ORGN 181 |
| My academic training was in the area of physical organic chemistry and it wasn't until I took employment at the Hercules Powder Company (now Hercules, Inc.) in 1956 that I was introduced to organotransition metal chemistry. I was given the assignment to 'do something with transition metals', hopefully to find new and valuable catalytic chemistry. My mechanistic background led me to look at what was known about the mechanisms of the several commercially important reactions being used at the time. To my surprise, essentially nothing was known. So, I decided to study one of these, the Hydroformylation Reaction, in the hope that knowledge of the mechanism would give me some ideas on new chemistry to investigate. The study led to the proposal of a mechanism and subsequently to much new organocobalt chemistry but no commercial applications were found. I then turned my attention to organopalladium chemistry where many potentially useful reactions were discovered. Some will be discussed as time permits. |
|
Herbert C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods
8:05 AM-12:00 PM, Monday, 27 March 2006 Georgia World Congress Center -- Georgia Ballroom 2, Oral
Division of Organic Chemistry |