Interview Professor Daniel Singleton

Whitesides met with a group of graduate students and, according to Singleton, told them all to get out of physical organic chemistry . Following this advice, he did a postdoctoral stint with Professor Barry Trost. 

Singleton s main use of quantum chemistry is to compute KlEs, largely to aid in the interpretation of his experiments. Most of the time our work starts with experiments and the calculations follow, Singleton explains. We always compute the isotope effects in conjunction with the experiments, and we do them early on. I hate to admit it, but computed isotope effects are more than equal partners with experiments. That is, we really can t do without them in most of our cases.  

Computations occasionally precede the experiments, but this is rare. The experiments may fail, he points out. Particularly now we are using trajectories in an exploratory way to look for something weird to happen and then go to the lab to try to verify it.  

Singleton feels that nonstatistical dynamics are not important in most reactions, but that they are important in a great many Maybe 1 out of 5 cases will have something interesting, he speculates. If you go through our cases, what we find is mostly by accident. But it s not complete random chance that a reaction has nonstatistical behavior. Now we are designing systems to force dynamic effect on it.  

Organic Chemistry, 5th ed. McGraw-Hill Boston, 2003. 

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