Chem 3520 Nobel Prize Paper
Chemicals in 3D Vision The Nobel Prize in Organic Chemistry for the discovery of chemicals in 3D vision was awarded to Derek Barton and Odd Hassel in 1969. This was the breakthrough in visualizing the way chemicals could be interpreted. Before their phenomenal discovery, people could only think of seeing a chemical such as cyclohexane in its planar, flat, 2D form. What Barton and Hassel found that was different from the universal perspective of this chemical was the infamous boat conformation. This boat conformation of cyclohexane gave a whole look at the chemical and a new understanding of how it moves and reacts with neighboring chemicals, which is how they also found the equally infamous chair conformation. …show more content…
His parents were William Thomas Barton and Maude Henrietta Barton. He went to Imperial College, University of London and earned a Ph. D. of organic chemistry in 1942. In 1949, he earned his D. Sc. from the same university. Barton held many positions from various colleges and did various assignments of research through his years. Then he was appointed as the Professor of Organic Chemistry at Imperial College in 1957. In 1950, Barton wrote a short paper with the title, “The Conformation of the Steroid Nucleus,” which showed how organic molecules could be assigned a conformation according to the information that was given by chemical physicists. The physicist he worked with was Odd Hassel. They found that in molecules with fixed rings, there was a relationship between configuration and confirmation. Once the confirmations could be found for a molecule, the configuration of that molecule could be found. This is when the whole subject of conformational analysis started, which lead to the Nobel Prize of 1969. Derek Barton had two marriages, his first to Jeanne Kate Wilkins and his second to Christiane Cognet. He had a son named W.G.L. Barton. Derek Richard Harold Barton died on March 16, …show more content…
His parents were Ernst Hassel and Mathilde nee Klaveness. His father was a physician with a specialization in gynecology. Hassel began attending the University of Oslo in 1915, and he studied mathematics and physics with chemistry being his main subject of study. After he graduated in 1920, he did an extensive amount of research and laboratory work between the years of 1922 to 1934, when he was appointed the chair and head of physical chemistry in Oslo, which was the first chair there was in Norway. He remained the chair of physical chemistry until 1964. During Hassel’s early years, he was mainly interested in the subject of teaching inorganic chemistry until about 1930. After this point, he began concentrating on topics involving molecular structure, specifically dealing with cyclohexane and other chemicals with six carbon rings within them. Hassel had gathered together enough information to publish a short paper on more knowledgeable reasoning to find possible configurations, or conformations, in 1943. This was right before he has arrested by Norwegian Nazis and later released by the Germans in November of 1944, when he returned to see that the institute was mostly deserted. In the 1950’s, Hassel began studying more into electron-donor molecules like ethers and amines, and he also began studying electron acceptors like halogens and halides. With years of hard work, this became his main field of