Due to a festering project at work I had to miss the Gordon Conference in Newport, RI, this year. I attended the organometallic session last year for the first time and found it to be a very stimulating experience.  Some background for context- My graduate & post-doc training is in organic synthesis. I did my graduate work in a group well known for asymmetric C-C bond forming chemistry in the 80’s. My post-doc was in catalytic asymmetric C-C synthesis with rhodium carbenoids.  It is with this background that I have noticed a bit of a sea change in the big ocean of Organic Chemistry.

At ACS meetings lately it seems that most of the excitement is at the INORG sessions. I’ll qualify that. The excitement for me seems to be at the organometallic sessions. Some pretty stunning work continues to pour out of the labs of the usual rock stars of academia- Bergman, Fu, Grubbs, etc. If you go to INORG talks you could see Harry B. Gray give a rousing account of electron quantum tunneling in enzymes before a packed house. It really is quite a thing to see.

Organic talks at the national meetings seem to be fewer in number than in years past. I don’t have hard numbers, but qualitatively it seems so. Since my grad school time in the 80’s we’ve seen asymmetric synthesis bloom and then go to seed as mechanisms were elucidated and high % ee’s became fairly commonplace. We’ve seen an almost fractal-like growth in catalysts come along to make transformations more efficient. We’ve seen combichem and cheminformatics multiply the efficiency of discovery.

A cryptozoology of hyphenated analytical devices have come along. They can be quite invaluable, but they can choke the budgets of anayltical departments in academia and industry alike, filling disc drives with galaxies of data and graphic user interfaces with an explosion of windows and settings. 

Have I become a Luddite?  No, but I am fussier about commiting hours and hours to learning new software and having to adapt to the machine’s “requirements”.

Obviously, the past 20 years of organic chemistry have been very fruitful. But, the Organometallic people are coming up with the really interesting new examples of organic transformations. Why the lull, why the lack of buzz at ACS meetings in the ORGN sessions? Will the upcoming San Francisco meeting be alight with some new excitement, or will it be a pageant of variations on a theme? I’ll be there to have a look.