America-Israel Patent Law Blog

I’ve been writing this blog on and off for over ten years, and I don’t think that until now I’ve strayed beyond IP-related things.  I guess there’s a first time for everything.

I was a chemistry major in college.  My favorite course was my sophomore year organic chemistry course, a fact due at least as much to Maitland Jones’ teaching as the subject matter.  I was sufficiently into it that when we got around to studying Diels-Alder and related reactions, and the Woodward-Hoffman rules that explained those reactions, I actually went to the library and checked out Woodward and Hoffmann’s classic “The Conservation of Orbital Symmetry”, which I read cover-to-cover. 

Note that I mentioned Diels, Alder , Woodward and Hoffmann.  Orgo was full of reactions, reagents and phenomena named after the people who discovered them or who devised rules explaining a large set of observations.  Brønsted-Lowry acids and bases. The Cope rearrangement. Tollens’ reagent.  In fact, prompted by the piece I link to a little later, I went back to my sophomore year orgo book, which was published in 1984, and found the following reactions, reagents and phenomena listed in the index:

What caused me to look up and compile this list?  It was this write-up in Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly publication that goes out to members of the American Chemical Society, of a recent podcast hosted by C&EN.  The “issue?”  That orgo has all these name reactions, and the names are all those of white men.  Here’s one of the money quotes, from a woman with a PhD who is the head of the student lab courses at North Carolina State:

“All the name reactions that we teach in organic one and organic two are named after all white men. So I find that very discouraging to women in the field or people of color in the field because it looks like nobody’s ever going to name a reaction around your name.”

That thinking is muddled, in several ways.  First, many of those name reactions were discovered at a time when very few women were working in the field, when most of the work in chemistry was being done in Germany and France and Russia and England, and now that those reactions have been discovered, they can’t be discovered again. So that precludes not only women from getting those now-known reactions named after them, but also precludes men – of any skin color – from getting those now-known reactions named after them.

Second, who gives a hoot about the gender or the skin color of the people who discovered the reactions, and why should the fact that historically light-skinned men were active in organic syntheses discourage anyone nowadays?  Nothing is presently preventing women, or men, or platypuses, of any shape, size or skin melanin concentration from discovering new reactions. In fact, the article itself notes that the namesake of one of the more recently named reactions is Carolyn Bertozzi, a professor at Stanford.  I wouldn’t mind having a reaction named after me, but gosh, I haven’t discovered one. The small likelihood of having a reaction named after me was not what led me to pursue a career outside the laboratory.

Third, the attitude evidenced by the woman from NC State reflects a trend, currently in vogue, to try to erase history. That might have flown in the USSR, but it doesn’t fly in societies that are honest about their past.  Chemistry in the 19th century was mostly done by men in Europe and Russia.  Why should we pretend otherwise?

Instead of whining about how there are all these reactions named after men, Ms. Student Lab Course should take note of the fact that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year is going to two women for their contributions to the development of CRISPR-Cas9 technology.  If she thinks female students need more encouragement, that ought to do it.