Reflections

This section collects the essays from Reflections from the Frontiers (Explorations for the Future: Gordon Research Conferences 1931-2006), GRC's 75th anniversary commemorative publication.

Reflections on Matter
Edel Wasserman
Edel Wasserman
DuPont (retired)
Scientific Synergism

Gordon Research Conferences continue to be among the most stimulating and rewarding of scientific gatherings. GRC provides dedicated meetings for well-established, active fields and was one of the first organizations to create conferences (to which new participants are attracted) for emerging, often multidisciplinary research areas. In the 1960s two subjects were centers of increasing activity: photochemistry and magnetic resonance. Stimulated by the Photochemistry Gordon Conference that began in 1964 (known as Organic Photochemistry until 2001) and the Magnetic Resonance Gordon Conference that started in 1958, both of these fields were extended by multidisciplinary efforts. Individually, both of these meetings were of great value to a number of scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where I worked at the time. Together, the two series helped develop a unique research focus on the combination of photochemistry and magnetic resonance.

In photochemistry connections were being made between the excited states of starting molecules and reaction products. The earlier, largely empirical approach of the field (as developed by organic chemists) was changing into a combination of organic and physical chemistry, especially in the use of spectroscopy. The laboratories of George Hammond at the California Institute of Technology and of George Porter at the University of Sheffield and the Royal Institution in England played major roles in the early Photochemistry Conferences, the first of which was chaired by Tony Trozzolo of Bell Lab-oratories. The opportunity to learn from and teach one another in the mutually supportive atmosphere of these conferences facilitated rapid progress. Newcomers to the science could consider how recent developments in photochemistry could be applied in their own fields.

The study of magnetic resonance in condensed phases effectively began in the late 1940s as a discipline within physics. During the 1950s chemically distinct nuclei and their neighboring atoms could be identified; this information was of great importance for chemists. At the Magnetic Resonance Conferences chemists learned from physicists the fundamentals of the field and the wide-ranging techniques that were becoming available. Anatole Abragam, Nicolaas Bloembergen, Ray Orbach, and John S. Waugh were among the leaders who participated. The chemists could apply their newly acquired knowledge to larger molecules, while the physicists acquired new structures and phenomena to study. The cross-disciplinary fertilization stimulated by these conferences was beneficial to both groups and has continued for five decades.

In the 1960s Bell Labs was a major center for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and the largest customer of Varian, Inc., the primary manufacturer of NMR instrumentation. Dave McCall, Bill Slichter, and Dean Douglass studied organic polymers at Bell Labs; Bill Yager, a physicist who had pioneered in the paramagnetic resonance examination of organic free radicals, was a few doors away. Located along the same corridor at Bell, Bob Murray, Gerry Smolinsky, and Tony Trozzolo were studying carbene and nitrene chemistry. Missing two bonds with hydrogen, many of the carbene and nitrene species had two unpaired electrons and were ground-state triplets. Independently, Trozzolo and I had developed interest in their electronic structures and how to detect them. Valued theoretical in-put came from Larry Snyder and Si Glarum. Following an unexpected but thoughtfully pursued paramagnetic resonance observation by Yager, we developed a facile and efficient route for obtaining the most important triplet parameters. Months after we completed our first studies, we learned that physicists had been using similar methodology primarily in the study of inorganic structures. Even with contributions from the Gordon Conferences, communication across fields was imperfect.

This combination of photochemical generation of triplet systems with paramagnetic detection was unusually productive and continued over the next decade in several different directions. One highlight was elucidating the now generally accepted structure of the parent carbene (CH2). Another was the formation and study of di- and tri-carbenes and nitrenes, now often referred to as “organic ferromagnets” because of their high spin states.

For those of us who attended the conferences, there was an additional bonus: on returning to Bell Labs we continued discussions with colleagues. Chatting with them and with other preeminent practitioners was a major activity, and we became each other’s teachers and students. An electric atmosphere existed at Bell and at some other industrial laboratories. The stimulation yielded combinations of existing fields, which became new disciplines. Unfortunately that era of basic industrial research has passed. But new trends in academia have led to interdisciplinary centers and industrial-academic collaborations with highly productive environments. These will be critical for the future of science and for industry.