What are the attributes that lead to success ?  For scientists, artists,  musicians, and athletes, Malcolm Gladwell, in his best-selling book, "Outliers"  observes that in every field of endeavor, outstanding tendencies show up at an early age -- and mastery is built on more than  10,000 hours of experience.

National technological competitiveness has been attributed to  a baby-boom cohort of people who had learned hands-on through  youthful hobbies such as electronics, auto mechanics, other do-it-yourself endeavors. 

Chemistry is the same.  At almost every award ceremony and scientific conference, the presenter regales the audience with tales of  early experiences with home laboratories, explosions, pyrothechics, and smelly chemical experiments in the basement ( and the family doq was lucky to stay safely out of the way).  Just about everyone has heard a story like this.  The story below was related first-hand, from the great chemist, Ivar Ugi, himself...

Professor Ivar Ugi ( 1930-2005 ) was a famous organic chemist, who studied the chemistry of isonitriles; invented the multicomponent condensation reaction known as the Ugi Reaction; and made major contributions to theoretical chemistry.  

Prof. Ugi, who was on the short list for the 1998  nobel prize in chemistry, was the first investigator to use the term "chemical library" to describe the outcome of a combinatorial synthesis scheme.

In his illustrious career, he was the youngest ever, Director of Research at Bayer AG, and subsequently had a highly prolific career in academia, at USC and Technical University of Munich.  

I became acquainted with Prof Ugi in 1995, when he was a consultant for my group at Pharm-Eco Laboratories.

How did he get started in chemistry ?  It was an early interest - in his home laboratory, as a boy.

In the spring of 1996, professor Ugi related the following story to me:

"I got interested in chemistry during the war (WW-II) because I enjoyed games with explosions.  At age 15 I got some little book about chemistry and explosives and read and read .  I found out how one could produce artificial sweeteners by converting a headache medicine.

"Just after the war saccharine was not available  Sugar was not available.  So I read the chemical literature and I found one of these sweetening compounds [ Dulcin] that could be easily made from some pharmaceutical drugs that I could buy.... Some headache pills [Phenacetin].  I learned to convert it into sweetening compounds.

"So the first thing that I was doing in chemistry at home -- and the house was smelly and full of hydrochloric acid, et cetera.  I succeeded in producing these sweeteners, which I was then selling to people."

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Method for converting the pain medicine, Phenacetin, to the

sweetener, Dulcin, hand written by Prof Ugi, on the back of

an airport parking receipt,  in 1996.

 He made the sweetener and exchanged it for goods and money with his neighbors.  He had read so much chemistry by the time he attended the university of Tübingen, he did not need any additional background and was able to spend almost all of his time doing research in the laboratory.

Prof Ugi, in his office at Technical University of Munich, in 1995 

Download Ugi bio:

www.bos06.ttu.ee/files/abstracts/Domling.pdf