Call For Nominations For Chemical Breakthrough Awards

The American Chemical Society Division of the History of Chemistry is calling for nominations for its 2012 Citation for Chemical Breakthrough Awards.

The awards recognize breakthrough publications, books, and patents worldwide in the field of chemistry. The advances must have been revolutionary in concept, broad in scope, and long-term in impact.

Departments or institutions being recognized will receive a plaque to be hung near the office or laboratory where the breakthrough was achieved.

Nominations must include a full literature citation and a supporting statement of up to 200 words. All nominations must be received by Nov. 9.

More information and nomination forms are available at scs.uiuc.edu/~mainzv/HIST. Click the heading “Divisional Awards.” Send nominations to hist_ccb@yahoo.com.

The 2011 winners are Amedeo Avogadro’s paper that postulated what is now Avogadro’s law (Journal de Physique1811,73, 58); Stanislao Cannizzaro’s paper that distinguished between atomic and molecular weights (Nuovo Cimento1858,7, 321); Gilbert N. Lewis and Merle Randall’s 1923 book “Thermodynamics and the Free Energy of Chemical Substances”; Otto Diels and Kurt Alder’s paper on the cycloaddition of olefins with dienes (Justus Liebigs Annalen der Chemie1928,460, 98); and Sir Robert Robinson’s synthesis of tropinone, the first retrosynthetic analysis and multi­component synthetic reaction (J. Chem. Soc. Trans.1917, 762).