A new academic year has started and with it comes the usual yearly change in our research team. Our 5 honours students have successfullly graduated and, except for Hong Lee, all have left the group to venture into new areas. Hong Lee is pursueing his PhD degree as a member of our the group. All the best to you all.

In addition, we welcome 5 new honours students into our team. Work hard and succeed.

Our Merlion collaborative project with Prof Christophe Darcel from “Sciences Chimiques de Rennes” is the only chemistry project selected for the year 2008 by the French Embassy in Singapore. With this award both teams will receive funding for overseas travels to setup a collaboration.

Han Yuan’s 7th paper entitled “Ag(I) and Pd(II) Complexes of a 1,3-Dibenzhydryl Substituted Benzannulated N-Heterocyclic Carbene: Unexpected Rearrangement, Structures and Catalytic Studies” has been accepted for publication in Journal of Organometallic Chemistry and is already available online. It features Desmond as co-author as well.

A group dinner at Muthu’s Curry after the honors and UROPS students have finished their projects.
Such an event seems to have become a tradition of Huynh’s group. As the “oldest” student member in this group, I still remembered almost three years ago the three girls Chun Hui, Hui Xian and Ling Rong treated boss and me at Sakae Sushi happily after they finished their FYP. Four of us girls had a great time that year. At that time boss is the only guy in this group, hehe. In the following year, Basu joined. And then Andrew and Desmond joined as honors students. As a result, I became the only girl in our group that year. When Andrew and Desmond finished their FYP, they treated us at Samy’s Curry. It was my first time to eat curry fish head, hehe. But I realized it was too spicy for me. Time flies. Now it is my fourth year already. Looking at the group photos, I am happy to see our group growing. Our group looks really “big” on this year’s photo, with three graduate students in there, hehe.

Students who want to join our team for their final year project, should ask themselves the following questions:

1. Am I really interested in synthetic chemistry, which combines the classical areas of organic and inorganic chemistry?
2. Am I willing to work hard in the lab and learn new things to achieve the objective of the project?
3. Am I a good team-member?

If you can answer all three questions with a confident “yes”, you are welcome to contact us for more details about potential FYP projects.

All projects will be of synthetic nature, which requires you to actively “work” in the lab with proper personal protective equipments such as a labcoats and safety googles. The synthesized compounds will mainly be analyzed by multi-nuclei NMR spectroscopies, ESI mass spectrometry and single crystal X-ray diffraction.

After many many years, the results of Pearly’s and Ling Rong’s Honours projects on Ni(II)-NHCs have finally been published in Organometallics. The paper entitled “Anagostic Interactions and Catalytic Activities of Sterically Bulky Benzannulated N-Heterocyclic Carbene Complexes of Nickel(II)” is now available as an Organometallics ASAP online article.

Han Yuan’s article “Palladium(II) Pyrazolin-4-ylidenes: Remote N-Heterocyclic Carbene Complexes and Their Catalytic Application in Aqueous Suzuki-Miyaura Coupling“, published in Organometallics is being featured on the ACS Publications website as a Most-Accessed Article for the fourth-quarter (Oct-Dec) of 2007.

The recent years have seen some very extreme fraud cases, most of which were related to bio-related research. For example, in 2006 South Korean stem cell scientist Dr Hwang Woosuk was caught having fabricated results for his two Science papers published in 2004 and 2005. While some people (e.g. Norwegian Jon Sudbø) have been stripped of their doctorate degree for plagiarism and fraud, it is indeed surprising that he is even able to continue to work in some research institute. This sad fraud series continued very recently with a case involving Dr Kim Tae-kook, another South Korean scientist and ironically “self-acclaimed admirer” of Dr Hwang. Kim published his fraudulent results describing nanoparticles that can be used to probe molecular behavior inside cells ultimately allowing for the identification of novel drug targets (Science 2005). Another fabricated paper was published in Nature Chemical Biology in July 2006.
Disturbingly, Chemistry also has its share of frauds. Former Dr Guido Zadel is still infamous for his irreproducible “enantioselective synthesis in a magnetic field”, which was published in 1994 and subsequently retracted from Angewandte Chemie. Maybe it was his “aura” that led to high ee. More recently, James J. LaClair stirred the organic chemical community with his singled authored and thus “heroic” communication on the full synthesis of hexacyclinol in Angewandte Chemie 2006. John A. Porco Jr. and Scott D. Rychnovsky subsequently proved him and his (fabricated?) NMR data wrong, and yet LaClair has not retracted his paper. At least Dalibor Sames retracted some of his irreproducible papers from the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS, 5 papers!) and Organic Letters (1 paper) co-authored by his former PhD student Sezen, whom he accused of providing fabricated data. Maybe, they are still arguing about “which brand of coffee beans to use to make a good expresso”.
However, the most recent and the worse fraud case in chemistry so far has just been reported in early 2008 and investigations are still on-going. Chiranjeevi, a professor of chemistry at Sri Venkateswara University (SVU), Tirupati was found guilty of having plagiarized and fabricated results in >70 papers (!!!), some of which appeared in Talanta, Food Chemistry and Analytica Chimica Acta. All these developments are extremely worrying, but I am sure there are more of these desperate guys out there, who act without any integrity and honesty. Let’s hope that true science will find these culprits.