The January 26, 2009 C&EN has an interesting letter to the editor. Carl Djerassi sent a letter critical of the manner in which Professor Trost cites authors in his references. According to Djerassi, Trost didn’t cite the discoverer of a natural product for which the Trost group had just reported a total synthesis. He took Trost to task in diluting the accomplishment of the workers who had isolated, characterized, and tested the compounds for biological activity by not citing the original work.
Trost’s treatment of Pettit is particularly egregious given the well-known fact in the chemical community that the spectacularly laborious decade-long efforts of one of the heroes of marine natural products chemistry—the person who personally collected the bryozoan, isolated the bryostatins, established their constitution, and pursued their anticancer activity against all odds—were terminated through a draconian closure of his laboratory by the new administrators of Arizona State University. [C&EN, Jan. 26, 2009]
Trost and Djerassi are two of the rock stars of organic chemistry. When such people “go nuclear” in their open personal criticism, it is so compelling that you can’t help but take notice. Far from being unseemly, I think this kind of thing is healthy for the field. Neglecting key early workers while trotting your own references up to the front of the line is a kind of misdemeanor racketeering of scholarship. If true, Djerassi has a good point.
But, I can sympathize with Trost to some extent. Eventually, past progress becomes part of the background. Do we have to cite Henry Gilman everytime we use BuLi to remove a proton? There must be some juicy backstory that has Djerassi riled.
Lamentations on Chemistry 
Petit worked for Djerassi, thus his interest in seeing his protege cited correctly. Interestingly, Djerassi and Trost are members of the same faculty and couldn’t settle this behind closed doors and the Leland Stanford University.
The plot thickens.
my best guess is that these two HAVE had similar arguments behind closed doors; probably for years.
Well, I guess I should be glad that my grad school wasn’t the only place where the professors couldn’t play nicely. Why couldn’t Djerassi and Trost have just gotten a deathmatch together in Halo or Wii Boxing and left it at that?
As someone noted on The Chem Blog, Pettit’s story is more than a little interesting in itself. I figure that FSU and ASU ought to pitch in together for recruitment visits. “Bring your own money. We promise we won’t take it (all).”
Professors could easily sell tickets to a Wii Boxing grudge match. . .what a fabulous idea!
Those fools should be placed next to each other in the grave-yard.
The below link was the funniest thing I saw all day. If you don’t know what TARP is, you shouldn’t bother.
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/02/tarp-visualized.html
Having first-hand experience, I can say that that Prof. Trost is not a very nice person. It’s also hilarious that his lab the floor underneath Prof. Wender’s lab at Stanford, since they hate each others’ guts. As far as I know, that stems from the same issue as this–a Trost group member borrowed a compound from the Wender group, used in their (Trost group’s) total synthesis of a compound, and didn’t acknowledge/cite Wender for the compound.
wow.
was this compound bromine, a catalyst, alanine or some multi-step product kind of thing?