Stimulating Concepts in Chemistry

Book Preface

Dwelling momentarily on the words Stimulating Concepts in Chemistry conjures up more than one line of thought. One is “Concepts in Chemistry” that are stimulating in themselves. Another is how “Concepts in Chemistry” can be stimulated at the interfaces with the life sciences and with materials science. These are powerful undercurrents that provide the changing circumstances for the creative developments in chemistry through – in many instances – the dreams and imaginations of intelligent and welltrained young men and women entering the profession as researchers at the graduate student and postdoctoral levels. Those academic, government, and industrial scientists in mid-career and beyond, who have demonstrated their creativity in articles, communications, papers, and reviews in the scientific literature – and from the lecterns in giving research seminars and named lectures in a variety of different settings, as well as from the podiums in presenting plenary talks and award lectures at society meetings and international symposia – are certainly in a position to commit their accomplishments and experiences to print, often with the direct involvement of their industrious and enthusiastic young colleagues.

By focusing the spotlight on concepts that are particularly stimulating to chemists, a collection of essays, that address some of the most exciting conceptual developments in chemistry in recent years, have been gathered together in the pages that follow herein. The exercise was initiated by inviting over 30 highly renowned chemists, all of them pioneers in their field, to contribute an essay to this treatise. In the event, some two dozen world leaders in their research areas responded somewhat differently to a fairly prescriptive format: some followed the rubric closely, others veered away from the recommendations somewhat, and the remainder did what they felt most comfortable with doing – and the outcome is what you have in your hands to select from and savor, we hope.

There was some discussion by the editors about the title of this book, especially with regard to the problem that some areas of “chemistry” (for example inorganic chemistry) are not represented to the same degree of detail as others. A consensus was then achieved that this volume, by touching, illustrating and interconnecting a selection of undoubtedly important branches of chemistry, should stimulate, challenge and initiate further monographs to include other subdisciplines.

Chemistry receives a lot of its current stimulationmfrom its two-way trafficking with the biological world. Three essays under the heading Biological Aspects in Section IV (p 339) serve to illustrate this point extremely well.

In an up-date of a recent Angewandte review, Kirby discusses enzyme mimics (p 341) under five banners – namely, mimics based (1) on natural enzymes, (2) on other proteins, (3) on other biopolymers, (4) on synthetic macromolecules, and (5) on small-molecule host-guest interactions. He is at pains to point out that, although a lot of progress has been made toward ‘explaining’ enzyme catalysis, our current level of understanding is nowhere like sufficient to design and synthesize enzyme analogs that even begin to vie with enzymes, at least as far as catalysis is concerned. So far, supramolecular chemists have by and large failed the practical test of delivering artificial enzymes that actually do a respectable job: their attempts to date to translate the sophisticated molecular recognition of their (ground state) systems into effective catalysis is judged to have been ‘generally disappointing’. Consequently, there is still a big challenge out there for chemists to meet and it is our hunch that it will take a combination of some form of supramolecular or dynamic covalent chemistry, probably relying heavily on computational methods and virtual/ dynamic combinatorial libraries for its ultimate success. Even then, by its very nature, substrate specific catalysis with artificial enzymes could end up being one job at a time.