Peter Pauson

Peter Ludwig Israel Pauson (born July 30, 1925 in Bamberg ; † December 10, 2013 in Glasgow ) was a German-British chemist who was a professor at the University of Strathclyde and is known for contributions to organometallic chemistry . He is one of the discoverers of ferrocene .

life and work

Pauson was a Jewish emigrant from Bamberg who came to England with his family in 1939 before the persecution of the National Socialists. He studied from 1942 in Glasgow, where he turned to organic chemistry under the influence of Thomas Stevens Stevens (1900-2000), and from 1946 at the University of Sheffield , where he received his doctorate in 1949 with Robert Downs Haworth (1898-1990) a work on purpurogallin (and tropolones derived from it ). He then went to Duquesne University near Pittsburgh, where he intended to study aromatic compounds that are not derived from the benzene structure (such as tropolones). As a post-doctoral student he was at the University of Chicago in 1951/52 with Morris S. Kharasch (1895-1957), where he worked on peroxides, and then as a Du Pont Fellow at Harvard University and at the laboratories of Du Pont in Wilmington before returning to the UK and becoming a lecturer at the University of Sheffield. He was later a professor at the University of Strathclyde, where he retired in 1995 and was then a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow.

In 1951 he and his student Tom J. Kealy at Duquesne University synthesized ferrocene , the first synthesis of an organometallic sandwich compound ( metallocenes ). The discovery came about by chance during experiments on fulvalene synthesis. Both published their discovery in December 1951 in Nature (Volume 168, pp. 1039-1040), a little later Samuel A. Miller, John A. Tebboth and John F. Tremaine published the independent discovery. The sandwich structure was recognized soon after by Geoffrey Wilkinson and Robert B. Woodward at Harvard (with Myron Rosenblum, Mark C. Whiting) and, independently, by Ernst Otto Fischer and Wolfgang Pfab in Munich. The proposed sandwich structure was completely new at the time and immediately opened up a new field of research with the synthesis of similar compounds.

The Pauson-Khand reaction ( cyclopentenone - annulation ) is named after him and his Pakistani doctoral student Ihsan U. Khand .

He had been a member of the Leopoldina since 1976 .

literature

• Helmut Werner, Obituary in Angewandte Chemie, Volume 53, 2014, 3309
• Peter Pauson: Organometallic Chemistry , New York, St. Martin´s Press 1967

Web links

• Chemistry Tree

Individual evidence

1. ^ Christel Dell, Danny Weber, Thomas Wilde: Deceased members and honorary patrons . List of members and honorary patrons who died between July 31, 2013 and June 30, 2015. In: Jörg Hacker (Ed.): German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina . Structure and members. German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina eV, Halle (Saale) 2015, p. 347 ( leopoldina.org [PDF; accessed September 25, 2016]).
2. ↑ Miller, Tebboth, Tremaine, J. Chem. Soc., 1952, 632-635
3. ^ Pierre Laszlo, Roald Hoffmann Ferrocene: Ironclad story or Rashomon Tale? , Angew. Chemistry, Int. Edition, 39, 2000, pp. 123-124, pdf
4. ^ Pauson, Ferrocene — how it all began , J. Organomet. Chem., 2001, 637-639. Pp. 3-6
5. ↑ Wilkinson, Rosenblum, Whiting, Woodward, J. Am. Chem. Soc., Vol. 74, 1952, pp. 2125-2126. The name ferrocene comes from Whiting, in Woodward, Rosenblum, Whiting J. Am. Chem. Soc., 74, 1952, 3458
6. ↑ According to Pauson, the sandwich structure was also orally suggested to him by William von Eggers Doering in September 1951 before its publication, without Pauson at the time realizing the full meaning of the communication
7. ↑ And initially met with skepticism from leading structural chemists like Jack D. Dunitz . Dunitz carried out an X-ray structure analysis which confirmed this. Pauson himself gave the substance he had discovered to JM Robertson for X-ray structure analysis, but he left it to a student, which delayed the results from his laboratory so that others came first.