University of Birmingham Chemistry Lectures

This year we are unable to attend the Chemistry lectures at the University of Birmingham. Students in the Lower Sixth and Upper Sixth have been able to see them through Zoom at the comfort of their own homes.

The first lecture was by Dr John Snaith on ‘discovering new medicine: the role of the chemist’. Chemistry is the cornerstone in the continuing search for new medicines. Since the efforts of William Henry Perkin to synthesise the antimalarial quinine in the mid nineteenth century, chemists have used their skills to prepare compounds for the treatment of disease.

The lecture started with a brief review of the treatment of diseases through the ages and then looked at the work done by Perkin which led others to the discovery of the sulphonamide antibiotics. The many roles played by chemists in the modern drug discovery process was discussed by looking at how chemical synthesis, natural product isolation, and genome data were used to generate promising compounds, and how these developed into successful drugs. The second lecture was by Dr Simon Cotton and titled ‘chirality, smell, drugs and chemistry’.

Many carbon compounds contain a chiral carbon. This leads to the existence of two "mirror-image" forms (enantiomers) of the same compound. Chemically they are identical, but they may behave differently in the human body, most tragically in the case of the sedative thalidomide. One form of thalidomide leads to birth the defects of babies with defective limbs when administered to pregnant women; the other form does not.

The lecture provided many examples of how the presence of a chiral carbon may affect the properties of a drug. The lecturer also discussed a number of cases where enantiomers have different smells, including the true story of the isomers of limonene.