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Organic Division
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Division News and Upcoming Meetings:

A New NCI Initiative: The Chemical Biology Consortium Notice of Request For Information (RFI)

The National Cancer Institute (NCI), through its Operations and Technical Support Prime Contractor, SAIC-Frederick, Inc., is seeking input and ideas from the scientific community and the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sector about an innovative initiative that will bridge the gap between basic scientific findings and NCI-supported clinical research and in the process establish the NCI as a leader in the area of innovative cancer therapeutics discovery.

The RFI addresses the feasibility of establishing an integrated network of chemical biologists, molecular oncologists, and screening centers from government, industry, and academia with specific drug development skills and expertise to address unmet needs in therapeutic oncology. NCI is calling this network the Chemical Biology Consortium (CBC). Responses to this RFI will be used to assess the feasibility of assembling a consortium of experts to participate in the NCI's new Drug Discovery and Development Platform, whose mission is to advance first-in-class, targeted molecular therapeutic agents to the clinic. CBC-related activities will span the entire spectrum from target identification and validation through proof-of-concept (POC) Phase I/II clinical trials. Project Teams will be formed with Project Team Leaders tasked with coordinating the discovery and development of novel cancer therapeutics in an environment that fosters open cooperation and communication.

For a complete copy of the RFI, please visit http://www.fbo.gov and Quick Search for Pre-solicitation number S08-181.

For additional information regarding the CBC or SAIC-Frederick, Inc. please visit http://dctd.cancer.gov or http://www.ncifcrf.gov.

2008-2009 Division of Organic Chemistry Graduate Fellowships in Organic Chemistry

The Division of Organic Chemistry plans to award 2008-2009 academic year fellowships for Ph.D. students to be held during their third or fourth year of study. Sponsors of the fellowships awarded for the current academic year are: Boehringer Ingelheim, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly and Company, the Genentech Foundation, GlaxoSmithKline, the Nelson J. Leonard Fellowship (Sponsored by Organic Syntheses, Inc.), Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Organic Reactions, Inc., Organic Syntheses, Inc., Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi-Aventis, Schering-Plough Research Institute, the Emmanuil Troyansky Fellowship, and Wyeth Research. All application material must be received by May 23, 2008. For more details see http://organicdivision.org/fellowships.html.

Call for Graduate Fellowship Sponsors, 2008-9

We welcome contacts from companies, individuals and organizations interested in sponsoring annual fellowships or wishing to endow a graduate student fellowship. There are always many more deserving applicants than there are fellowships! Please contact Professor Brian Stoltz (stoltz@caltech.edu; Tel: 626-395-6064) if you would like to sponsor a fellowship.

Two Postdoctoral Positions in Organic Synthesis and Medicinal Chemistry

Research projects in our group focus on the identification and optimization of lead compounds for protein targets implicated in HIV and hepatitis B and C. Successful candidates will be working on the design and synthesis of small molecule inhibitors and will have the unique opportunity to collaborate closely with a scientific team including a computational chemist, biochemist, molecular biologist and virologist at the Center for Drug Design at the University of Minnesota. See the DOC Employment page for more details.

Gordon-Kenan Graduate Research Seminar in Organometallic Chemistry

The 2nd Gordon-Kenan Graduate Research Seminar in Organometallic Chemistry will be held at Salve Regina University in Newport, RI from July 5-6, 2008. This seminar is aimed at providing graduate students and postdoctoral researchers with their own venue in which to present and discuss current research in organometallic chemistry. The program will explore a broad range of topics and relevant trends in organometallic chemistry, similar to that of the regular Gordon conference. Two keynote lectures will be presented by Prof. John Bercaw (California Institute of Technology) and Dr. Shane Krska (Merck) in addition to research talks given by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. The full program is available at Graduate-Organometallic Chemistry. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from all areas of organometallic research are invited to submit abstracts for oral presentations before April 25, 2008. Applications for poster presentations will be accepted until June 14, 2008.

It is expected that participation of 30-40 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows will present at the seminar and that the large majority will remain for the GRC in Organometallic Chemistry that follows (July 6-11th, 2008). Acceptance to the Graduate Research Seminar will be based on a one-page submitted abstract. The top 8 abstracts submitted before April 25, 2008, will be selected for oral presentations and the remainder will be asked to present posters. Please apply on-line at the above web site. (Please note that you must apply separately for the GRC at GRC-Organometallic Chemistry). Questions can be directed to the conference chairs, Daniela Buccella (db2164@columbia.edu), and Victoria Landry (vkl2103@columbia.edu).

A Donation of Journals and Books

Prof. Albert Padwa from the Chemistry Department at Emory University, would like to donate his entire personal library of journals and books to either a private college/university in the U.S. or to a small U.S. industrial bio-tech company.  His collection includes about 50 years of hard bound issues of JACS and JOC; Tet. Lett. (ca 40 years); many decades of Chem. Commun., Synthesis, Accounts, and other journals; as well as many useful books.

Any organization interested in acquiring this collection needs to consider the required effort/cost to pack up and ship the collection at their own expense. One recommendation would be to use a rental truck and drive it to Emory in order to pick up the books yourself. For further information, contact Prof. Albert Padwa (chemap@emory.edu).

New Orleans, National Meeting Abstracts

The New Orleans Abstracts are now available for the April 2008 meeting. The Division of Organic Chemistry provides a full listing (as a PDF file) of the Division's meeting abstracts (separates) via the members only section on acs.org. To obtain the separates, login, click on Organic Chemistry under division membership, and then follow the link to Abstract Separates.

The 12th French American Chemical Society Meeting (FACS XII): Registration is now open.

The FACS XII meeting (June 8-12, 2008) will bring together industrial and academic chemists from the United States and France allowing them to present and discuss their most recent developments in organic and bioorganic chemistry. Young scientists-in particular, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows-are very much encouraged to attend. Registration is now open. For more information see http://www-chimie.u-strasbg.fr/facsXII/ or Letter or Poster

Balticum Organicum Syntheticum 2008 (BOS 08)

The objective of BOS 2008 is to provide a window to Western science for Baltic scientists by inviting top-line Western speakers, highlighting local scientists to the world community, and accelerating the building of scientific contacts. The conference is limited to 275 to permit interaction among all participants.

Date/Location: June 29-July 2, 2008 in Vilnius, Lithuania at the Academy of Sciences.
Early Registration: May, 15 2008
Poster Submission Registration: June 1, 2008
Website: http://www.BOS2008.eu

Nomination Request for the Organic Assistant Professors Symposium at the 2008 Fall ACS Meeting

The Organic Division of the American Chemical Society initiated an Assistant Professors Symposium in the Fall 2006 ACS meeting. The first two years of the symposium have been very successful. Consequently, we are scheduling a similar symposium in the Fall 2008 meeting.

The Organic Division Executive Committee wishes to give greater opportunities for Assistant Professors to present their work at a national setting prior to their tenure decision. The intent of the Symposium is to have the program composed of Assistant Professor speakers who are entering their fifth or sixth years and who have not yet been considered for tenure. Eight speakers will be invited to give 30-minute presentations on their work.

We invite you to nominate Organic Assistant Professors as potential speakers for this symposium. The nomination may come from the Chair of the department or other tenured faculty. You would need to send by e-mail a very short nomination statement, confirmation that the nominee will be a fifth or a sixth year Assistant Professor in the Fall 2008 and attach a copy of their CV. Please send the e-mail to both Huw M. L. Davies and Lisa McElwee-White (hdavies@buffalo.edu and lmwhite@chem.ufl.edu) Organizers of the Organic Division Assistant Professors Symposium before February 15, 2008.

Organic Chemistry Animations-Site added to Links

A new link has been added on the Organic Links page to Prof. Nick Greeves' (Univ. of Liverpool) site ( 3D Organic Chemistry Animations ) that contains interactive 3D animations for some of the most important organic reactions covered during an undergraduate degree with supporting information on reactivity.

Contact with ORGN Members

The primary means of communication with division members is via the web. Please check this web page often or subscribe to the RSS feed (See: http://www.organicdivision.org/DOC_RSS.html for more details). This web page is updated frequently, but we rarely send the entire membership an e-mail because of spam concerns.

ChemKey: Including Download instructions

The Organic Division and Professor Al Padwa from Emory University have arranged for all organic division members to have the Padwa ChemKey program free of charge. ChemKey was reviewed by JACS earlier this year. If you or your institution subscribe, you can download the review from http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja076956s. Quoting the review, "ChemKey Search Database is a compilation by Albert Padwa and co-workers of 115,000 literature references covering organic synthesis, methodology, heterocycles, reactive intermediates, asymmetric synthesis, theory, and more. In summary, ChemKey Search Database is simple and fast to use, does not require an expensive subscription to an on-line database, and exists right on one's desktop computer. Its primary benefit is the rapid retrieval of key literature entry points for a given subject or author." I have found that it is often faster to get key references from ChemKey than from SciFinder because the completeness of SciFinder leads to the incorporation of many unimportant references. Each year the Chemkey database gets updated by 5,000 new references which will also be made available to the Organic ACS membership for free.

Both Mac and PC versions are available. To obtain download information, you will need to log in at www.acs.org. If haven't done so before, create an account. You will need your membership number, which is on the upper left of your C&EN mailing label. The ACS system knows what divisions you belong to and you will see a link to the Organic Division sub portal. Click on this link and you will be on a page with a link to ChemKey and Separates of National ACS Meetings. From the ChemKey page, you can choose the option that is right for your computer. It takes less than three minutes to download the program and get it installed on your computer. More complete installation instructions are given on the ACS ChemKey page and are provided below.

For the Mac OS X Operating System: Download Chemkey09.sit to your Mac. Stuffit expander is necessary to unstuff the chemkey09.sit file. If you don't already have it, it can be downloaded freely from http://www.stuffit.com/mac/expander. Once the Chemkey folder is created, open it up and double click on the Chemkey file to open the program.

For the Windows Operating System: Download the compressed binary Chemkey09.exe to your PC. Open up the self-extracting Chemkey09.exe file to create the database into a folder entitled Chemkey. Make sure that all of the files are in the same directory. Open the Chemkey folder and double click on the Chemkey file to open the program.

Electronic Balloting in 2008

We will be switching to electronic balloting in 2008 to make participation easier and cheaper. Other divisions have been doing this successfully for years. The annual volumes of Organic Synthesis will be mailed to you, but all other communication will be via the web or e-mail.

NIH: Call for New Compounds for Biological Testing

NIH is interested in obtaining (10-20 mg samples of discreet, well-characterized) compounds from organic chemists (primarily academic researchers), for the purpose of biological screening via the NIH Molecular Libraries initiative. These compounds will be incorporated into the Molecular Libraries Small Molecule Repository (MLSMR), for distribution to the Molecular Libraries Screening Centers Network (MLSCN) and its successor, the Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network (MLPCN). Each year, compounds will be exposed to 100 or more unique biological screens representing a huge swath of biology. The screens are solicited from the biological research community. This represents a great opportunity to discover biological activities that might not have been anticipated. Validated hits will provide opportunities for med. chem. followup studies that could lead to collaborative projects independent of the ML program. Of course, many of these projects will spawn new R01 grants. NIH is willing to pay $15 for each sample accepted into the MLSMR, and they are piloting a program for collection of samples by staff from the MLSMR to minimize the amount of grad student and/or postdoc time/effort required. For more information, see http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-RM-07-005.html and http://mli.nih.gov