What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
If you’re an organic chemist, quite a lot, as it happens! Learning ‘organic named reactions’ is a rite of passage for all undergraduate level chemists. Named reactions are so called because they are (mostly) named after their discoverer, like say the Beckmann Rearrangement.
Or they have names that actually describe what is going on, such as the aldol condensation: where an aldehyde or ketone condenses with another carbonyl compound to make an aldol. Subsequent elimination leaves a C=C conjugated bond.
We’ve decided to create a compendium of these reactions, learned (and mostly loathed) by chemistry students through the ages. Rather than a ‘by the numbers’ recitation of the reactants, products, conditions and mechanisms, we’ll aim to shed light on the actual science that went into their discovery. Learning stuff by rote is never fun, and we hope to lighten the burden by not forgetting that science is a human story, first and foremost.
And the name of this massive and essential resource? The ‘Organomicon’! The Book of (Mostly) Dead Names1. Most of the discoverers of these reactions have gone to the Great Chemistry Lab in the Sky. We’ll add to the list of eldritch horrors regularly!
So, if you’re studying or teaching chemistry to an advanced level, or you just like looking at pretty pictures of molecules doing fun things, then bookmark this blog.
And we’ll be making available a companion Chem4Word Library at a very reasonable cost!
- Fantasy and horror fans will recognise the reference to the Necronomicon. This, despite what many will tell you, does not exist! ↩︎