Prof. Gilbert Stork of Columbia University has enjoyed a lengthy and amazingly productive career as a synthetic organic chemist. It was my good fortune to spend a few minutes with him in spring 1976 when I was considering Columbia as a possible graduate school. I remember him looking out one of the windows in his office while he reflected on the fact that his younger organic colleagues (all of whom I had met earlier that day) had, no doubt, pumped me full of praise for life in New York city (which, perhaps they and he knew, was a very tough sell to a native Angeleno like me). He followed that comment with his own observation that most of his colleagues actually lived in New Jersey and their grad students spent nearly all of their waking hours in the chemistry lab, not in the city.
The article “Gilbert Stork: In His Own Words and in the Musings of His Friends” (J.I Seeman, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., Volume 51, Issue 12, pages 3012-3023, March 19, 2012) provides 12 pages of memorable observations about growing up, education, scientific research, and life. Here are two insightful “Storkisms” on how science works,
from The True Meaning of Success in Organic Synthesis: “The toughest question to ask in synthetic organic chemistry after the work is done is: what have you learned?” Stork goes on to say that science probably gains more from designing a method for making polyethylene than it does from a complicated total synthesis, but the aesthetic satisfaction might be missing. The same point about science, worded slightly differently, “what is it that you now know that was not known before?” gets made again in Poor Choice of a Research Project.
from The Main Event: “[Barton] developed his conformation insights at that time. I was violently opposed to it… My objection was both reasonable and stupid; his was fundamentally not rigorous but brilliant. There’s a difference. The difference is simply that there are things that are not absolutely correct with a capital ‘C’, but extremely worthwhile because they’re major assumptions, which allow things to move forward.”
My personal contribution to the literature of Storkisms dates back to either 1975 or 1976. Stork was giving a research lecture at Caltech when he was interrupted by a problem with a faulty slide projector. While the projectionist worked to set things right, Stork told us that he had once been obliged to give an entire lecture using a projector that rotated every one of his slides by 90 degrees. To his relief, his audience appeared willing to make the best of a bad situation by obligingly tilting their heads to one side for the duration of the talk. Or so he thought. When the lights came back on, only a couple of heads returned to vertical. Everyone else had fallen asleep.
