Post by Lives in Chemistry

🎁HBT K. C. Nicolaou, who turns 80 today. Born in Cyprus on July 5, 1946, K. C. left his home country in 1964 to study chemistry at the University of London; there he received his PhD in 1972 for work with Peter Garratt and Franz Sondheimer on macrocyclic hydrocarbons with allene moieties. For postdoctoral work, he travelled further west to join first Tom Katz’s group at Columbia University (1972/73) and then, from 1973 to 1976, E. J. Corey’s group at Harvard University. From 1976 to 1989, he rose through the ranks of the chemistry faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, from assistant to full professor. In 1989, he moved even further west to join the chemistry department of the University of California, UC San Diego, and to build up, together with Richard Lerner, a first-class chemistry department at The Scripps Research Institute. For a couple of years, Nicolaou also led a laboratory in Singapore in parallel with the one at Scripps. Finally, in 2013, he moved to the chemistry department of Rice University in Houston, from which he retired this year. K. C. is famous for having developed new synthetic methods for organic synthesis and, in particular, for pushing “the art of total synthesis”. In sometimes fierce competition with other top groups in the field, the Nicolaou team often finished first—and elegantly so—in the total synthesis of many important natural products, e.g. Calicheamicin, Taxol, Brevetoxin B, Epothilone, and Vancomycin, to name a few. K. C. Nicolaou is also famous for writing captivating and stimulating reviews about the total syntheses his team achieved, and even more for writing the textbook-like four-volume series, with different co-authors in each case, “Classics in Total Synthesis”; the wonderfully illustrated “Molecules That Changed the World”, which Nicolaou co-authored with T. Montagnon, presents the art of organic synthesis to a wider audience. His achievements earned him several academy memberships and many other honors, including the Linus Pauling Award in 1996, the Arthur C. Cope Award in 2005, and the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2016. More recently, K. C. Nicolaou has published his autobiography, “The Peripatetic: Chasing the Molecules of Nature”. Left: Masakatsu Shibasaki, University of Tokyo; K. C. Nicolaou; and George A. Olah, University of Southern California (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1994), at Pacifichem 2005. Right: K. C. Nicolaou with his wife at the same meeting. Photos by Mario Müller.