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Published November 2, 2018 | public
Journal Article

A Thirty-Year Journey to the Creation of the First Enantiomerically Enriched Molecular Sieve

Abstract

In 1987, our research on how to synthesize a chiral zeolite began. Finally, in 2017, my co-workers and I succeeded in preparing and characterizing the first enantiomerically enriched molecular sieve. Here, I recount how we initiated our work on synthesizing a chiral molecular sieve, the lessons learned from the many failures we had over the years, and what were some of the key advances that ultimately led to the successful synthesis and proof that we had in fact prepared an enantiomerically enriched molecular sieve. I have no doubts that numerous other chiral molecular sieves will now be elucidated and that clever applications of these materials will ultimately be realized.

Additional Information

© 2018 American Chemical Society. Received: August 2, 2018; Published: September 18, 2018. I hope that this brief expose of how my research program went from initial concept to successful discovery provides some insights to how research can proceed. In today's world where step-by-step proposed experiments with many yearly milestones are becoming more the norm for receiving support to conduct research, it is clear to me that this is not how breakthrough research occurs. One must have the freedom to have time to explore, to think, to learn and to have lots of failures. And, one needs a bit of luck (take it when you can get it!). I am fortunate that we had all those attributes over many years, and that we were able to take advantage of them to ultimately achieve our objective. I thank the many students and co-workers that I have had the pleasure of working with over the years (whose names appears on our publications). I also thank the various sources of funding such as NSF, DOE, Dow, and Chevron for supporting our efforts. As I tell the members of my research group, what is nice about being in academia, you can work on problems you would like to work on IF you can find someone else to pay for them! I would especially like to thank Dr. Stacey Zones and Chevron for providing us tremendous freedom to explore and understand zeolite and molecular sieve synthesis. Special thanks go to Chevron for supporting our work on creating a chiral molecular sieve. It is worthy of noting a company that would have no direct use for a chiral molecular sieve was encouraging of our studies as they realized that information needed to create such a material could be useful to their programs on synthesizing molecular sieve for other uses. The author declares no competing financial interest.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 18, 2023