Archive for the 'High School' Category

The finals of the Intel Science Talent Search ended last night in Washington, DC. Old fogies like me know the contest as the Westinghouse, a competition open to high school seniors who have completed scientific research projects. The girl who won top honors this year built an instrument for collecting Raman spectra, in her home, for $300. Now, if she would just go ahead and make a 400 MHz NMR spectrometer for ChemBark Labs, I’ve got a check for $400 with her name on it.

The Westinghouse/Intel competition has been running since 1942, and you might recognize some of the people who’ve reached the finals:

Andrew Streitwieser (STS ‘45)
Martin Karplus (STS ‘47)
Ronald Breslow (STS ‘48)
Walter Gilbert (STS ‘49)
Roald Hoffmann (STS ‘55)
Eric Lander (STS ‘74)
David Liu (STS ‘90)
Paul Bracher (STS ‘98)

Those are some pretty big names in chemistry. Andy Streitwieser’s story is particularly remarkable. It’s been about six years since I’ve read his autobiography, so I might have a couple of the details wrong, but it goes something like this:

Streitweiser and his friends loved chemistry so much that they built a rudimentary lab in his basement. While thumbing through the literature, he came across a JACS paper that described the reaction of fluorene with sulfuryl chloride but didn’t report the position at which the molecule was chlorinated. Streitweiser repeated the preparation and found that the melting point of his product matched that of 2-chlorofluorene, which had been reported previously. Maybe it doesn’t sound like such a big deal now, but it was 1944, he was in high school, and he was working in a lab that he built himself. You gotta love it.

Streitwieser wrote up his results, and at the tender age of 17, he published a communication/note in JACS. The institutional address printed in the journal was his home address in Queens. The only time I’ve seen something even close to as cool as that is when Gunter Wachtershauser listed his Yahoo! e-mail address on a paper in Science. L0Lzzz!!111!1!

Streitwieser would grow up to become a true hero in the field of physical organic chemistry, spending over 50 years on the faculty at Berkeley. He kept (keeps?) an entire print collection of JACS in his office, and before the advent of pubs.acs.org, it was not uncommon for students to stop by when the library was missing issues they needed. Even when Streitwieser was in his office, his secretary would tell the students to just go in and grab whatever they needed. Streitwieser, renowned for his intense concentration, would sit there like a statue despite being in the presence of someone rummaging through his book shelves. Weird.

Anyway, if you read through that paper from 1944, you will notice a familiar name in the acknowledgments: Ed Kosower. A classmate of Streitwieser’s at Stuyvesant, Kosower also grew up to become a fantastic chemist. They even co-authored a sophomore organic textbook together (with Clayton Heathcock). The book is superb, but it’s unfortunately out-of-print. I heard that the reason the fourth edition is the last is that the authors refused to acquiesce in the publisher’s wish to add color graphics. You’ve got to give those guys credit for not selling out the Old School.