文档介绍：Editor's preface
This year there is a new co-editor of the series, Professor John Richard of the
Stale University of New York at Buffalo. With two editors, there is a wider
range of expertise available, thus providing more opportunity for soliciting
manuscripts that cover the full breadth of topics included within the field of
anic Chemistry. It is planned to expand the Board of Editors as
well, as these individuals help to ensure that the subject matter covered
includes a wide range of topics. We intend to continue to solicit contributors
not only from around the world, but from the increasingly diversified group of
laboratories at which modern aspects of the subject are pursued.
In 2001 the new millennium officially begins, and the current volume
includes a retrospective of one of the major topics in anic
in the 20th Century, namely free radical reactivity. There is a
fascinating report by the late Lennart Eberson, who was a valued member
of tJhe Board of Editors, concerning the reasons that the many nominations of
Moses Gomberg for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry were not essful. In
19013 Gomberg made the bold claim that he had prepared a stable free radical,
namely triphenylmethyl, and this proposal was shown, after great discussion,
to be correct, and sparked an outpouring of chemical creativity that continues
unabated into the 21st Century. Eberson reveals why the Nobel Prize
Committee on Chemistry missed the opportunity to recognize Gomberg's
great insight, through bination of a lack of appreciation on the part
of mittee, and unfortunate timing. This essay was Eberson's last
major contribution, and was sent to the Editor shortly before his untimely
death. We wish to acknowledge the assistance of Anne Wiktorsson at the
Center for History of Science, The Royal Academy of Sciences, Stockholm,
in t]he editing of this manuscript. The Nobel prizes exert a profound influence
on l~he conduct of science, a