by Thomas T. Tidwell
The 3rd Florida Heterocyclic Conference was held at the University
of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, USA from 6-8 March 2002. The
conference was organized by the Florida Institute of Heterocyclic
Compounds directed by Alan Katritzky, Kenan Professor of Chemistry
at the University of Florida. The audience of 100 was distinguished
by extensive industrial participation and four of the lectures,
by Peter Wuts of Pharmacia (Kalamazoo, Michigan), Graham Johnson
of Bristol-Myers Squibb (Wallingford, Connecticut), Joseph Sisko
of GlaxoSmithKline (Philadelphia), and Nicolas Bodor of Ivax Corporation
and the University of Florida dealt with industrial themes. The
topics included the discovery and development of new drugs for the
treatment of Parkinson's disease, HIV treatment, and dopamine agonists.
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From
left to right: Ronald Grigg, Alan Katritzky (the conference
organizer), and Jose Barulenga.
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Other lecturers included Ronald Grigg (Leeds University, UK) on
cascade reactions for heterocyclic synthsis, William Pearson (University
of Michigan) on alkaloid synthesis, Jose Baruenga (Universiy of
Oviedo, Spain) on heterocyclic synthesis using metal carbene complexes,
Dennis Curran (University of Pittsburgh) on fluorous techniques
in organic synthesis, Ernst Anders (University of Jena, Germany)
on the synthesis of novel heterocycles, Joachim Schantl (University
of Innsbruck, Austria) on synthesis of cyclic azomethine imines,
and Nicos Petasis (Universit of Southern California, Los Angeles)
on heterocyclic synthesis using organoboron compounds.
A feature of the conference was an initial full day short course
on the fundamentals of heterocyclic chemistry. The Florida Heterocyclic
Conference is also used to support ARKIVOC (Archive for Organic
Chemistry), a free on-line refereed journal covering all aspects
of organic chemistry, available at http://www.arkat.org
Thomas
T. Tidwell, University of Toronto, is president of the IUPAC
Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry Division.
