2005 ACS National Award Winners

Following is the sixth set of vignettes of recipients of awards administered by the American Chemical Society for 2005. C&EN will publish the vignettes of the remaining recipients in next week's issue. An article on George A. Olah, 2005 Priestley Medalist, is scheduled to appear in the March 14 issue of C&EN along with his award address.

Most of the award recipients will be honored at an awards ceremony, which will be held on Tuesday, March 15, in conjunction with the 229th ACS national meeting in San Diego. However, the Arthur C. Cope Scholar awardees will be honored at the 230th ACS national meeting in Washington, D.C., Aug. 28-Sept. 1.

Joel Henry Hildebrand Award in the Theoretical & Experimental Chemistry of Liquids

Sponsored by ExxonMobil Research & Engineering Co. and ExxonMobil Chemical Co.

James T. (Casey) Hynes has made important contributions to the molecular-level understanding of the dynamics of reactive processes in liquids and to molecular energy transfer processes. Specifically, Hynes developed the standard theoretical model for reactions in solutions and subsequent extensions and applications to realistic chemical systems. His current projects involving dynamical studies of electronic structure define the current understanding of proton transfer in liquids.

Hynes, 61, received his bachelor's degree in 1965 from the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1969 in theoretical chemistry and statistical mechanics. He worked as a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 before accepting a position as assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he has remained. He now divides his time between Colorado and École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

In 1980, Hynes and his student Richard F. Grote created the current major theory of chemical reactions in solution, the Grote-Hynes (GH) theory, which superseded the Kramers theory of 1940. A colleague notes that the theory is "simple and elegant, taking explicitly into account the vital feature that the key dynamics for reaction occurs on very short timescales when the system is in the neighborhood of the transition state." The physical insight in the GH theory and its relative simplicity of application have combined to make this the standard for the field.

Hynes's more recent work in this area involves twisted intramolecular charge transfer (TICT) in dimethylaminobenzonitrile (DMABN), a paradigm of excited-electronic-state charge transfer coupled to give a large geometry change. Using his theory of electronic structure in solution, Hynes gives full calculations for DMABN kinetics for the reaction in acetonitrile, methanol, and ethanol solvents that are in excellent agreement with recent experiments. Application of this theory, when combined with GH theory, predicted experimental TICT rates in a variety of solvents, where the Kramers theory fails by several orders of magnitude.

Hynes has made major contributions to understanding vibrational relaxation in liquids dating from work on the I₂ cage effect, showing that vibrational relaxation of the recombined I₂ was slow and could account for the experimental timescale. The model also predicted solvent dependencies for the relaxation times, which were subsequently confirmed by experiments and molecular dynamics simulations.

Hynes is also making major contributions to the understanding of dynamical electronic structure in reactions in solution. Many reactions in solution involve charge transfer, and this means the electronic structures must change throughout the reaction. At the same time, the electronic structure itself depends crucially on the solvent. These are major effects because the structural changes affect barrier heights with ensuing exponential effects on rates. Hynes developed a conceptually clear and useful theoretical model to guide thinking and to predict phenomena in these contexts.

Two pioneering applications of this work have led to new insights. For acid dissociation, he has constructed a microscopic picture of how HCl ionizes in water. The mechanism involves solvent activation and quantized proton transfer in a tight HCl-H₂O complex. For the paradigm S_N1 ionization of t-butyl chloride, the well-known acceleration of the ionization with increasing solvent polarity was shown to follow from the resonance coupling between covalent and ionic forms of the molecule, rather than from the classic picture of better solvation of the transition state.

The award address will be presented before the ACS Division of Physical Chemistry.--LINDA RABER

ACS Award for Team Innovation

Sponsored by ACS Corporation Associates

Few would disagree that drug development is a team effort. Most drugs on the market today required the input of hundreds of researchers, technicians, quality-control specialists, and other professionals, often working on a candidate only during select stages of its development.

So when two scientists leading a drug discovery team take an innovative candidate from concept to successful commercialization in about six years, people take notice--and even distribute awards.

W. Harry Mandeville and S. Randall Holmes-Farley were the first two employees of GelTex Pharmaceuticals Inc., a start-up company founded in 1992. Working together at GelTex, they invented a new class of polymer-based therapeutics and used the technology to develop drugs for a variety of conditions.

Although the pair had never met until Mandeville hired Holmes-Farley as a senior researcher at GelTex, they shared the same graduate adviser, George M. Whitesides. Mandeville earned his Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1975 when Whitesides was a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Whitesides joined the Harvard University faculty in 1982, where he mentored Holmes-Farley, who earned his Ph.D. in 1986.

Both Mandeville and Holmes-Farley went on to hold positions at a handful of chemical companies after graduation. They also both kept in touch with Whitesides, who, along with several other biotechnology notables in the Boston area, was hatching a plan to start a new company based on some promising ideas.

Mandeville had already tried his hand at the start-up business, having served for two years as director of development for Hyperion Catalysis International. When he called Whitesides in the late 1980s to "ask what's new," he was intrigued by the concept for GelTex. "I've always been a high-risk guy," Mandeville says. He decided to leave his position with Waters Chromatography to be GelTex's first employee--senior vice president of chemical technology.

"George and his colleagues pooled their personal money together to found GelTex," Holmes-Farley recalls. When he was hired, he came into the firm knowing that "if we invent something, there will be a company. If not, there won't." Despite the risk, Holmes-Farley saw the start-up as an exciting opportunity and a chance to be directly responsible for his successes and failures.

Mandeville and Holmes-Farley took their first stab at success by researching polymeric drugs, which are based on the principle that high-molecular-weight-polymers are not absorbed by human internal systems but can be designed to selectively bind target molecules within the gastrointestinal tract. Polymeric drugs can therefore remove excess agents from the intestines and then be completely flushed from the system.

Renagel, which was released in 1998, was the first polymeric drug developed by GelTex in a joint venture with Genzyme Corp. Because kidneys are the primary organ involved in phosphate excretion, kidney failure can cause excess phosphate buildup, leading to conditions such as soft-tissue calcification and bone disease. Renagel adsorbs and allows elimination of phosphate from the GI tract of kidney disease patients.

By 2002, Renagel and other polymeric drugs developed at GelTex were selling so well that Genzyme offered to buy GelTex for more than $1.3 billion. Although they no longer work together--Holmes-Farley stayed with Genzyme while Mandeville moved on to another Boston-area start-up--the thousands of patients whose lives are improved by polymeric drugs stand as testament to the positive team interaction of these two men.

The award address will be presented before the Division of Polymer Chemistry.--VICTORIA GILMAN

James Flack Norris Award in Physical Organic Chemistry

Sponsored by the ACS Northeastern Section

Martin Saunders, professor of chemistry at Yale University, has been a pioneer in applying nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, computers, and isotopes to solve important problems in physical organic chemistry.

Saunders, 74, got his first taste of physical organic chemistry doing his doctoral research in Robert B. Woodward's lab at Harvard University. But even before he wrote the thesis that garnered him a Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry in 1956, Saunders started teaching at Yale as an instructor and has spent his entire career there.

"The study of carbocations was the major focus of physical organic chemistry at that time," Saunders says. He eagerly dove in and began making significant contributions to the understanding of carbocation structures and rearrangements.

A major factor that "influenced my career tremendously is that during my second year at Yale, the department decided to get a [nuclear magnetic resonance] spectrometer," Saunders relates. None of his senior colleagues wanted to have anything to do with the unfamiliar instrument, so Saunders was given responsibility for it.

"Saunders recognized the importance of NMR spectroscopy in studying carbocations," notes Kendall N. Houk of the University of California, Los Angeles. He developed the "molecular beam" method to obtain ions such as sec-butyl in stable solution. His early study of rearrangements of the sec-butyl cation uncovered the intermediacy of a protonated cyclopropane. His work also provided definitive evidence for the bicyclobutonium ion.

"Yale got its first computer the year after I came here," Saunders recalls, "and I was one of the first users." Although that computer was "totally primitive and extremely difficult to use by current standards," he says, it got Saunders into computing. That capability allowed him to do calculations of NMR spectra employing the symmetry of molecules in collaboration with Lars Onsager, and to compute NMR line shapes for molecules undergoing rapid scrambling reactions.

"One of his most important contributions has been the development of the isotopic perturbation method to differentiate equilibria from resonance," Houk notes. Saunders used this method to establish that the structure of the 2-norbornyl cation--a subject of major controversy--is nonclassical rather than classical. This work was key to resolving the controversy and trumped work by other major players, in Houk's opinion.

Saunders' early use of computers also led to his work in conformational analysis. He developed the stochastic search procedure for finding conformational energy minima for flexible molecules with molecular mechanics calculations. "This is a powerful tool," says his Yale colleague William L. Jorgensen, and it has been incorporated into several computational chemistry packages. "I believe it is the best general method for conformational search, especially for molecules containing rings."

In collaboration with his Yale colleague R. James Cross Jr. and geologist Robert J. Poreda, Saunders discovered that buckminsterfullerene molecules encapsulate helium atoms and that the helium can be released at 550–850 °C. As an NMR spectroscopist, Saunders says he realized that "the best thing to put inside a fullerene is helium-3 because it's a superb NMR nucleus." Indeed, he and Cross used high temperatures and pressures to squeeze ³He into fullerene cages. He then collaborated with Frank A. L. Anet to observe the helium by NMR. ³He NMR is a valuable probe of the structure and chemical transformations of such host fullerenes. Hundreds of ³He-containing fullerene derivatives have been prepared and studied in this way by Saunders and his many collaborators. Each isomer of each product gives a distinctive ³He NMR peak.

Besides helium, Saunders and Cross also have inserted neon, argon, krypton, and xenon into fullerenes, producing unprecedented types of rare-gas compounds. Before Saunders' work, "no stable compounds of helium or neon were known," Jorgensen points out. "This is a truly great discovery."

The award address will be presented before the Division of Organic Chemistry.--RON DAGANI

George C. Pimentel Award in Chemical Education

Sponsored by Dow Chemical Co.

"The impact that he has had on the education of chemistry students throughout the country--both directly and indirectly, through the faculty members he has influenced--is incalculable," says Richard S. Moog, chair of the chemistry department at Franklin & Marshall College (F&M), Lancaster, Pa., about his colleague James N. Spencer. "Knowing that others can benefit from what he has learned and the insight that he has gained, Jim continues to work tirelessly to help colleagues everywhere understand how to engage their students in meaningful learning through his writings and the numerous workshops and presentations that he gives across the country," Moog adds.

Over his 37-year career, Spencer, who is the William G. & Elizabeth R. Simeral Professor of Chemistry at F&M, has been an effective teacher and mentor. According to him, the key to his success is involving the students. "The most important thing I've learned is to engage students, whether through research or in the classroom," he says.

Colleagues have taken notice of his talents. "Jim is truly an excellent role model for anyone desiring to present chemistry in an exciting fashion and to establish a creative undergraduate research program," says H. Anthony Neidig, professor emeritus of chemistry at Lebanon Valley College, Annville, Pa.

In the lab, Spencer has focused his research on calorimetric studies of the phenomenon of hydrogen bonding and donor-acceptor reactions. He has mentored more than 110 undergraduates and published more than 100 research papers--most with student coauthors.

"For him, the end result was not the data, but a student who wanted to acquire knowledge and understanding," says Alexander Grushow, associate professor at Rider University, Lawrenceville, N.J., and a former student in Spencer's lab. "Many students recognized this quality and, as a result, turned to him as a mentor."

In the classroom, Spencer has a long history of making important contributions to chemical education. He served as editor and author for the Modular Laboratory Program in Chemistry, which was developed in 1970. He was one of the original members of the Council on Undergraduate Research in 1978 and served on it for four years. He served as chair of the ACS Division of Chemical Education's Task Force on the General Chemistry Curriculum in 1989. Last November, he was named chair of the Advanced Placement Chemistry Development Committee.

But perhaps his most important contribution to chemical education is his current work to develop a guided-inquiry learning curriculum for chemistry called Process-Oriented Guided-Inquiry Learning (POGIL). Spencer is the coprincipal investigator on a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant to develop this innovative approach to teaching.

POGIL was developed by looking at "what made undergraduate research so successful and seeing how we could apply that to the classroom," Spencer notes. The resulting methods involve giving students data sets on a specific topic and allowing them to ask questions as they work through it. "It's amazing what can happen if you involve students, even in a minimal way, in the learning process," he points out.

"Jim Spencer is a true scholar and superb teacher," says Lyman H. Rickard, a chemistry professor at Millersville University, in Pennsylvania. "Chemical education in the U.S. continues to evolve and improve because of his dedication."

Spencer, 63, received a B.S. from Marshall University, Huntington, W.V., in 1963. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from Iowa State University in 1967. That year, he became an assistant professor at Lebanon Valley College. He moved to F&M in 1980.

Spencer's honors include awards for both teaching and research. Among these awards are the Chemical Manufacturers Association's Catalyst Award for Excellence in Teaching Chemistry (1987), the ACS Award for Research at an Undergraduate Institution (1999), and the E. Emmet Reid Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Chemistry (2000).

The award address will be presented before the Division of Chemical Education.--SUSAN MORRISSEY

2005 ACS Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry

Sponsored by Strem Chemicals

Thomas G. Spiro, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, is recognized internationally for his outstanding record of research in bioinorganic chemistry.

He and his students have made important contributions to areas ranging from iron transport and storage to the dynamics of ligand binding in heme proteins to structural studies of iron, sulfur, copper, zinc, and cobalt proteins, among others. Specifically, he is best known for helping to establish that resonance Raman spectroscopy can provide useful information about biological molecules, particularly metalloproteins, and can also provide real-time structural information on proteins in motion.

Spiro's laboratory "made important and early contributions to the study of heme proteins, blue copper proteins, oxygen-activating enzymes, iron-sulfur proteins, and several other systems," says David M. Dooley, chemistry and biochemistry professor at Montana State University. "The volume and quality of Spiro's research greatly stimulated interest in biological inorganic chemistry and frequently laid the foundation for the further development of the field."

Early in his career, at about the time of the first Earth Day in 1972, Spiro became intensely interested in the environment. At that time, his chairman at Princeton asked him to design a course that would delve into the chemical aspects of environmental issues. Spiro then offered an undergraduate course in environmental chemistry. These materials eventually formed the basis of a well-received textbook, "Chemistry of the Environment," which he coauthored with William M. Stigliani. It was published in 1996.

Several of the current leaders in the fields of inorganic biochemistry and biophysics--including Roman S. Czernuszewisz, Michael Johnson, James Kincaid, Giulietta Smulevich, and William Woodruff--were trained in Spiro's laboratories at Princeton. Spiro's teaching and research philosophy is simple, he says. He advises those who are going into the teaching profession to "follow your curiosity, become engaged with your material, and develop personal relationships with your students. Teaching is a human activity, and we should support one another in the effort to learn about our world."

Spiro has shaped the development of the field of bioinorganic chemistry by chairing an early "Metals in Biology" Gordon Conference and by editing and promoting a "Metals in Biology" series of monographs. Currently, he serves on the editorial boards of two journals: Issues in Environmental Science & Technology and Inorganic Biochemistry.

Over his long career, Spiro has received numerous awards and honors. He became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1991 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1989. In February, he will be presented with the Biophysical Society's Founders Award.

Spiro, 69, earned a B.S. degree in chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1956, and a doctorate in chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1960. After doing postdoctoral research at the University of Copenhagen and at the Royal Institute of Technology, in Stockholm, he joined the chemistry faculty at Princeton in 1963. He has authored or coauthored more than 430 research articles.

The award address will be presented before the Division of Inorganic Chemistry.--BETTE HILEMAN  

ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry

Sponsored by ExxonMobil Chemical Co.

Before 'nano' was hot, Samuel I. Stupp--Northwestern University professor of materials science, chemistry, and medicine, as well as director of the Institute for BioNanotechnology in Medicine--recognized the importance of the control and synthesis of materials with nanosizes. Colleagues refer to Stupp as a "central driving force in the rapidly advancing fields of polymer self-assembly and nanoscience."

Among his distinguished achievements, Stupp demonstrated that synthetic polymer molecules could mimic proteins by forming nanoscale objects with characteristic shapes and internal molecular order. His 1993 paper on the bulk synthesis of two-dimensional polymers, which remained covalent sheets in both the liquid and solid states and utilized large chiral molecules as the monomers, is viewed as the inspiration for the application of supramolecular and self-assembly approaches to polymer science [Science, 259, 59 (1993)].

In 1997 and 1999, his mushroom-shaped 105-dalton polymers were the first structures synthesized that were close to proteins in terms of size and the presence of chemically distinct nanoscale surfaces within a single macromolecule. These nanostructures, lacking a center of inversion, self-assembled into polar stacks that generated the first example reported of bulk polar self-assembly.

In 2001, Stupp discovered dendron rod-coil monomers that self-assemble into nanoribbon-shaped objects up to 10 µm long, 10 nm wide, and 2 nm thick. New forms of these supramolecular polymers containing electronically conducting properties have the potential to create nanowires by self-assembly that connects two points as the polymerization occurs.

Another discovery in 2001 was cylindrical nanofiber polymers formed by peptide amphiphile molecules. These nanofiber polymers, which mimic the architecture of collagen fibrils, can be chemically engineered through the monomers to be bioactive or to mineralize with nanocrystals. In this way, one system re-creates the composite nanoscale structure of bone by the sequential process of a self-assembly polymerization followed by spontaneous mineralization with hydroxyapatite. The materials are important in creating matrices for the universal repair of bone or regeneration of other tissues.

Stupp received a B.S. in chemistry in 1972 from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1977, he received a Ph.D. degree in materials science and engineering from Northwestern University.

Since 2003, he has been a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science & Technology and a founding member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory. Among many awards and honors he has received are the Materials Research Society Medal in 2000 and a Humboldt Award for Senior U.S. Scientists in 1997.

The award address will be presented before the Division of Polymer Chemistry.--WILLIAM G. SCHULZ

HOW DO THESE AWARDEES GET PICKED?

Hynes

PHOTO BY 2WA

Mandeville

Holmes-Farley

Saunders

PHOTO BY MARTIN SAUNDERS

Spencer

PHOTO BY MARCY DUBROFF

Spiro

PHOTO BY DENISE APPLEWHITE

Stupp