Sondheimer. Franz

Most of the synthetic work directed toward the higher annulenes was earned out by Franz Sondheimer and his students first at Israel s Weizmann Institute and later at the University of London Sondheimer s research systematically explored the chemistry of these hydrocarbons and provided experimental venfication of Huckel s rule... 

It is noteworthy that Jones and Darby, who pioneered the enediyne rearrangement, now known as the Bergman rearrangement, and Nicolaou, who achieved the first total synthesis of the enediyne antibiotic calicheamicin 7 / were under the joint supervision of Profs. Franz Sondheimer and Peter Garratt. It might seem that all researchers in the enediyne field have been influenced by Sondheimer and Garratt. 

Richard Taylor obtained BSc and PhD (Dr. D. Neville Jones) from the University of Sheffield. Postdoctoral periods with Dr. Ian Harrison (Syntex, California) and Prof. Franz Sondheimer (University College London) were followed by lectureships at the Open University and then UFA, Norwich. In 1993 he moved to a chair at the University of York. Taylor s research interests center on the synthesis of bioactive natural products and the development of new synthetic methodology. His awards include the Royal Society of Chemistry s Pedlar Lectureship (2007). Taylor is the immediate past-president of the RSC Organic Division and an editor of Tetrahedron. 

Beginning in the 1960s, Franz Sondheimer and his colleagues, first at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and later at the University of London, synthesized a number of larger annulenes, primarily to test the validity of HiickeTs criteria for aromaticity. They found, for example, that both [14] annulene and [18] annulene are aromatic, as predicted by Hiickel. [18]Annulene has a resonance energy of approximately 418 kJ (100 kcal)/mol. Notice that for these annulenes to achieve planarity, several of the carbon-carbon double bonds in each must have the trans configuration. 

Professor Franz Sondheimer (1926-1981), University College, London. 

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