Modern Physical Organic Chemistry, Eric V. Anslyn and Dennis A. Dougherty

Modern Physical Organic Chemistry

Eric V. Anslyn
The University of Texas, Austin

Dennis A. Dougherty
California Institute of Technology

NOW IN ITS THIRD PRINTING

"Students and others are emphatically recommended to read this excellent book. "Anslyn & Dougherty" should be in every chemical library. It will be a valuable aid to every student, but it can also be strongly recommended for all research chemists as a reference source on physical-organic chemistry. The book is a worthwhile investment."
--Angewandte Chemie, 2006, 45, 1019-1020

"MPOC is the most well rounded textbook on physical organic chemistry that I have seen. The authors are to be commended for their six year "labor of love."
--J. Chem. Ed, 2006, March, Vol. 83, No. 3, pg. 387

Modern Physical Organic Chemistry is a most impressive resource for researchers and teachers, and yet it also offers an accessible entree into the topics for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates. Each chapter ends with a "Summary and Outlook", an excellent array of problems and exercises and a comprehensive bibliography that often refers to the review literature. This type of text is often not easily accessible to the undergraduate reader, but I found this one to be well structured and very pleasant to read. Modern Physical Organic Chemistry is a book I am very happy to have on my shelf.
--The Times Higher, 2006

"Spectacular! Congratulations! I plan to recommend it to all of my research group members and to those students in my class who are getting hooked on organic chemistry. This is going to be a winner."
--Peter Vollhardt, University of California at Berkeley

"Anslyn and Dougherty have done an admirable and scholarly job to put the essence of this important subject between the covers of a single text. I can enthusiastically recommend the text for anyone who is teaching a course dealing with the essentials of physical organic chemistry and more."
--Nicholas J. Turro, Columbia University

“The text will certainly inspire those coming to physical organic chemistry as a first love, as well as those coming from a bordering discipline who wish to acquire the insight that physical organic chemistry can provide.”
--Barry Carpenter, Cornell University

“This much needed text places physical organic chemistry in its most modern context as the foundation of not only organic chemistry, but as the basis for understanding the most current research in supramolecular chemistry, organic materials science, catalysis, and organometallics. This book is the new authoritative physical organic resource that will benefit researchers, students, and teachers alike.”
--Timothy M. Swager, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"By building the text from the ground up, the authors have managed to incorporate modern applications of the theories of physical organic chemistry throughout, in a way that no revision of an existing text can hope to accomplish."
–Thomas Poon, Claremont Colleges

"This is a high quality book that fills a real need in our field, and that makes every other book in this area immediately obsolete. Congratulations to the authors on a remarkable achievement!"
–David I. Schuster, New York University

This is the first modern textbook, written in the 21st century, to make explicit the many connections between physical organic chemistry and critical fields such as organometallic chemistry, materials chemistry, bioorganic chemistry, and biochemistry. In the latter part of the 20th century, the field of physical organic chemistry went through dramatic changes, with an increased emphasis on noncovalent interactions and their roles in molecular recognition, supramolecular chemistry, and biology; the development of new materials with novel structural features; and the use of computational methods. Contemporary chemists must be just as familiar with these newer fields as with the more established classical topics.

This completely new landmark text is intended to bridge that gap. In addition to covering thoroughly the core areas of physical organic chemistry – structure and mechanism – the book will escort the practitioner of organic chemistry into a field that has been thoroughly updated. The foundations and applicabilities of modern computational methods are also developed.

Written by two distinguished researchers in this field, Modern Physical Organic Chemistry can serve as a text for a year-long course targeted to advanced undergraduates or first-year graduate students, as well as for a variety of shorter courses on selected aspects of the field. It will also serve as a landmark new reference text, and as an introduction to many of the more advanced topics of interest to modern researchers. An accompanying Student Solutions Manual by Michael Sponsler is also available.

The Authors
Eric V. Anslyn, right, received his PhD in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology under the direction of Robert Grubbs. After completing post-doctoral work with Ronald Breslow at Columbia University, he joined the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where he became a Full Professor in 1999. He currently holds four patents and is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Presidential Young Investigator, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, the Searle Scholar, the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and the Jean Holloway Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is also the Associate Editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society and serves on the editorial boards of Supramolecular Chemistry and the Journal of Supramolecular Chemistry. His primary research is in physical organic chemistry and bioorganic chemistry, with specific interests in catalysts for phosphoryl and glycosyl transfers, receptors for carbohydrates and enolates, single and multi-analyte sensors – the development of an electronic tongue, and synthesis of polymeric molecules that exhibit unique abiotic secondary structure.

Dennis A. Dougherty, below, received a PhD from Princeton with Kurt Mislow, followed by a year of postdoctoral study with Jerome Berson at Yale. In 1979 he joined the faculty at the California Institute of Technology, where he is now George Grant Hoag Professor of Chemistry. Dougherty's extensive research interests have taken him to many fronts, but he is perhaps best known for development of the cation-π interaction, a novel but potent noncovalent binding interaction. More recently, he has addressed molecular neurobiology, developing the in vivo nonsense suppression method for unnatural amino acid incorporation into proteins expressed in living cells. This powerful new tool enables “physical organic chemistry on the brain” - chemical-scale studies of the molecules of memory, thought, and sensory perception and the targets of treatments for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, learning and attention deficits, and drug addiction. His group is now working on extensive experimental and computational studies of the bacterial mechanosensitive channels MscL and MscS, building off the crystal structures of these channels recently reported by the Rees group at Caltech.