Announcing the 2006 Chemmy Awards
Posted by Paul on December 18th, 2006
The First Annual Chemmy Awards will be announced here on ChemBark at a special ceremony on Boxing Day. To supplement our undisclosed nominees, please use the comments to submit nominations in the following categories:
Best Organic Paper/Achievement
Best Physical Paper/Achievement
Best Inorganic Paper/Achievement
Best Biological Paper/Achievement
News Story of the Year
Comeback of the Year
Molecule of the Year
Villain of the Year
Worst Accident
Outstanding Academic Department
Good Citizenship Award
Lifetime Achievement Award
People interested in voting for the Best Chemistry Blog of the Year should visit Mitch at ChemicalForums. My vote goes to Tenderbutton, even though it’s dead. I also hope that Paul at TotallySynthetic is going to post a poll for Total Synthesis of the Year, but I’ve got no idea who should win that one.
December 19th, 2006 at 4:22 am
Well, there’s a lot of categories to vote but a couple of them ring some bells.
News Story of the Year has got to be the Sames/Sezen case, where I feel some kind of twist may still be on the cards (check http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2006.....bo-re.html for another look on the issue).
Molecule of the Year is probably going to be Hexacyclinol because of the “JJLaClair affaire” (Also eligible for the previous category?)
next nominations in a moment…
December 19th, 2006 at 1:08 pm
I think C(N3)4 should be in for Molecule of the Year. (I’m biased. I liked azides the first moment I saw them. Yay for Nb(N3)5 and As(N3)5! As long as they do not come anywhere near me.)
December 19th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Clearly, Eric Betzig should be the “Comeback of the Year.” He quit science years ago—after doing well-known work in the field of NSOM—and worked for his father in the machine-tool business; then he started doing experiments on sub-diffraction imaging in his collaborator’s living room and brought the world PALM (and a Science paper to boot). C&E News had a story about PALM and Betzig’s comeback.
December 20th, 2006 at 12:06 am
Although all these awards are subjective as hell, the Outstanding Academic Department is really out there. How can one honestly be 100% objective about such things? (I’d vote for my own school cause it did great things this year, but my nomination is Stanford Med for picking up two very worthy Nobel laureates.)
Lifetime Achievement Award- Richard Heck, the father of palladium catalysis (a field which has been sorely underrepresented in Nobelland). Victor Snieckus
gave a talk at my school and gave some very interesting arguments as to why Heck’s work was so important. Plus he’s getting pretty old.
Achievement in inorganic should go to self-cleaning cotton. Sweeeeeeet.
December 20th, 2006 at 1:05 am
Worst Accident: I heard about a chemist who experienced an explosion that blew him through the ceiling of his lab. The building was more or less destroyed. Don’t think he survived it. I also don’t have a reference for it. Does anyone else?
December 20th, 2006 at 1:50 am
That was the one in France this year: C&EN and SoSD.
Keep the suggestions coming…
December 20th, 2006 at 7:52 am
Paul, how about categories for best nanotech paper and best analytical paper?
I nominate Rick Smalley for lifetime achievement.
December 20th, 2006 at 11:45 am
I would like to have category “best accident” also. There was a funny one last year in Texas - somebody at university was annoyed by the hiss from a large liquid N2 dewar so he replaced the pressure-release ventil on the dewar with a screw. And the hiss stopped for few days. Fortunatly the Dewar blew up at night, when nobody was around. The explosion cracked rebar in reinforced-concrete floor and the upper half of dewar went through the celing into the lab one floor above.
December 20th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
Wow, that self-cleaning cotton is pretty amazing!
December 20th, 2006 at 1:52 pm
OK…let’s expand the award to include analytical and nano. Also, my intention was always to make the “worst” accident = the “best/silliest/stupidest” accident. If someone dies while doing something perfectly normal, he/she shouldn’t win just because the outcome was tragic. If someone, however, breaks a toe by tipping over an NMR magnet while attempting to mouth-pipette something into his NMR tube, that’s a different story.
December 20th, 2006 at 1:54 pm
Oh…and the network just called to say there’s no way we can cram all of these awards into a single ceremony that will end before late local newscasts, so we’ll stagger the announcements over the 12 days of Christmas.
December 20th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Best Organic/Inorganic paper:
Triple-Bond Reactivity of Diphosphorus Molecules
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/.....siteid=sci
from the Cummins group. A really neat method for trapping diphosphorous by a homogeneous organometallic complex at room temperature as opposed to 1100 degrees Celsius.
Or there is always that:
Das S, Incarvito CD, Crabtree RH, Brudvig GW, Molecular Recognition in Regioselective Oxygenation of Saturated C-H bonds by a Dimanganese Catalyst, Science, 2006, 312, 1941-1943
where the complex basically acts like an enzyme mimic and only attaches to the substrate in one way, so that the oxidation does not happen at the more favourable part of the substrate. The complex is huge (just like a protein I guess) and it had to be designed by modelling to see what size tail was needed so that the substrate would only fit in one way.
It has been a while since I read these two articles. I hope I’m not wrong anywhere. I remember them being quite excellent and definitely my choices for best of the year.
December 20th, 2006 at 9:43 pm
These were my favourites:
Best Physical Paper:
Coherent Control of Retinal Isomerization in Bacteriorhodopsin
Prokhorenko, et al. Science, 313,1257-61
Best Bio Paper:
A Genetic Code for Nucleosome Positioning
Widom, et al. Nature, 442,772-8
Best Nano Paper:
Folding DNA to create nanoscale shapes and patterns
Rothemund, Nature, 440, 297-302
News Story:
Probably the Sames/Sezen thing
Best Comeback:
I agree with Sam, Eric Betzig went from a washout to NIH darling and potential Nobelist.
Molecule of the Year:
Torcetrapib
Villain of the Year:
Libya
Worst Accident:
I think the Berkeley_LN2 Dewar_Down the Stairs had the most promise but I’m going to have go with
Milkshake’s suggestion (also LN2) for its sheer carnage.
Good Citizenship Award:
Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) or Peter Agre (officially the nicest person in the world)
Lifetime Achievement Award:
umm…Steven Colbert?
December 23rd, 2006 at 12:11 am
Best bio paper:
I agree with Joel’s suggestion, and I also like:
“Editing-defective tRNA synthetase causes protein misfolding and neurodegeneration.”
Lee, J.W., et al. Nature 2006, 443, 50-55.
Lifetime Achievement Award:
Harry Gray, Albert Eschenmoser
December 23rd, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Best organic achievement: Too many difficult, to give just one. Probably Corey’s superquick total synthesis of Tamiflu (when the big pharmas did not have stock to combat a hypothetic aviar flu pandemia)
Best physical/inorganic chemistry/biological paper achievement: Not qualified to give a decent opinion.
News story of the year:
a) Chemistry blogs bloom or how the opinion-maker role in chemistry has become a democracy.
b) Sezen. Hexacyclinol. Or how the editors of chemistry journals and other disciplines need to revised their refereing rules.
Comeback of the year. In my discipline (organic chemistry) the comeback of the last 5 years. Raymond Funk.
Molecule of the year.
a) Hexacyclinol. b) Plantensymicin.
Villain of the year.
Bionic Bros. For not sticking up with JJ in the middle of the hexacyclinol crisis.
WORST ACCIDENT: NO QUESTION ABOUT THIS. THE WORST ACCIDENT IN A LONG TIME. MULHOUSE (FRANCE) MARCH 2006. A building blown up and at leat one dead researcher.
Outstanding academic department: Not qualified to give a decent opinion.
Good citizenship award:
Life-achievement award: S.J Danishefsky.
December 25th, 2006 at 9:37 pm
It was good to see ol’ Ray publish again.
January 5th, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Go Ray =)
January 8th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
[…] In the comments thread announcing the Chemmy Awards, Excimer noted that “although all these awards are subjective as hell, the Outstanding Academic Department is really out there. How can one honestly be 100% objective about such things?” […]
January 29th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
Any reports or comments on Cap37.Thank you.JBO
April 27th, 2007 at 1:57 am
[…] The Chemmy Award for Organic Achievement of the Year goes to: […]
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