While tunneling deep through the compacted patent strata, I happened to notice that E. J. Corey’s oxazaborolidine patent appears to be expired. US Patent 4,943,635 (July 24, 1990) was assigned to the President and Fellows of Harvard College and listed Professor Elias J. Corey as inventor. This is a patent with 30 claims, of which 3 are independent claims. All of the claims are for composition of matter.
The description teaches methods of preparation of a variety of oxazaborolidines, with a special emphasis on the preferred embodiment based on proline. The use of the catalyst for asymmetric reductions is taught in the description as well.
Curiously, Corey is the only inventor on the patent. Hmmm. Knowing that he was well into his career by 1988 when the application was filed, I can only guess that he must have been very busy running multiple reactions, doing flash columns, and burning NMR spectra. \;-)
The next oxazaborolidine patent to expire will be the Merck US 5,039,802 (Aug. 13, 1991) patent. This is a process patent claiming a method for the preparation of the diarylproline system using aryl Grignard addition to a pyrrolo[1,2-c]oxazole-1,3-dione.
Incidentally, I did witness a famous professor actually doing bench chemistry. A friend and I were wandering around the chemistry building at her alma mater, (The) Ohio State University, in March of 1993 when we happened past the lab of Mel Newman.
There he was, in his 90’s, intently shaking a 2-liter separatory funnel of some dark hellbroth. He was isolating a polyaromatic hydrocarbon that he made. Newman graciously stopped to talk about his work. Having freshly graduated from a stereochemistry group and a stereochemistry post-doc, I nearly fainted when I met him. It was like meeting Elvis. Newman passed away a few weeks later.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
During a post doc at OSU I, too, observed Newman in the lab. It was inspiring.
My advisor went into the lab whenever a student was dragging his feet on a favored project or idea. I think it didn’t take long for said student to realize the advisor was not happy.
During grad school we had one speaker, I think it was Firestone, who was introduced as actually still doing experiments. The host felt this was really impressive. He however did not volunteer to start going back in the lab.
I would guess most faculty at undergrad labs are still in the lab turning pristine chemicals into black tars. My favorite pasttime.
“Curiously, Corey is the only inventor on the patent.” A patent that does not list all the inventors is invalid. If I was a attorney trying invalidate a competitive patent, that’s the route I would take. You KNOW that for any patent that’s of any value, there is some disgruntled technician or low level scientist/engineer in the company that thinks he/she should have been listed and wasn’t, and they would LOVE to get back at the company who did that.
Incidentally, I did witness a famous professor actually doing bench chemistry I’ll bet Karen Wetterhan wishes she wasn’t at the bench.
Well, it just seems odd that, within one of the top synthetic research groups in the world, there were no co-inventors. In fact, one might suppose that a benevolent faculty advisor would naturally encourage underlings to be a part of the creative work, given the non-trivial amount of experimental work that went into it. I’m sure there is a story here.
The dimethylmercury incident is a real tragedy. Must have been very frightening for her.
Uncle Al, I inadvertantly deleted your comment about the patent you worked on. The Akismet spam feature misfired. I would really like to see it. Could you give me the patent number again?