Impossible dreams.

You will understand the title at one level by knowing that I have been a fan of the Boston Red Sox for about seventy years. This loyalty was partially rewarded about seventeen years ago when by chance I had the pleasure of spending an hour with my boyhood hero, Ted Williams. At about the time that I started to follow the Red Sox games by radio, I acquired the notion that I would like someday to know in detail how to build from scratch radios, planes, skyscrapers, bridges, and all the other objects of modern life. I sometimes wonder, in retrospect, whether this impossible dream somehow had an influence on the course of my life. I had no idea that I would choose chemistry as a profession when I entered MIT as a 16-year-old freshman in June of 1945. In fact, until my senior year in high school, the only science that I had ever taken in school was mathematics. I enjoyed math more than any other subject, although I liked all of my studies. My preference for math led to my being handed a two-page application form for MIT which I completed in less than an hour and returned to my high school advisor, Mr. O’Brien. A few weeks later, I learned that I had been admitted into MIT. Mr. O’Brien’s advice was that I should consider majoring in electrical or chemical engineering at MIT because the chances of finding good employment in math were low. I eventually found my way into chemistry in my sophomore year at MIT because it was more interesting to me than the engineering options. My hope was that I might find work as a scientist with a large corporation after graduation from college. I never dreamed that in the short space of about five years I would have a Ph.D. degree in chemistry and a faculty position at the University of Illinois. My undergraduate years flew byspartly because MIT was then still on an accelerated wartime academic schedule. I usually took three extra courses each semester since that was permitted then. As a result, I was able to take all of the available MIT chemistry courses, the other requirements, and a few engineering courses as well. At the invitation of Professor John C. Sheehan I stayed on for graduate research at MIT as a member of his pioneering project on the chemical synthesis of penicillins. Early on in my third year of graduate work, I received word that Roger Adams, then Head of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois, was visiting Cambridge and wanted to see me. I well remember that very cordial meeting on the campus at Harvard where Adams served as an Overseer. A week later I was offered an Instructorship at Illinois provided that I could report for work within six weeks, at the start of 1951. It was astounding that somehow I had been chosen from so many other young chemists for what was clearly one of the premier academic positions that year. Professor Sheehan readily agreed that I could accept the offer despite such short notice. For years it remained a mystery to me that I could be so lucky. Just a few years ago I learned from Nelson Leonard, a faculty colleague of Adams, that it was a group of my former fellow MIT students, then at Illinois as graduate and postdoctoral fellows, who recommended that I be considered for the Illinois opening and that Nelson had relayed their suggestion to Roger Adams. I remained at the University of Illinois until mid-1959 when I assumed my present faculty position at Harvard. It has been a privilege to work for this period of over fifty years at these two great institutions with wonderful students and faculty colleagues. At Illinois, I was especially close to Roger Adams, C. S. Marvel, Nelson Leonard, John C. Bailar, I. C. Gunsalus, David Y. Curtin, and Douglas E. Applequists all great chemists for whom I have enormous respect. I am grateful to John Bailar for a very stimulating collaboration that produced the first conformational analysis of metal chelates and led to what are now known as the δ and λ stereochemical descriptors. A collaboration with “Gunny” Gunsalus on the microbial hydroxylation of camphor led to his pioneering and historic biochemical program over the next four decades on cam P-450, the first and now the best understood member of the P-450 class of biochemical oxidants. There were a number of other research discoveries at Illinois that brought great pleasure to me. I shall mention just a few: the recognition that stereocontrol in a reaction could arise from a preference for a three-dimensional transition state involving the maximum overlap of the perturbed molecular orbitals (which I called stereoelectronic control); the determination of the structures of the natural products © Copyright 2004 by the American Chemical Society VOLUME 69, NUMBER 9 APRIL 30, 2004