Sweet Sorrow.

The death of Raymond Lemieux, FCIC, covered in the September 2000 issue of ACCN, elicited much response from readers. Below, Christopher K. Jankowski, FCIC, offers his perspective on this great scientist.

To most of us, Professor Raymond U. Lemieux was known, with much respect and admiration,

as 'Sugar Ray'. In conversation he always denied having been a boxer, despite his characteristic nose and square shoulders, but he did once practice hockey and more recently golf. But above all he practised sweet sugar chemistry. In this area he probably touched everything -- synthesis, spectroscopy, blood group sugars, immunology, molecular recognition, and joint venture university--industry entrepreneurship. In all these areas he was a pioneer who faced novel challenges and achieved the goals faster, ahead of others and in a more elegant manner.

In his autobiography [1], an interesting book to read for chemists and non-chemists, Professor Lemieux described his travels through life's milestones: his Alberta birthplace, a McGill doctorate, an Ohio State postdoctoral position with Professor Wolfrom, his first academic appointment at University of Saskatchewan (Saskatoon), and professorships at University of Ottawa then, finally, U of Alberta.

His chemical heritage is extremely diverse. He will be remembered as being extremely productive in sugar synthesis (total as well as transformations), for his elegant steriochemical contributions to the conformational analysis of cyclic compounds, for general carbohydrate chemistry, aminosugars, antibiotics and blood group determinants.

It is difficult to pick up the single-most important paper of Professor Lemieux. In a rare book review (in 1995), Sir Derek H.R. Barton confesses to the same difficulty in choosing Lemieux's most important contribution to chemistry. The fact that Sir Derek wrote a five-page review of Exploration with Sugars: How Sweet It Was [2] indicates his own high evaluation of Professor Lemieux's contributions to science. And this fact alone means a lot more coming from Barton's egocentric pen.

Professor Lemieux will be remembered by all those who teach organic chemistry and spectroscopy in North America because of the anomeric effect and widely publicized proton spin-spin decoupling spectra in Silverstein and Bassler's textbook Spectroscopic Identification of Organic Compounds. This is an elegant demonstration of how NMR helps to visualize the pyranose cycle chair conformation.

He was often helping younger chemists, offering his demolishing criticisms back-to-back with words of encouragement. I do remember him pointing out to me the synthetic beauty and utility of one of his own products (commercialized first by Raylo), unsaturated sugar triacetyl glucals, which served as an important synthons in sugar synthesis. He was often a messenger of good or bad news from the committees; not particularly liking the administrative part of academic life, he always found the words in French or English to wrap up gently the less positive news. This demanding teacher and research director has left numerous disciples now exercising our unique profession in Canadian and American universities.

I will remember Professor Lemieux particularly from Moncton and Vancouver conferences, where as a speaker he showed his exceptional sense of humour. In a less formal atmosphere I compared him to the Colas Breugnon of organic chemistry. "Breugnon?" Lemieux answered jokingly. "What university is he from?"

He was awarded most of the high-ranking chemical awards in United States and Canada, as well as almost 20 honorary doctorates from Europe and America, and unprecedented PhD from his own Alma Maters (McGill, Saskatchewan, Ottawa and Alberta). Professor Lemieux was certainly one of the front-row candidates for another Canadian Nobel Prize. Did the fact that his pioneering work in molecular recognition, linking immunology to chemistry, the blood group determinants and lectin I with all his synthetic and spectroscopic work, create the difficult problem of deciding which Nobel Prize he could fit better -- medicine or chemistry?

In fact, he suffered from a lack of fast molecular recognition by the Academy.

For all of us, he also will be a model for the newer kind of university professor, successfully able to marry the creation of our own companies with work on fundamental problems of our specialty.

Many have tried this, not very successfully, and not without sacrificing one aspect of our career: teaching, graduate-student mentoring, or fundamental research.

Today, with 500 MHz NMR spectrometers, not very many remember that once the axial and equatorial protons of glucose acetates were not seen separately. Professor Lemieux's report of diaxial couplings in the 1950s showed what we can do today with NMR in configurational and conformational analysis.

His work on the anomeric effect was an extension of his postdoc questioning, and pushed the discussion on this subject to a higher level -- the solvent effect, exoanomeric effects, the conformation-reactivity relation. Just one step toward molecular recognition -- a new popular wording unknown in the 1950s.

Professor Lemieux was one of the most prominent chemists of the second half of the twentieth century whose rich and diversified chemical heritage will follow us through the sweet sugar chemistry of the twenty-first.

References

(1.) Lemieux, R.U., 'Explorations with Sugars: How Sweet It Was', Profiles and Dreams, American Chemical Society, 1990.

(2.) Barton, D.H.R., 'Raymond U. Lemieux--Explorations With Sugars,' Tetrahedron News, 5: 4-12, 1995.

Christopher K. Jankowski, FCIC, is a professor of organic chemistry at Universite de Moncton.