Paul Rothemund and S. Ferguson MacDonald, and their Namesake Reactions – The Influence of the Fischer School on my Life in Porphyrin Chemistry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Rothemund reaction and the MacDonald 2+2 condensation are two named reactions widely recognized in porphyrin syntheses. Yet not much has been written about the persons whose work paved the way to various porphyrins and porphyrinoids now realized. Paul Rothemund and S. Ferguson MacDonald both obtained their doctorate under Hans Fischer at Munich. Here I attempt to piece together the life stories of the two chemists, tracing back to the connections with the Fischer School, and giving the historical context to their namesake reactions. The pioneering discoveries of Fischer and his students, with later modifications, have become standard methods in the modern era for the synthesis of sizable quantities of porphyrins and porphyrinoids employed for enzyme models, catalysts, drugs, sensors, and building blocks of materials and biomedical research. This essay highlights the pioneers’ achievements, renders history relevant, and recounts the influence they had on my research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".