I write to lament the state of chemical nomenclature today.  There are several forces in the nomenclature world- Chemical Abstracts, Beilstein, and IUPAC.  Near as I can tell, with the globalization of CASRN’s, CAS nomenclature is the predominant nomenclature in the world.  At least the world open to English language.  I have no idea of how the nomenclature works in texts written in Mongolian, Tagalog, or Ubangie. Are there translations or transliterations- I don’t know or care much, truthfully.

I can say that the introduction of new chemical entities into commerce presents the issue of what to call a thing.  A name that has 80 characters, including greek letters like mu or kappa, strings of digits delimited by layers of commas, brackets, dashes, and parentheses, poses certain practical problems with business data systems and catalogs.  It also poses problems for the many non-chemical people who have to deal with it on a daily basis.  It becomes hard for people to understand what the hell they are referring to. In fact, it actually intimidates non-chemists to the point of locking up. They become convinced that the slightest error will lead them down the merry path of ruin.

One of my duties is to define nomenclature for products at my day job. We dutifully collect the 9CI names for the TSCA nightmare, and then we decide what we’re going to call it on a commercial basis.  I’m finding myself using the IUPAC nomenclature module of ChemDraw more and more.  The nomenclature coming out of it seems more human friendly.

I once contacted CAS in Colombus and spoke to a helpful and sincere person who explained that CAS doesn’t offer a handbook that would explain how CAS does its nomenclature.  I haven’t researched this too deeply, but I have not yet found a CAS publication that defines the taxonomy that CAS uses.  Of course, CAS will happily charge you for an official name assignment. I guess for a $26 charge I could look it up in SciFinder.

Whining about nomenclature is like complaining about the weather. CAS has to do something with all of the species cited in the literature.  I just regret the high cost associated with using CAS services. 

All of this feeds into my nagging feeling that ACS and it’s lovechild, Chemical Abstracts Service, has gotten a bit unwieldy and maybe even too big for its britches.  With the publishing and the registry database business, it has grown to be the major force in the sales and distribution of chemical knowledge. It is an economic engine.  Maybe even monopolistic.  Oops, there is that word.