Abstract
The hurly-burly life of a scientific nomad is traced through thick and thin from the Athens of the North to the City of Angels with brief and not so brief interludes on the edge of the Canadian Shield, in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, on the Plains of Cheshire beside the Wirral, and in the Midlands in the heartland of Albion.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1089-1106 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| Journal | Pure and Applied Chemistry |
| Volume | 77 |
| Issue number | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jul 2005 |
Keywords
- Catenanes
- Mechanical bond
- Molecular electronics
- Molecular machines
- Molecular recognition
- Noncovalent interactions
- Rotaxanes
- Self-assembly
- Supramolecular chemistry
- Template-directed synthesis
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Chemistry(all)
- Chemical Engineering(all)
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From a Meccano set to nano meccano. / Stoddart, J. Fraser.
In: Pure and Applied Chemistry, Vol. 77, No. 7, 07.2005, p. 1089-1106.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
TY - JOUR
T1 - From a Meccano set to nano meccano
AU - Stoddart, J. Fraser
N1 - Funding Information: No sooner had I arrived at Queen’s in 1967 than did Charles Pedersen’s seminal paper [4] on macrocyclic polyethers appear in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. This paper inspired me to get involved, during my postdoctoral years, in the synthesis of chiral crown ethers from carbohydrate precursors [13,14]. It was this activity that was subsequently to dominate [15,16] my independent research activity as a lecturer in chemistry at Sheffield University from 1970 to 1978. I had returned to the United Kingdom from Canada in 1970, supported by an Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) research fellowship, and this piece of good fortune allowed me to establish collaborations with numerous ICI researchers under the auspices of several Cooperative Awards in Science and Engineering (CASE) from the then Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). It was with generous support from the SERC and additional financial support and much encouragement from a number of ICI’s senior managers, including Tom McKillop, Bernard Langley, and Warren Hewertson, that I joined the ICI Corporate Laboratory in Runcorn, Cheshire in 1978 on a three-year secondment. Funding Information: Since most mechanical devices rely on solid supports—in the form of either surfaces or interfaces—for the transmission of energy or force, the advent of the molecular elevator performing elegantly in solution provided us with yet a further impetus to develop nanomechanical devices that operate at both supramolecular [121,122] and molecular [123] levels on surfaces. This particular research has been the direct result of a Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) effort supported by the National Science Foundation at UCLA. While an operational supramolecular nanovalve [122] has been designed and fabricated in collaboration with Jeff Zink and his group in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, chemical energy has been transducted into mechanical energy in a joint research effort with Chih-Ming Ho’s group in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Working closely with the mechanical engineers, and also with scientists at Vecco Instruments in Santa Barbara, we have found [123] recently that arrays of microcantilever beams, coated with self-assembled monolayers of palindromic, doubly bistable, redox-active [3]rotaxane molecules, undergo controllable and reversible bending when they are exposed to chemical oxidants and reductants. When the gold-covered beams are coated with a redox-active, but mechanically impotent control compound, they do not bend. A series of control experiments and rational assessments preclude the influence of heat, photothermal effects, and pH variations as potential mechanisms of beam bending. Along with a simple force calculation, our experimental observations support the hypothesis that the cumulative nanoscale movements within surface-bound molecular muscles can be harnessed to perform large-scale mechanical work.
PY - 2005/7
Y1 - 2005/7
N2 - The hurly-burly life of a scientific nomad is traced through thick and thin from the Athens of the North to the City of Angels with brief and not so brief interludes on the edge of the Canadian Shield, in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, on the Plains of Cheshire beside the Wirral, and in the Midlands in the heartland of Albion.
AB - The hurly-burly life of a scientific nomad is traced through thick and thin from the Athens of the North to the City of Angels with brief and not so brief interludes on the edge of the Canadian Shield, in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, on the Plains of Cheshire beside the Wirral, and in the Midlands in the heartland of Albion.
KW - Catenanes
KW - Mechanical bond
KW - Molecular electronics
KW - Molecular machines
KW - Molecular recognition
KW - Noncovalent interactions
KW - Rotaxanes
KW - Self-assembly
KW - Supramolecular chemistry
KW - Template-directed synthesis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=22144466879&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=22144466879&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1351/pac200577071089
DO - 10.1351/pac200577071089
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:22144466879
VL - 77
SP - 1089
EP - 1106
JO - Pure and Applied Chemistry
JF - Pure and Applied Chemistry
SN - 0033-4545
IS - 7
ER -