Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
name of a chemist awarded Chemistry Nobel Prizes for the discovery of efficient
synthetic procedures. The list is far from being exhaustive.
V. Grignard 1912 (Mg); K. Ziegler and G. Natta 1963 (Ti, Al); E. O. Fischer,
G. Wilkinson 1973 (Fe, Cr); H. C. Brown 1979 (B, H); G. Wittig 1979 (P); R. F.
Heck, A. Suzuki 2010 (Pd); E. Negishi 2010 (Zn, Pd); R. H. Grubbs, R. R. Schrock
2005 (Ru, Rh). A few other names follow that have not been honored by the Nobel
Foundation, yet they have discovered important organic reactions involving various
other heteroatoms: E. Frankland (Zn); H. Gilman (Cu); J. K. Stille (Sn).
1.4
Chemical Abstracts Service: Documentation in Chemistry
versus Other Sciences
On the occasion of its centennial anniversary in 2007, Chemical Abstracts Service
(CAS) issued a Special Issue of
Chemical & Engineering News
in which the CEO of
CAS, Robert J. Massie, gave details of what CAS is and what it does (Massie
2007
).
CAS qualifies as a “national treasure”. Moreover, by adopting a graph-theoretical
approach to chemical structures represented as hydrogen-depleted molecular graphs
that can be traced on a computer screen and then linked to the CAS database, it
is possible to learn in a matter seconds if any covalent structure has ever been de-
scribed in a publication or a patent. Thus chemistry, considered to be the Central
Science (Brown et al.
2011
; Balaban and Klein
2006
) because it bridges the hard
sciences such as mathematics, physics, or astronomy with the soft sciences such as
biomedical, economic and social sciences, is nowadays also the best-documented
science. One can never be certain if a mathematical theorem or a physical property
has been described earlier, because these are expressed in words, and the association
between words and the corresponding theorems, properties, or ideas is not unique. Of
course, this limitation applies also to chemistry when it uses words and not structural
formulas.
Before the “computer age”, the IUPAC Nomenclature Committee had devised
elaborate rules for naming chemical substances: the “Red Book” for inorganic sub-
stances, and the thicker “Blue Book” for organic substances. Yet despite spending
hours or days in the library for looking into the Collective Molecular Formula In-
dices of
Chemisches Zentralblatt
(till 1945) or
Chemical Abstracts
(1907-1986),
one could never be quite sure that one could access all documentation for a given
substance because of the intricacy of chemical isomerism and nomenclature. All this
uncertainly is now a problem of the past, as long as one can draw a constitutional
formula as a hydrogen-depleted molecular graph, provided that one has access to
SciFinder. An agreement between CAS and FIZ Karlsruhe gave rise to STN Interna-
tional, which is an online database service that provides global access to published
research, journal literature, patents, structures, sequences, properties, and other data.
