A rumble in the chemistry jungle and an elemental TV appearance.

A letter to Chemical and Engineering News (vol. 87, p5) from Carl Djerassi decrying the lack of credit given to Robert Pettit's isolation of bryostatin in Barry Trost's recent total synthesis paper has generated a lot of interest from the blogosphere. It started with Sam at Everyday Scientist (http://tinyurl.com/dz7syh), commenting that citing original work is important and wondering whether C&EN is the right forum, especially when there are other examples of inadequate citation. He was also a little confused because “the Trost paper does cite Pettit ... at least three times.” At The Chem Blog, Kyle Finchsigmate's post (http://tinyurl.com/afzh8w) elicited a flurry of comments ranging from recipes for fried chicken (don't ask) to more interesting discussions on whether research groups of 40 people are really workable. All this noise got picked up by Katharine Sanderson at the Nature blog The Great Beyond (http://tinyurl.com/acq5t2) — fittingly enough, as the paper was published in Nature originally. Maxine Clarke added some important extra detail in a comment: Djerassi wrote letters in support of Pettit to both C&EN and Nature, protesting against “a draconian closure of his laboratory” at Arizona State University.

Meanwhile, boron and its appearance on the Conan O'Brien TV show in the USA got a few bloggers sitting up. The new-found TV stardom follows from the discovery of its new form (see page 23 of this issue) and a write-up in the New York Times. The reporter (http://tinyurl.com/dls7vg) made a slight mistake in reporting the number of forms (three instead of four), sparking comedy routines on TV talk-shows. Sugar Daddy, on our very own Sceptical Chymist (http://tinyurl.com/cavdrn), describes how O'Brien “whipped out a big poster board with crystal structures of the various forms of boron”. Excimer, who actually works with boron compounds every day, gave his thanks to the TV schedulers on Carbon Based Curiosities (http://tinyurl.com/deue85).