News Release

New York chemist wins national award for insights into making molecules, including drugs

Grant and Award Announcement

American Chemical Society

James L. Leighton of New York will be honored Sept. 9 by the world's largest scientific society for discovering how chemical reactions take place and manipulating them in new ways to make complex molecules such as pharmaceutical drugs. He will receive the 2003 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society at its national meeting in New York.

"We try to come up with ways to synthesize only the 'good form' of compounds, often those that have some biological activity," said Leighton, an organic chemist at Columbia University. Like hands, many molecules in nature come in mirror images that otherwise are identical in structure. The difference in form is subtle but critical — for example, the pain-relieving effects of ibuprofen come from only one of its pair of mirror images.

Leighton and his research group control the "handedness" of a compound by using starting materials that are themselves specific mirror images. Most recently he has invented new reactions using pseudoephedrine, found in the cold medicine Sudafed®. The good form of pseudoephedrine originates from an herb used for thousands of years in Chinese medicine.

Using the right mirror image of pseudoephedrine as a starting material, Leighton's team discovered ways to assemble handed forms of alcohols and other building blocks of many pharmaceuticals. "In retrospect, the hints were all there in the literature, but for whatever reason it sat around until we managed to come up with mechanisms that hadn't been described before," he said. "That was a good day."

Leighton's mother was one of the few women who received a doctorate degree in biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University in the 1950s. But as a boy his own interest was sparked more by astronomy — until an organic chemistry class in college "just sort of clicked," he remembered.

"One of the misconceptions I encounter a lot is that organic chemistry is very mathematical, that chemists just sit around using computers a lot," he said. "That's absolutely not true. It's very much about problem-solving in three dimensions, about testing your ideas right at the bench."

Leighton received his undergraduate degree from Yale University in 1987 and his doctorate from Harvard University in 1994. He is a member of the ACS division of organic chemistry.

The ACS Board of Directors established the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awards in 1984 to recognize and encourage excellence in organic chemistry. Cope was a celebrated organic chemist and ACS president. Each award consists of a $5,000 prize as well as an unrestricted research grant of $40,000.

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