Cryptands’ discovery

My presentation on March 14 at a symposium at the ACS national meeting in San Diego on Howard Simmons being overlooked by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was covered in C&EN (April 11, page 19). It may have given the erroneous impression that Simmons codiscovered cryptands, for which Jean-Marie Lehn deserves sole credit.

The proceedings of the symposium in San Diego will be published in book form. My chapter on Simmons will set the historical record straight while presenting the multiple groundbreaking achievements of Simmons, a great scientist who played a leading role in industrial research as the head of the Central Research Department at DuPont.

Pierre Laszlo
Sénergues, France