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Kurioses, Erstaunliches, &Uuml;berraschendes &mdash; was vor 50 Jahren in den &bdquo;Nachrichten aus der Chemie&ldquo; stand, die damals noch &bdquo;Nachrichten aus Chemie und Technik&ldquo; hie&szlig;en.

Vor 50 Jahren

<h2 type="main">Konzept für ein neues Grundstudium</h2>Heidelberger Assistenten und Studenten schlugen vor 50 Jahren ein gesamtnaturwissenschaftliches Grundstudium vor, eine dreisemestrige Studieneingangsphase für Chemie, Biologie, Physik und Geowissenschaften. Diese Fächer hätten eine gemeinsame Grundlage und bedienten sich gleicher Lern- und Arbeitsmethoden. Die Studierenden würden so in die Lage versetzt, sich nach diesen drei Semestern bewusst für eines der Fächer zu entscheiden. Die Redaktion fand das Konzept „so interessant und konsequent“, dass sie es in der Februarausgabe 1973 der Nachrichten aus Chemie und Technik zur Diskussion stellte.<img alt="image" src="https://media.graphassets.com/nhPqIZStQaK9rq7s9VZ3">Mehr Erstaunliches und Überraschendes aus den blauen Blättern von anno dazumal lesen Sie in der GDCh-App: <url href="https://gdch.app/category/vor-50-jahren"><a href="https://gdch.app/category/vor-50-jahren" target="_blank">gdch.app/category/vor-50-jahren</a></url>

Vor 50 Jahren in den Blauen Blättern

Konzept für ein neues Grundstudium

Konzept für ein neues GrundstudiumHeidelberger Assistenten und Studenten schlugen vor 50 Jahren ein gesamtnaturwissenschaftliches Grundstudium vor, eine dreisemestrige Studieneingangsphase für Chemie, Biologie, Physik und Geowissenschaften. Diese Fächer hätten eine gemeinsame Grundlage und bedien...

John Hartwig is co-discoverer of the Buchwald-Hartwig amination &ndash; a widely used palladium-catalyzed coupling reaction for the formation of C-N bonds. For his research, he received the Emanuel Merck Lectureship last year. A discussion about creativity, useful reactions and pricey metals.
Nachrichten aus der Chemie: You were quite young when you developed the reaction named after you. How did this affect your career?
John Hartwig: I worked as a postdoc in bioinorganic chemistry, on anti-cancer-drugs. Afterwards, I then started working on compounds with metal boron bonds. The reaction that I was interested in discovering, this named reaction was just a single step within the catalytic cycle. I looked for complexes that would undergo that reaction. I didn&rsquo;t anticipate that the catalytic would be so important synthetically. But because it was important for synthetic chemists, my program then became much more oriented towards catalysis and synthetic chemistry. So the Hartwig-Buchwald amination influenced my career in many ways: it got me tenure and my job and pointed us toward synthetic organic chemistry.
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<figcaption><label>Abb.1: </label>John F. Hartwig; since 2011 he is professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He had been at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Yale and the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology.</figcaption>
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Did you need more knowledge in inorganic chemistry or in organic chemistry for these catalysts?
I wouldn&rsquo;t say it&rsquo;s more one than the other. Every major advance in catalyst that we&rsquo;ve made has come from a mechanistic understanding; isolating intermediates and understanding the nature of the true active catalyst. Thus, we have applied knowledge of inorganic chemistry to solving problems in organic chemistry.
What drives your research?
In the beginning I was just interested in increasing the knowledge base of fundamental organometallic chemistry by the discovery of new elementary reactions and new mechanisms. The intellectual puzzles they create, designing an experiment and learning what that answers, is the fun part of it. But as time has moved on, we have also found some things that are practical. Now, there are FDA approved drugs made through the cross coupling chemistry and C-H-activation chemistry. To know that we develop things that are useful for human health is very satisfying.
How do you identify what molecule you want to achieve and what catalyst you need for this?
A little bit from our own imagination. Lots of discussions with colleagues over a coffee at a conference, visiting other professors on university visits, visits to pharmaceutical and chemical companies. This is probably the best way Learning about what it is that people need. My sense of what is important for synthesis comes from that, probably more than from reading the literature even though I spend hours reading the chemical literature.
Why not from literature?
The literature tells you what&rsquo;s been done, it doesn&rsquo;t tell you what the future holds. Pharmaceutical companies have created lists about important problems to solve in organic synthesis. The formation of arylamines was never on such a list; making carbon boron bonds by C-H activation was never on that list. But, coupling to form arylamines is the most commonly used reaction discovered in 40 years and the borylation of C-H bonds is the most practiced functionalization of C-H bonds.
Do you like to think more about the catalyst or the target molecule?
I think a lot about what kinds of catalytic reactions one could achieve, more so than about a specific structure to achieve.
How do you help your students to be creative?
First, I make it clear they should explore their own ideas. None of the federal funding agencies say &bdquo;here are the guard rails on what you can spend your funds and if you go outside of those, we will take our money back.&ldquo; Our greatest discoveries have been made by students. We do literature surveys and presentations &ndash; to create a culture in which people take time to read the literature and not just have their head in the hood. We also hold group meetings, where we devise proposals on outside topics. That gets the students talking to each other about topics outside their thesis research.
The catalysts you&rsquo;re developing are mainly with these pricey transition metals, like iridium, or palladium. Have you ever thought about using cheaper metals?
I&rsquo;m a little skeptical about the importance of cost. Once I recieved reviews about the iridium chemistry saying &bdquo;iridium is too expensive&ldquo;. And after I resubmitted the grant, the price of iridium went below palladium.
It&rsquo;s very volatile.
Yes. For example, the cost of palladium is largely driven by catalytic converters, as this is where most of the palladium goes. With electric cars there&rsquo;s no catalytic converter, and it&lsquo;s cobalt that is needed for batteries. The source of cobalt is pretty ugly. So, if we adapt to cobalt catalyzed chemistry, we&rsquo;ll be facing news saying &bdquo;we&rsquo;re going to have a cobalt shortage&ldquo;. It&rsquo;s hard to see the future of what&rsquo;s really going to happen, so, as academics, the key is to seek fundamentally new science.
Do you think computation will increase for your research?
Sure, as computers become faster we can do higher level calculations, and then as theory develops we can perform more precise calculations. It&rsquo;s incredible. We conduct DFT calculations on molecules with 50 or 100 atoms, get energy values that are very close to the experimental values. But, we have not yet been able to use theory as a predictive tool. Today, we can make the molecules as fast as we can do the calculations.
The experiment in the lab is still the most important instrument you have?
Absolutely. A while ago, high throughput experimental methods were developed and people talked about making millions of catalysts and testing them. That was a little unrealistic, but it did change the mindset to conduct groups of experiments instead of individual experiments.
What is your next goal?
The scope of our program keeps increasing. We now have a subgroup working on a way to combine our laboratory chemistry and biocatalysis.
Like enzymes?
Artificial enzymes that can do laboratory chemistry themselves. In a way, this work brings us all the way back to the beginnings of organometallic catalysis when people did not think it would be practically. The question is, can we take some of these things that are not practical now, but ultimately make them the first choice for a synthetic chemist to make a molecule.We are also investigating ways to contribute to chemical recycling of plastics, by or through the C-H activation chemistry, and cleavage of carbon-carbon bonds. We keep adding new problems to our resaerch portfolio.
Nachrichten-Editor Frauke Zbikowski met John Hartwig in Darmstadt right before he held the Emanuel Merck Lecture.

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