World of Chemistry on François Auguste Victor Grignard
Organic synthesis owes a major debt to François Auguste Victor Grignard, whose pioneering studies were a critical early step in the advancement of the field. When he entered the profession at the turn of the century, the task of combining different organic chemical species was a major hurdle in the synthesis of new compounds. Grignard developed a process that enabled chemists to join many types of organic chemical compounds. It was a method that could be used with a broad array of organic reactants; it was also inexpensive and simple to perform, and it resulted in high yields. These features resulted in its rapid adoption by organic chemists around the world. Grignard shared the 1912 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Paul Sabatier. Grignard was born in Cherbourg, France, on May 6, 1871. His mother was Marie Hébert Grignard; his father, Théophile Henri Grignard, was a sailmaker and foreman at the local marine arsenal. During his early education, Grignard's parents steered him towards a career as a teacher, and at age eighteen he won a scholarship to the École Normale Spéciale, whose graduates routinely became secondary school teachers. But the school closed after he had completed only two years there, and then, despite further work at the University of Lyons, Grignard failed the mathematics exams that were then required for licensing as a teacher.
In 1892, Grignard did a year of compulsory military service, and upon his return to Lyons a friend urged him to study chemistry. Grignard had long considered chemistry scientifically uninteresting, believing it consisted mainly of unrelated facts and observations, but he soon found himself interested and began to pursue a graduate degree. Philippe Barbier became his supervisor and convinced him to do his doctoral thesis on chemical synthesis.
Barbier had been investigating the general problem of using a metal to attach together two organic radicals--chemical groups that remain unchanged by a reaction. Species made by joining an organic radical with a metal atom are known as organometallic compounds, and while the creation of these compounds was well known at the time, there were serious limitations on their uses. Some were extremely reactive (such as organosodium and organopotassium), while others were very unreactive (such as organomercury).Zinc had been used, but only a few compounds could be prepared with it, and organozinc compounds had the unfortunate tendency of spontaneously igniting at room temperature. Barbier had experimented with using magnesium to join organic radicals, but he had obtained inconsistent results.
This was the problem Grignard pursued for his thesis. He knew that one of his first challenges would be to solve the same problem that plagued the organozinc researchers; he had to avoid having his organomagnesium compounds spontaneously erupt in flame. His research showed him that workers had overcome this hazard when dealing with organozinc species by performing the reaction in anhydrous ether.
Thus Grignard added magnesium shavings in ether to methyl iodide. This solution, later to be known as the Grignard reagent , would react with an aldehyde or ketone, which were both readily obtained types of organic compounds. With the addition of dilute acid, the resultant compound broke apart with the formation of water to produce an alcohol. The particular alcohol produced depended solely on the particular aldehyde or ketone used in the reaction. The yield--the amount of alcohol produced relative to the aldehyde or ketone reactant--was high, the process simple, and the reaction consistent. Moreover, as Grignard and others rapidly discovered, the reaction was extremely flexible. Many different reactants besides aldehydes and ketones could be used, and the types of compounds that could be produced were virtually limitless.
Grignard's complete thesis was published by the University of Lyons in 1901, and several articles describing the process and its applications rapidly appeared in major chemistry journals. In 1909 Grignard left Lyons to take up a post at the University of Nancy, where he was soon named professor. In 1910, he married Augustine Marie Boulant. The first of their two children, Roger, was born the following year.
In 1912, Grignard's colleagues formally recognized the importance of his early studies by awarding him the Nobel Prize. He shared the 1912 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Paul Sabatier , also a Frenchman, who had developed another important methodology in organic synthesis, catalytic hydrogenation. The joint prize was the cause of great national pride, and one French newspaper announced that this proved chemistry was not "a predominately German science."
Grignard remained at Nancy for nearly a decade, and his research continued to focus on organomagnesium compounds and their reactions with a wide array of other chemical species. During World War I, Grignard worked on methods for synthesizing toluene, an important solvent, and on the analysis of chemical warfare gases. After the war, he returned to the University at Lyons, where he had been chosen to succeed Barbier, who was retiring. He remained at Lyons for the rest of his life, continuing his studies of organic synthesis processes and expanding his work to include other fields.
Grignard wrote two volumes of what he planned to be a fifteen-volume work on organic chemistry, but he died unexpectedly on December 13, 1935. Two more volumes of this work were published posthumously, with editorial assistance from his son Roger, who had followed his father and chosen a career in organic chemistry. Grignard's legacy includes 170 publications and a host of honors and awards for his work, including honorary doctoral degrees from the universities of Louvain and Brussels, and the title of Commander of the Legion of Honor.
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