Out of Control

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Organized by Tai-Shan Fang, For Special Advance
Physical Organic Chemistry
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"click chemistry"
In the "click chemistry" strategy developed
recently at Scripps Research Institute, reactive
molecular building blocks are designed to "click"
together selectively and covalently. The Scripps
researchers are now extending the idea by using
protein binding sites, supramolecular complexes,
or functionalized surfaces as reaction vessels to
direct the in situ formation of potentially
functional click chemistry products. The products
might be biological inhibitors,
molecular-electronics components, sensor probes,
nonlinear optical materials, light-harvesting
compounds, or compounds with any number of other
useful properties.
PERFECT FIT Model of acetylcholinesterase
inhibitor.
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Out of Control

• 1990- 1994   Researched and wrote Out of
  Control, the Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization.
  Reviewed in Fortune magazine as "A book that
  should be required reading for all
  executives....As entertaining as it is
  insightful."
• 1987   Married Gia-Miin Fuh, a biochemist.
• 1952   Born, in Pennsylvania, USA

1994 The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems,
and the Economic World Read it online
Available from Amazon
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• Chapter 1 THE MADE AND THE BORN
• Neo-biological civilization
• The triumph of the bio-logic
• Learning to surrender our creations
• Chapter 2 HIVE MIND
• Bees do it distributed governance
• The collective intelligence of a mob
• Asymmetrical invisible hands
• Decentralized remembering as an act of perception
  
• More is more than more, it's different
• Advantages and disadvantages of swarms
• The network is the icon of the 21st century
• Chapter 3 MACHINES WITH AN ATTITUDE
• Entertaining machines with bodies
• Fast, cheap and out of control
• Getting smart from dumb things
• The virtues of nested hierarchies
• Using the real world to communicate
• No intelligence without bodies

• Chapter 6 THE NATURAL FLUX
• Equilibrium is death
• What came first, stability or diversity?
• Ecosystems between a superorganism and an
  identity workshop
• The origins of variation
• Life immortal, ineradicable
• Negentropy
• The fourth discontinuity the circle of becoming
• Chapter 7 EMERGENCE OF CONTROL
• In ancient Greece the first artificial self
• Maturing of mechanical selfhood
• The toilet archetype of tautology
• Self-causing agencies
• Chapter 8 CLOSED SYSTEMS
• Bottled life, sealed with clasp
• Mail-order Gaia
• Man breathes into algae, algae breathes into man

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• Chapter 16 THE FUTURE OF CONTROL
• Cartoon physics in toy worlds
• Birthing a synthespian
• Robots without hard bodies
• The agents of ethnological architecture
• Imposing destiny upon free will
• Mickey Mouse rebooted after clobbering Donald
• Searching for co-control
• Chapter 17 AN OPEN UNIVERSE
• To enlarge the space of being
• Primitives of visual possibilities
• How to program happy accidents
• All survive by hacking the rules
• The handy-dandy tool of evolution
• Hang-gliding into the game of life
• Life verbs
• Homesteading hyperlife territory
• Chapter 18 THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE

• Chapter 11 NETWORK ECONOMICS
• Having your everything amputated
• Instead of crunching, connecting
• Factories of information
• Your job managing error
• Connecting everything to everything
• Chapter 12 E-MONEY
• Crypto-anarchy encryption always wins
• The fax effect and the law of increasing returns
• Superdistribution
• Anything holding an electric charge w ill hold a
  fiscal charge
• Peer-to-peer finance with nanobucks
• Fear of underwire economies
• Chapter 13 GOD GAMES
• Electronic godhood
• Theories with an interface
• A god descends into his polygonal creation
• The transmission of simulacra
• Memorex warfare

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• Chapter 21 RISING FLOW
• A 4 billion year ponzi scheme
• What evolution wants
• Seven trends of hyper-evolution
• Coyote trickster self-evolver
• Chapter 22 PREDICTION MACHINERY
• Brains that catch baseballs
• The flip side of chaos
• Positive myopia
• Making a fortune from the pockets of
  predictability
• Operation Internal Look, Ahead
• Varieties of prediction
• Change in the service of non-change
• Telling the future is what the systems are for
• The many problems with global models
• We are all steering
• Chapter 23 WHOLES, HOLES, AND SPACES

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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2001

• "for their work on chirally catalysed
• hydrogenation reactions

"for his work on chirally catalysed oxidation
reactions"
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Mirror Image Catalysis

• Many molecules appear in two forms that mirror
  each other just as our hands mirror each other.
  Such molecules are called chiral. In nature one
  of these forms is often dominant, so in our cells
  one of these mirror images of a molecule fits
  "like a glove", in contrast to the other one
  which may even be harmful. Pharmaceutical
  products often consist of chiral molecules, and
  the difference between the two forms can be a
  matter of life and death as was the case, for
  example, in the thalidomide disaster in the
  1960s. That is why it is vital to be able to
  produce the two chiral forms separately.
• This year's Nobel Laureates in Chemistry have
  developed molecules that can catalyse important
  reactions so that only one of the two mirror
  image forms is produced. The catalyst molecule,
  which itself is chiral, speeds up the reaction
  without being consumed. Just one of these
  molecules can produce millions of molecules of
  the desired mirror image form.
• William S. Knowles discovered that it was
  possible to use transition metals to make chiral
  catalysts for an important type of reaction
  called hydrogenation, thereby obtaining the
  desired mirror image form as the final product.
  His research quickly led to an industrial process
  for the production of the L-DOPA drug which is
  used in the treatment of Parkinson's disease.
  Ryoji Noyori has led the further development of
  this process to today's general chiral catalysts
  for hydrogenation.
• K. Barry Sharpless, on the other hand, is awarded
  half of the Prize for developing chiral catalysts
  for another important type of reaction
  oxidation.
• The Laureates have opened up a completely new
  field of research in which it is possible to
  synthesise molecules and material with new
  properties. Today the results of their basic
  research are being used in a number of industrial
  syntheses of pharmaceutical products such as
  antibiotics, anti-inflammatory drugs and heart
  medicines.

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Illustrated Presentation http//nobelprize.org/n
obel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/2001/illpres/
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thalidomide disaster
Chemistry Thalidomide (a-phthalimidoglutarimide)
has a chiral centre and was dispensed as a
racemate (11 mixture) of dextrorotatory (R)- and
levorotatory (S)-thalidomide. Initial animal
studies indicated that the enantiomers have
different biological properties Calming and
sleep-inducing effects are associated with the
R-enantiomer, whereas teratogenic effects are
more closely associated with the S-enantiomer.
Under physiological conditions, both enantiomers
undergo rapid interconversion making a total
separation of their clinical effects unfeasible.

• Thalidomide (Contergan) - Annotated Collection of
  Links Annotated collection of English and German
  web resources providing information on the drug's
  physico-chemical properties, effects, side
  effects, the German Contergan disaster in the
  early 1960s, and the current use of thalidomide.

Thalidomide a-Phthalimidoglutarimide
()-N-(2,6-Dioxo-3-piperidyl)phthalimide
()-N-(2,6-Dioxo-3-piperidinyl)-1H-isoindol-1,3(2
H)-dione
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2001 Nobel Laureate Prof. K. Berry Sharpless
visited the Chemistry Department and was
conferred an Honorary Doctorate degree from our
University on Nov. 17, 2004.(Dec. 10, 2004)