Forty-Five Years With a Hydra, Organosulfur Chemistry

Abstract

Lamar Field was born in 1922 in Alabama, USA. After attending public schools there, he entered M.I.T., where he received a Rogers Award to outstanding seniors and from which he received the S.B. degree in chemistry in 1944. After two years in classified research at Merck and Co. during World War II, in 1946 he returned to M.I.T. At M.I.T., he taught classes as an Advanced Teaching Fellow, was a lecture demonstrator, and then held the Socony Fellowship. After graduation in 1949 with a Ph.D. in organic chemistry, he joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University as Instructor of Chemistry, a rank once common but now strange to the ear. By 1959, he had become Professor of Chemistry and remained so for 30 years, during which he served as department chairman for six years. He has served the American Chemical Society in a number of respects and has served as consultant to the National Institutes of Health, to several industries and to several educational accrediting groups. In 1968, he was Coulter Lecturer at the University of Mississippi and in 1974 was a Fellow at the Australian National University. He is a member of Alpha Chi Sigma, Sigma Xi, and Phi Beta Kappa. In 1989, he became Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus at Vanderbilt. As the Table of Contents shows, the research of the group at Vanderbilt has ranged widely, covering most of the functional groups of organic sulfur chemistry. This account of the research is intended to be mildly provocative in inviting readers to compare their explanations with those published and to pick up the trails in areas where further explorations seem likely to be promising.

Key Words:

• Bioorganic and medicinal-organic sulfur chemistry
• derivatives of sulfurous
• sulfuric
• sulfenic
• sulfinic
• sulfonic acids; di-, tri-
• polysulfides
• sulfones
• sulfoxides
• sulfur heterocycles
• thiols
• thio acids
• thiono compounds