Welcome to the

Organic Division
Web Page

Division News and Upcoming Meetings:

Nominations Sought for the 2009 ACS Tech. Achieve. in Org. Chem. Award Program: Due December 31, 2008

The Organic Division of the American Chemical Society is seeking to increase the involvement of Bachelor's- and Master's-level chemists in Divisional activities. Although these chemists make important contributions in the workplace, they often receive little or no recognition for their efforts from the scientific community. In order to address this situation, the Organic Division has instituted an annual symposium at the Fall ACS meeting to recognize the achievements of non-Ph.D. chemists. We are now seeking nominations for the 2009 year's program.

The fifteenth annual Symposium on Technical Achievements in Organic Chemistry (TAOC) will be held during the 238th National Meeting of the ACS in Washington, DC (August 16-20, 2009). The invited speakers will present their recent discoveries in basic or development research during 30-minute presentations.

The deadline for receipt of nominations is December 31, 2008. Information is also available on the DOC Technical Achievement Webpage and/or the News release (PDF).

ORGN Officers Announced

The listing of the officers for the 2009 Organic Division Executive Committee is now available.

2009 DOC Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship Program

The Division of Organic Chemistry (DOC) of the American Chemical Society (ACS) will be sponsoring a summer undergraduate research fellowship (SURF) program beginning in 2009, awarding fellowships to talented undergraduates throughout the United States who have been nominated by their departments and selected by an evaluation committee. Financial support for the program is provided by industry and the Division of Organic Chemistry. These fellowships will provide support for undergraduates to carry out research at their respective colleges/universities in the summer between their junior and senior year. In addition, the fellowships will allow awardees to visit an industrial research center in the fall for formal reception of their award and to report on their summer research.

The deadline for receipt of nominations is February 2, 2009. Announcement of the awards will be made on March 16, 2009. Information on the program and application forms are available on the DOC SURF Webpage.

Registration is now open for the 41st National Organic Chemistry Symposium (NOS 2009)

Date: June 7-11, 2009
Location: Univ. of Colorado, Boulder
Early Registration: April 15, 2009
Poster Submission Registration: April 15, 2009
Website: http://www.nationalorganicsymposium.org/

2008-2009 Graduate Fellowship Award Winners: Webpage Updated

The 2008-9 Graduate Division of Organic Chemistry Fellow's bios, photos, and essays are now available. See: the 2008-9 Awardees Page. For a Complete list of all 349 DOC Graduate Fellows see: the Fellowship Awardee Page.

Abstracts and Travel Award Applications for the Fall 2009 ACS National Meeting will be due March 13.

Abstracts for the 238th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society to be held August 16-20, 2009 in Washington, D.C. Abstracts will be accepted starting January 19th, 2009 and are due online by Friday March 13, 2009. Submit abstracts using the Online Abstract Submittal System (OASYS) at http://oasys.acs.org/. Travel grant applications are also available for this meeting (Due March 13th) (See the Travel Awards page).

Molecules That Matter exhibit

The Chemical Heritage (CHF) Foundation's Museum in Philadelphia now has on display, until January 30th, the "Molecules That Matter" exhibit that showcases 10 organic molecules that profoundly altered our world: aspirin, isooctane, penicillin, polyethylene, nylon, DNA, progestin, DDT, Prozac, and buckminsterfullerene. The exhibit connects each molecule to one decade of the 20th century. For more information, visit CHF's page on the exhibit

Updated Version of ChemKey is Now Available

The latest version of Chemkey has just been uploaded onto the ACS website (now at 120,000 refs) which represents a 5,000 ref increase from the earlier 2007 version. The best way to update the database is delete the earlier version that currently resides on your computer, download the new one (see below), and replace all of the files with the ones that were be downloaded from the ACS site. This should take just a few minutes provided you have a fast internet connection.

Both Mac and PC versions are available. To obtain download information, you will need to log in at www.acs.org. If haven't done so before, create an account. You will need your membership number, which is on the upper left of your C&EN mailing label. The ACS system knows what divisions you belong to and you will see a link to the Organic Division sub portal. Click on this link and you will be on a page with a link to ChemKey and Separates of National ACS Meetings. From the ChemKey page, you can choose the option that is right for your computer. It takes less than three minutes to download the program and get it installed \1\4\3\2\5on your computer. More complete installation instructions are given on the ACS ChemKey page and are provided below.

For the Mac OS X Operating System: Download Chemkey09.sit to your Mac. Stuffit expander is necessary to unstuff the chemkey09.sit file. If you don't already have it, it can be downloaded freely from http://www.stuffit.com/mac/expander. Once the Chemkey folder is created, open it up and double click on the Chemkey file to open the program.

For the Windows Operating System: Download the compressed binary Chemkey09.exe to your PC. Open up the self-extracting Chemkey09.exe file to create the database into a folder entitled Chemkey. Make sure that all of the files are in the same directory. Open the Chemkey folder and double click on the Chemkey file to open the program.

The Organic Division and Professor Al Padwa from Emory University have arranged for all organic division members to have the Padwa ChemKey program free of charge. ChemKey was reviewed by JACS earlier this year. If you or your institution subscribe, you can download the review from http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ja076956s. Quoting the review, "ChemKey Search Database is a compilation by Albert Padwa and co-workers of 115,000 literature references covering organic synthesis, methodology, heterocycles, reactive intermediates, asymmetric synthesis, theory, and more. In summary, ChemKey Search Database is simple and fast to use, does not require an expensive subscription to an on-line database, and exists right on one's desktop computer. Its primary benefit is the rapid retrieval of key literature entry points for a given subject or author." I have found that it is often faster to get key references from ChemKey than from SciFinder because the completeness of SciFinder leads to the incorporation of many unimportant references. Each year the Chemkey database gets updated by 5,000 new references which will also be made available to the Organic ACS membership for free.

History of ORGN

A new page documenting some of the history of the Division of Organic Chemistry is now accessible from the navigation bar on the Division web site.

ACS Affiliated Meetings Symposia Support

On August 17, 2008, the Organic Division Executive Committee agreed to provide up to $1500 for support of organic symposia at ACS affiliated meetings. Please note that only multi-speaker symposia will be eligible for Division support. For details see the Meetings Support Page

Top 200 Brand-name and 200 Generic Drug Posters

Prof. Njaroarson and his research group at Cornell have released posters detailing the stuctures of the top 200 brand-name and the top 200 generic drugs for 2007. The new posters can be downloaded from: http://www.chem.cornell.edu/jn96/outreach.html along with the old ones. His group plans to update these posters each year.

Organic Events Calendar

We have implemented a new calendar feature for events that are pertainent for members of the Division of Organic Chemistry. The calendar will include important due dates and meetings for the Organic Division's activities as well as other events that we are made aware of such as those already being listed on the meetings page. Members can view the events using the calendar feature on the homepage of the Division's Web site or they can subscribe to the calendar using a desktop calendar application (i.e. Outlook or iCal) if the program reads ical or xml formatted files. Alternatively, an RSS reader can subscribe to the xml file, or the calendar can be viewed in html (Please see the links on the calendar feature).

Please contact the Division webmaster, Brian Myers, with comments on this new feature. If you would like to advertise your event, please contact the division's webmaster who will add it to the calendar.

Contact with ORGN Members

The primary means of communication with division members is via the web. Please check this web page often or subscribe to the RSS feed (See: http://www.organicdivision.org/DOC_RSS.html for more details). This web page is updated frequently, but we rarely send the entire membership an e-mail because of spam concerns.

NIH: Call for New Compounds for Biological Testing

NIH is interested in obtaining (10-20 mg samples of discreet, well-characterized) compounds from organic chemists (primarily academic researchers), for the purpose of biological screening via the NIH Molecular Libraries initiative. These compounds will be incorporated into the Molecular Libraries Small Molecule Repository (MLSMR), for distribution to the Molecular Libraries Screening Centers Network (MLSCN) and its successor, the Molecular Libraries Probe Production Centers Network (MLPCN). Each year, compounds will be exposed to 100 or more unique biological screens representing a huge swath of biology. The screens are solicited from the biological research community. This represents a great opportunity to discover biological activities that might not have been anticipated. Validated hits will provide opportunities for med. chem. followup studies that could lead to collaborative projects independent of the ML program. Of course, many of these projects will spawn new R01 grants. NIH is willing to pay $15 for each sample accepted into the MLSMR, and they are piloting a program for collection of samples by staff from the MLSMR to minimize the amount of grad student and/or postdoc time/effort required. For more information, see http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-RM-07-005.html and http://mli.nih.gov