🌻A great loss: Armin de Meijere passed away at age 86 on December 17 in Göttingen. Born in Duisburg, not too far away from the Netherlands, hence his Dutch name. His distinguished career spanned both the golden age of physical organic chemistry and the rise of transition-metal catalysis. De Meijere studied chemistry at the Universities of Freiburg @UniFreiburg and Göttingen, where he received his PhD in 1966 under Wolfgang Lüttke for spectroscopic and electron-diffraction studies. After a postdoc with Ken Wiberg at @Yale Univ., he embarked on his academic career: Habilitation (1971) and first professorship in Göttingen (1974) were followed by full professorships at the Univ. of Hamburg (1977–1989) before returning to Göttingen, where he remained until his retirement in 2006. De Meijere was famous for studies on highly strained polycyclic small-ring hydrocarbons, for developing new synthetic methods using cyclopropane and cyclopropene building blocks on the one hand and for transition metal—Pd in particular—catalyzed reactions on the other hand. He used such methods in the #TotalSynthesis of natural products and bioactive compounds. As early as 1976, his group reported a gold-catalyzed rearrangement, and soon after a photochemical trifluoromethylation—both notably ahead of their time. A plethora of fascinating three-membered ring-based molecules were synthesized, like polyrotanes and propellanes; acepentalene was first synthesized in his group, among many other achievements. De Meijere received numerous awards, including the Adolf von Bayer Medal of the GDCh @GDCh_aktuell. Around 250 PhD students and postdocs have lost an exceptional mentor—and chemistry has lost a giant.

I'm thrilled to share that Christian Ducho of @ducholab and I have been elected co-vice chairs of the @GordonConf on Nucleosides, Nucleotides and Oligonucleotides for 2027 and we'll be co-chairs in 2029! Thanks to the community for choosing us to lead this truly great meeting!

Our Pick of the Week, published #OpenAccess in #ChemMedChem by Christian Ducho (@Saar_Uni): "Getting the Numbers Right in Medicinal Chemistry" ow.ly/EHyU50U61C4

A #ChemMedChem (@ChemEurope) Perspective by @ducholab highlights the importance of the correct presentation of quantitative data in Medicinal Chemistry. chemistry-europe.onlinelibra…

#ChemMedChem Getting the Numbers Right in Medicinal Chemistry (Christian Ducho) @ducholab onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/…

Statement against the Boycott of Israeli Academics. Launched by a doctoral student at the Hebrew University, the list of signatories is very distinguished, and growing by the day. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F…

Monday rant: significant figures. Folks, please don’t report an IC50 as 5.027 nM in a paper. There’s no way your measurements are that precise. This is what happens when you blindly take curve fit output from software without thinking. For most assays, 2 sig figs is about right.

@JOC_OL The concept and design principle of the probes used in this work looks exceptionally close to our work from 2019 (chemistry-europe.onlinelibra…) and the independently published work of Tatiboet, Sabot and @SchulerMarie1 from 2019 (pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs…)