Hugh Felkin

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Hugh Felkin (born January 18, 1922 in Neuilly ; † November 9, 2001 ) was a British chemist working in France ( organic chemistry , stereochemistry , organometallic catalysis).

Felkin went to school in England , studied chemistry in Switzerland during the Second World War, graduating in 1944 in Geneva and then went to France, where he did research for the CNRS from 1947 to 1990 . He was first in Bianca Tchoubar's group at Jeanne Lévy's laboratory at the Medical Faculty in Paris , where he worked on stereochemistry . In 1954 he received his doctorate. In 1955 he became the Chargé de recherche en 1955 and 1959 maître de recherche. Most recently he was research director (class exceptionelle) at the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles in Gif-sur-Yvette, where he had been since the mid-1960s. There he dealt with organometallic chemistry , in the mid-1960s with Grignard reactions with nickel complexes and later with activation of alkanes with rhodium and iridium complexes, among other things .

He worked closely with Malcolm LH Green on organometallic catalysis with transition metals in the 1970s . In 1975 they organized one of the first major international conferences on this in Saint-Raphael .

He is best known for the Felkin-Anh rule proposed in 1967 (expanded in the early 1970s by Nguyên Trong Anh and Odile Eisenstein ), a model for predicting the stereochemistry for nucleophilic addition in carbonyl compounds. She expanded and corrected a rule by Donald J. Cram . Felkin dealt with this topic from around 1958 to 1970.

He married the chemist Irène Elphimoff in France, with whom he had a daughter (born 1962). With his wife he received the Prix Le Bel of the French Chemical Society in 1954. He was a member of the Communist Party until the crackdown on the Prague Spring in August 1968.

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personal data
SURNAME Felkin, Hugh
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British chemist
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Neuilly
DATE OF DEATH November 9, 2001