Richard f heck biography of rory

Richard F. Heck, a giant in the field of organic chemistry, died on October 9, His investigations laid the groundwork for all catalytic, organometallic, bond-forming processes that are used currently in modern organic synthesis. The epic importance of catalytic palladium-mediated, carbon-carbon bond formation only slowly became apparent to the organic synthesis community.

Foreign correspondent

When his Organic Reactions chapter appeared in , coverage of all the literature required only 45 pages including tables! By , applications of his chemistry in synthesis had grown to the extent that the Organic Reactions chapter published that year, limited to the subset of intramolecular Heck Reactions, covered pages. Moreover, the original 45 page chapter, despite its size, it is the most highly cited chapter in the Organic Reactions series with over citations!

Professor Heck received number of awards for his seminal contributions to chemistry, most notably sharing the Chemistry Nobel Prize in Among his many professional activities, he served as a member of the Editorial Board of Organic Reactions , Inc. On a personal note, Dick Heck had already been publishing on palladium-catalyzed carbon-carbon bond formation for ten years, at the time that I joined the chemistry faculty of the University of Delaware in It was apparent that the intramolecular Heck reaction could be a powerful transformation.

I sketched out some possible applications to Dick and offered to help his students, but he was not interested.