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Pivotal Publications

New awards program honors institutions that have nurtured breakthrough discoveries

by Linda Wang
July 3, 2006 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 84, Issue 27

Some scientific publications have had such an enormous and long-lasting impact that mere mention of their titles is like recalling an old friend.

One such publication is Linus Pauling's 1939 book, "The Nature of the Chemical Bond." Another is Robert Burns Woodward's and Roald Hoffmann's 1965 paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on the stereochemistry of electrocyclic reactions.

These and eight other breakthrough papers, books, and patents are being celebrated this year as part of a new awards program called Citation for Chemical Breakthroughs. The program is sponsored by the ACS Division of the History of Chemistry (HIST).

CELEBRATORY
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Credit: Photo by Linda Wang
Hoffmann (from left), Westheimer, and Seeman.
Credit: Photo by Linda Wang
Hoffmann (from left), Westheimer, and Seeman.

The first of these celebrations took place on June 16 at Harvard University's department of chemistry and chemical biology. Hoffmann, 68, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University, was present as Harvard accepted a plaque for his and the late Woodward's famed paper. It was there in the early 1960s that he and Woodward conducted their research.

During the program, Hoffmann spoke directly to the students in the audience, offering his recollections about his collaborations as a young chemist with the older Woodward.

Within a relationship between a younger chemist and an older chemist, "how does real collaboration evolve"? Hoffmann asked. It's when the younger person brings to the older person's attention something the older person had not thought of and, more important, when the older person has the generosity and the humility to accept it, Hoffmann said, as was the case with him and Woodward.

The ceremony also celebrated Frank H. Westheimer, 94, an emeritus professor at Harvard and an author of the famous 1953 paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry on the enzymatic transfer of hydrogen and the reaction catalyzed by alcohol dehydrogenase. A formal ceremony and presentation of the plaque will take place at the University of Chicago, where the research took place.

Titta Aaltonen, a postdoc at Harvard, said the celebration helped her put a face to a famous name. "History comes much closer, and you start to pay attention." She says that meeting Hoffmann and Westheimer face-to-face has motivated her to learn more about their work.

TIMELESS
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Credit: Photo by Linda Wang
Hoffmann holds a photo of himself taken in 1970, a few years after publication of the paper that prompted this recent award.
Credit: Photo by Linda Wang
Hoffmann holds a photo of himself taken in 1970, a few years after publication of the paper that prompted this recent award.

And that's precisely what the awards are meant to do. "The goal of this program is to encourage an understanding of where we've come from and simultaneously to motivate young students to go into the sciences and excel by seeing that important projects were done where they are now studying," says Jeffrey I. Seeman, chair of HIST and founder of the program.

What's different about these new awards is that they recognize departments or institutions where the breakthroughs happened rather than individual scientists because environment is critical to nurturing great works. Winning institutions receive a plaque that can be hung near the office or laboratory where the breakthrough was achieved.

Seeman believes that as the program matures, it will be able to cover nearly all of the most important breakthrough publications over the past 150 years. To ensure that winners have had long-term impact, books, patents, and publications must have been published at least 25 years ago.

Another unique aspect of this award is that the nomination process is brief. Nominators need only provide a reference to the publication and write a few sentences explaining why the paper is important. "This type of award is one where if you don't know a paper, clearly it doesn't deserve to be considered a chemical breakthrough," Seeman says.

The next ceremony will take place at the ACS national meeting in San Francisco in September and will honor G. N. Lewis's 1916 JACS paper "The Atom and the Molecule." For more information, or to submit a nomination for the 2007 awards, visit the HIST website at www.scs.uiuc.edu/~mainzv/HIST or send an e-mail to hist_ccb@yahoo.com.

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