Chemist Victor A. Snieckus of Kingston, Ontario, will be honored August 28 by the world’s largest scientific society for inventing more efficient and ecologically benign ways to create, among other things, a new painkiller, fungicide for wheat crops, conducting materials and other compounds. He will receive the 2001 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society at its national meeting in Chicago.
Snieckus, who holds the Bader chair in organic chemistry at Queen’s University, is only the third Canadian to win the award. He compared his research efforts to stacking Lego blocks in all variety of patterns and forms, with one big difference — “no one has pre-set which ones should click together,” he said.
His specialty is making organometallic compounds, whose combination of carbon and metal atoms makes them reactive in unique ways. For example, researchers at the drug company Pharmacia Corp. use a Snieckus method to prepare celecoxib (Celebrex), an arthritis painkiller less likely than others to cause serious stomach problems. The chemist’s research team has also discovered a means to protect wheat crops against a destructive fungus, called Take-all.
When asked why he became a chemist, Snieckus described what he called “exclamation points in my mind” — not only teachers and other role models in chemistry, but also experiences like the beautiful color of a high school experiment and “an explosion in a friend’s backyard, very close to my face, after we thought that the nitroglycerin we had made was a dud,” he remembered. Outside the laboratory, he enjoys hockey, jazz and the history of chemistry — “in reverse order as I get older,” he said.
Snieckus received his undergraduate degree from the University of Alberta in 1959 and his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon in 1965. He is a member of the ACS divisions of organic and medicinal chemistry.
The ACS Board of Directors established the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award in 1984 to recognize excellence in organic chemistry. Under the terms of the prominent MIT chemist’s will, each of 10 such awards consists of a $5,000 prize and $40,000 research grant.