The guys at the Department of Chemistry at the University of California Irvine have really done themselves proud with this Parody of a Disney song. A Disney twist on an ode to Chemistry!

At this year’s Encaenia, Prof Jean-Marie Lehn was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Science. The citation is just beautiful (for everyone’s benefit they give the English paraphrase beside the Latin that is actually used during the ceremony). If you want to read all citations from the day look here.

“Chemists are artists because their task is not only to discover and analyse but also to create.”
 

Sculptorem hodie iam honestavimus, mox honestabimus inventorem musicae. Ecce chimicus qui suam scientiam et huius et illius arti comparavit. Ipse clavicymbalum dextere canit, et opera Arnoldi Schoenberg atque Albani Berg praecipue admirari dicitur; ex quo facile colligere possis eum et compagibus rerum implicatissimis gaudere et difficultates a plerisque declinatas acriter offendere.  Chimicos idcirco esse artifices dicit quia non solum res scrutari atque explicare sed etiam novam naturam creare quaerant. Itaque chimiam notis musicis comparat, quas fidicen ante intellegere et in sonos convertere non potest quam descripsit inventor.

Ipsum scit vulgus e quo tempore mundus magno illo fragore sit creatus atomos se in moleculas collegisse, e moleculis res varias et multiplices esse fictas. Multae tamen sunt res hominibus utilissimae quae naturaliter non creantur; quare chimicis opus est ut materies e qua omnia facta sunt intellegi mutari temperari possit. Lucretius demagistro suo ‘deus ille fuit, deus’ clamavit, quia rerum naturam explicare potuisset; tanto magis qui artem rerum novandarum cognoscunt, ei potestate quasi divina uti videntur. In qua arte hic vir maxime excellit; atqui dicit se minus moleculas ipsum disponere quam eis quasi suadere ut sua sponte nova fabricent. Caveas quidem construxit (sic docti eas vocant), non tamen ut moleculae tamquam in carcere coerceantur sed ut a plagis externis protegantur. Vir maxime ipse laudandus, studiosos chimiae propter hoc laudat: quae facta sunt, invenire quaerunt; quae sunt in praesenti, explorant; ad ea quae posthac fient, prospiciunt.

Praesento rerum minimarum scrutatorem oculatissimum, Iohannem Marium Lehn, apud Universitatem Argentoratensem quondam professorem, Collegio Francogallico honoris causa adscriptum, praemio Nobeliano nobilitatum, ut admittatur honoris causa ad gradum Doctoris in Scientia.

Admission by the Chancellor
Magister insignissime, qui supra moleculas dicionem benevolenter exerces, ego auctoritate mea et totius Universitatis admitto te ad gradum Doctoris in Scientia honoris causa.

Paraphrase
We have already awarded a degree today to a sculptor, and shall shortly award another to a composer. Here is a chemist who has compared his own subject to both their arts. He is himself an excellent pianist, and is said to be an especial admirer of Berg and Schoenberg; from which one may readily deduce both that he enjoys complex structures and that he readily encounters difficulties that most people shun. He argues that chemists are artists because their task is not only to discover and analyse but also to create. And thus he compares chemistry to a musical score which the player reads and interprets but which must also be composed.

Even the layman knows that from the time of the big bang atoms have coalesced into molecules, and molecules have developed into more diverse and complex structures. But many chemicals of great benefit to humanity are not found in nature, and chemists are accordingly needed to understand material phenomena and to change and control them. Lucretius declared that his own master was ‘a god, a god, I say’, for having understood the nature of matter; all the more do those who possess the art of making new matter seem to have a kind of godlike power. Our honorand excels in this art, and yet he describes it as less a matter of organising molecules than of persuading them to organise themselves into new structures. He has built ‘cages’ (as the scientists call them), not however to imprison his molecules but to protect them by keeping external forces out. Deserving in himself of the highest praise, he praises his subject for interrogating the past, exploring the present, and working toward the future. I present a keen-eyed investigator of small things, Jean-Marie Lehn, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, Emeritus Professor at the Collège de France, Nobel Laureate, to be admitted to the honorary degree of Doctor of Science.

Admission by the Chancellor
Eminent master, who exercise a benign sway over the molecules, I on my own authority and that of the whole University admit you to the honorary degree of Doctor of Science.

Sometimes solid state chemistry is beautiful. Like today when I finished a series of titanium dioxide thin films of different thicknesses and got the equivalent of a rainbow. And yes, that is my hand reflected in them.

A while ago I ventured into the Japanese mountains to a strange place called SPring-8 for HAXPES experiments on various metal oxide systems. Besides warning signs mentioning wild boar and deer attacks and the lack of sleep we managed to acquire amazing HAXPES data. A part of this work, on Chris Poll’s (Imperial College London) IrO₂ samples, has just been published in PRL.

Some of the work done on MBE-grown indium oxide at the XMaS beamline at the ESRF has been highlighted in their annual report.

And finally the story of thallium doped/alloyed In₂O₃ has found its end in a publication in APL.

Is it the next transparent conducting oxide? Who knows, but lets just say that I am not OVERLY optimistic due to its lovely “health benefits”.

Themis Prodromakis’ group at Southampton is currently looking for applicants for a PhD in Bio-inspired Nanosensors. If you are interested check out the details here.

This year’s Nobel Prize goes to the field of computational chemistry. It seems very important to point out that the prize was awarded to a field rather than individuals. The last Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to computational chemistry went to Walter Kohn and John A Pople for the development of the density-functional theory and of computational methods in quantum chemistry. A lot has been written about the importance of computational chemistry to nearly every chemist out there, so I will spare you another analysis like this.

But I came across one bit of information, that was very interesting for me personally, being an Austrian citizen. This years winners, Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, all work in the US but have multiple nationalities. Due to the geographical link and sharing the same country of birth, I read Martin Karplus’ biography, which was published in Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure.

Martin Karplus was born in Vienna and in his biography he describes a lovely (and very Austrian) childhood. Sadly, as so many other great scientists and thinkers, he and his family had to flee Austria after the Anschluss, first moved to Switzerland and then to the US. One of the most moving statements in his biography is his perception of past and present Austria: “To this day, more than 65 years later, I have mixed feelings about visiting Austria, which I rarely do, because anti-Semitism seems nearly as prevalent now as it was then.” He wrote this in 2006.

You can find the complete text here.