What’s all this about?  Well it started like this when I posted the following on The Wall:

24 Apr ‘07

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Let’s say you were a graduate student in organic chemistry at Harvard ‘60 - ‘62 (I was), and that you passed 8 of the first 9 cumes (I did) and that you talked Woodward into letting you work on you own idea 9 months after you got there because passing 8 cumes was all you needed to start your PhD work (also true) and were remembered by most concerned as arrogant unfortunately true) and that you were god-awful in the lab (true) and left organic chemistry to go back to medicine. Further suppose that organic chemistry always seemed natural and fun, and that you happened to see a squib in the 12 April Nature about the total synthesis of Lyconadin B, Googled it and found the structure and commentary in TotallySynthetic.Com and fell back in love with organic chemistry, and wished to get up to speed so you could enjoy reading about the field again.

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How and where would you start? What are the best introductory texts for organic chemistry, physical organic chemistry? Are there still texts, or is everything on the web now? What is the best place to read about NMR and structure determination (just beginning back then), computational chemistry (practically nonexistent back then — they were still sweating H2+). Also is Debye Huckel theory still what we used to think about it — good for slightly impure distilled water, but not much else. Something better is needed for
cell water which is .3 molar.

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I love the irreverance of the chemical blogs. Have at it folks.

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and

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Thanks

I got this back the same day from Excimer:

I’ll bite: my favorite introductory chem text is by Jones- it has pretty widespread use throughout undergraduate classes still, and I like Anslyn and Dougherty’s “Modern Physical Organic Chemistry” for that subject.

and from Paul:

Excimer mentions my two favorite undergraduate organic texts. I would also consider ordering the solutions manual to Jones, then working out some of the problems. There are few things more satisfying than being able to solve problems to convince yourself you understand what’s going on. If you’re super-excited, what about enrolling in an orgo course at a local community college? Taking courses on a subject always gives me extra motivation to learn things, since you have to stick to a schedule.

So I bought the above (the solution manual hasn’t arrived yet) and started working through Jones ‘04.  Anslyn looks like something I should read after Jones.   I was impressed with how different Jones is than how I remembered my first Organic text (English & Cassidy 2nd Ed. ‘56) so I managed to find a copy on the net and it arrived today.  The next post will contrast the two books.

So this series will be sort of “Rip Van Winkle meets Modern Organic Chemistry”.  Why should you bother reading what’s coming?   Just imagine quitting grad school with what you know and spending the next 45 years reading molecular biology and biochemistry with the background you currently have (in your spare time while going to med school and practicing neurology that is).  I guarantee you’d find it primitive and rather simplistic but would have no problem understanding what’s going on.   So there will be tidbits here and there that you’re unlikely to find elsewhere (such as why Jones is wrong about Strychnine poisoning — I saw a case, and how the cell lets potassium inside while excluding the smaller sodium ion — if you don’t know the answer think of how you’d design a protein to do it — MacKinnon won a Nobel for it — if you can’t wait.  I can assure you that no one had a clue until the structure was solved.  There was a lot of handwaving about differential absorption of Na and K to proteins, and that great fudge factor that no one could calculate — the activity coefficient.

Stay tuned,

Retread