever or pushed the start button, the wheels would turn to a random set of reagents.  The student could accrue points by predicting the correct products, using a drawing program.

Who knows, it might make organic even more fun than it is now!

T.S. Hall

Journal Reviews

I have been reading some organocatalysis papers lately to try to get a better sense of the field.  The chemistry appeals to my generally poor background in organometallic chemistry and my interest in understanding how enzyme catalysis works.

Publications in the field of organocatalysis range over a wide range from the very concept-to-application publications of some of the founders of the field, (MacMillan, List, Jorgenson, etc.) to me-too chemistry where a known catalysts is applied to previously un-organocatalyzed systems or a small change is made to a know catalyst without any hypothesis development that moves the field forward.  It's a newer hot field so this range of application will work it self out.

Unfortunately, as in the case of other "buzzword" fields a lot of shaky stuff appears to be slipping through the cracks.  In the last couple of days I have seen two papers, one in Org. Lett. and one in Syn. Lett., that have such problems that I can't see how the reviewers did not send them back to the authors for at least a rewrite.  An example problem from one the papers is:



Sure organocatalysis has yet not matured enough to work out a consistent terminology (ie. what does "bifunctional catalysis" mean) but the basics of the science of organic chemistry must still apply.

T.S. Hall