Timeless

Since I wrote that blog entry on the re-evaluation of the Wasserman catenane synthesis, I’ve had the pleasure of hearing from Ed Wasserman himself (via his son Stephen). He’s 93 and was quite struck to hear about this work, and he sent along the statement below:

“What a delightful surprise. The paper of Prof. Leigh and his colleagues is most impressive. The group’s use of modern tools and methods has permitted a detailed examination of my ancient and comparatively crude efforts.

One point should be mentioned. Of the various catenane yields noted in the introduction to Leigh’s paper, that in reference 8, 0.0001% is actually the overall yield, including the 7 steps that transformed the C10 starting material into the deuterated C34 rings. The other values, 0.7 and ~1%, are the probability of catenane formation from linear chains and pre-formed rings. The total yield was provided to convey the considerable effort that had been required. The error in the Scientific American article appeared during editing of the manuscript.

My first thoughts on the threading approach arose towards the end of my time in graduate school, 67 years ago. It’s been quite a journey from the 1950s to now.”

I’m sure it has! And this illustrates something I’ve mentioned from time to time over the >20 years of this blog. When I look through a microscope and see rotifers and copepods swimming past in pond water, they are the same as they were when I first saw them over fifty years ago. The same goes for the summer nebulae coming up in the sky now: those Messier objects, old friends now, look just the way they did when I saw them in the early 1970s through my first telescope.

Those two examples change, but just on an inhumanly slow time scale. But chemistry (and physics, and math) are even more timeless than that. We grow older, but the molecules themselves don’t. Nor do the inspirations behind them, no matter what the field. Last year I quoted G. H. Hardy’s line about Euclid’s proof of the infinity of prime numbers (“Time has not written a wrinkle on it”), and that’s true of all good ideas. Edel Wasserman’s bold inspiration from his graduate school days about threading rings of molecules together have grown into a whole field of its own, one that continues to advance into ever-more-complex macromolecular chemistry that pushes our synthetic and analytical capabilities to their modern limits. But the idea itself, and the willingness to try out something strange and new and difficult in the lab, to put the effort in to make it real – well, that feeling does not age. I hope it’s always availabe to all of us. Recognize it as an old friend when it appears!