Former ACS President Named 1996 Priestley Medal Recipient

The American Chemical Society (ACS) has named organic chemist Ernest L. Eliel, W.R. Kenan Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, as the 1996 recipient of the Priestley Medal. He will receive the solid gold medal--the United States' highest award in chemistry--at the ACS national meeting in New Orleans next March. Eliel, 73, who was ACS president in 1992, says he has been overwhelmed by well-wishers since the announcement of the award was made in late May: "I've received letters from over 100 people--from professional friends, former students, people I've worked with in the past, even from people I've never met [but who have a] background similar to mine. It was all very heartwarming." Over the last four decades, Eliel has been a prominent force in advancing the understanding of the three-dimensional shape of molecules and the role that their structure plays in chemical reactions, according to an ACS statement. Eliel was cited by ACS for two major contributions to organic chemistry. Based on work by 1995 Priestley Medal recipient Derek H.R. Barton, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Texas A&M University, Eliel set out his ideas on chemical conformations--alternate three-dimensional shapes of the same molecule--in a 1953 paper published in Experientia (E.L. Eliel, "The origin of steric hindrance in cyclohexane derivatives," 9:91-93). "What was recognized in this paper is that the conformation in which the compound reacts is not necessarily its most stable form," he explains. "This is an important principle and is very well recognized today in biochemistry, for example. Neither the substrate nor the enzyme have to be in their most stable conformation at the point of reaction." Eliel says that in 1953 the notion of alternate conformations "was a fairly new idea," but that now "it is part of the common understanding" of how molecules behave. Eliel is also widely recognized for his textbook on the stereochemistry of molecules (E.L. Eliel, Stereochemistry of Carbon Compounds, New York, McGraw Hill, 1962), the subdiscipline that deals with the three-dimensional arrangement of the atoms that constitute various compounds. He notes, "I hardly fail to meet chemists of the generation who learned their discipline in the '60s and early '70s who do not tell me that they learned stereochemistry out of my book." The 1962 text has been translated into five languages and was updated last year in an entirely new text: Stereochemistry of Organic Compounds (E.L. Eliel and S.H. Wilen, New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1994). In addition to teaching past and future generations of chemists, he points out, the texts are important to pharmaceutical chemists who are pursuing research in such areas as reaction mechanisms and chemical synthesis. Eliel, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, is also being honored for years of public service to the field of chemistry. He was a member of the ACS board of directors from 1985 to 1993 and its chairman from 1987 to 1989. Currently, he says, he is "very much involved in international aspects of chemistry. I have stimulated international scientific exchanges through the ACS." Eliel, who is fluent in Spanish, is also president of the U.S.-Mexico Foundation for Science--an organization affiliated with the National Research Council's Office of International Affairs that fosters collaborative research between the two countries. Born in Cologne, Germany, Eliel left that country in 1938, eventually moving to Cuba, where he received his B.S. in chemistry in 1946 from the University of Havana. Two years later, he obtained his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illinois. From there he went on to teach at the University of Notre Dame until 1972, when he moved to North Carolina. Karen Young Kreeger (The Scientist, Vol:9, #14, pg.17 , July 10, 1995) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.) garfield@aurora.cis.upenn.edu

Former ACS President Named 1996 Priestley Medal Recipient

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