Robert C. West (1928–2022): A Giant in Organosilicon Chemistry, Cosmopolitan, Mountain Climber and Pilot

Robert (Bob) Culbertson West passed away on October 12, 2022. Along with his pioneering contributions in the field of organosilicon chemistry, he will be remembered as an outstanding researcher who brought together many extraordinary talents and interests in addition to science. Portraying an influential great scientist solely through his scientific achievements would be just as inadequate as reducing an eagle to the fascinating mechanics and brilliance of its wings. Robert (Bob) Culbertson West brought together many extraordinary talents, in addition to science, that has inspired us to highlight some striking aspects of his life. He was 16 years old when he left home to learn more about the exterior and interior of nature. Even in his early school days, Bob was fascinated by nature and the natural sciences, which he wanted to explore in all their breadth. His first passion with the natural world was in astronomy—with the tiny points of lights that lie beyond the sky—the planets, suns, galaxies, and those real and imagined features that he observed with his homemade telescope in New Jersey. Before long, his attention was absorbed by the rocks and minerals and the kaleidoscope of materials beneath his feet. He was obsessive about maps of mountain ranges, especially the Rocky Mountains, primarily finding out which peaks had not yet been conquered—but more about that later. Quickly, Bob's fascination with nature was attracted to what connected it all together: the chemical elements of the Periodic Table and chemistry. The United States, short-handed during World War II and in need of scientific minds and hands to help with the war effort, enlisted Bob's curiosity and enthusiasm. Solemnly sworn to secrecy, the teenage Bob began his professional career working in a metallurgy laboratory for the Manhattan Project in New Jersey. Remarkably, his inquisitive mind quickly drove him to discern the ultimate goal of the entire project. From there, he went on to Harvard University where he studied under the “father” of American silicon and silicone chemistry, Eugene Rochow. At Harvard, his PhD research included the synthesis and characterization of new silicon and germanium compounds (Figure 1). Robert (Bob) Culbertson West. After finishing his PhD in 1954, Bob joined Lehigh University for a short period before moving to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The University of Wisconsin was enticing: it had the reputation and gravitas that people like Bob brought to it. It was far from the Ivy League culture of the East and found its path to becoming a scientific powerhouse through providing the practical and pressing needs of Wisconsin's agriculture. By the time Bob arrived, pure science had been thriving, alongside applied research, and the University of Wisconsin, like Bob, moved forward quickly to a leadership role in U.S. academic circles. Even so, neither Bob nor Madison anticipated the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s that followed. When Bob first arrived in Madison, there were entire research floors in the Chemistry and Physics buildings that didn't have women's restrooms; given the demographics of the graduate student body, there simply wasn't much of a demand for them. Bob helped change that by quietly examining the applications that were set aside, pointing out to the admissions committee suitable women to join graduate school. Early on in his career, West studied the structure and reactivity of organolithium compounds. Then were the oxocarbons, with deltic acid and its wonderfully symmetric dianion, [C3O3]2−. The quinone-radialenes also intrigued him both in the symmetry of their structures and in their colors, which exhibit spectacular electronic hues far into the near-infrared. Perhaps because it is eclipsed by his more recent work with silicon, one can easily overlook how much attention Bob paid to the chemistry of carbon. It isn't quite right to describe this work as “organic chemistry”, because in Bob's hands, carbon was just one of the main-group elements—he didn't care if a compound was “organic” or “inorganic”. He studied perlithiated carbon compounds and perchlorinated small carbon rings; in his hands they were more like main-group compounds than what an organic chemist would claim. “Always keep your mind open, folks!” Bob used to tell his students. An overview of Bob's full body of research reveals another element that was central to his science—oxygen, the most abundant element of the Earth's crust. It is an element frequently taken for granted, taking second place in naming conventions and often spoken of as merely one heteroatom among many others. But in Bob's oeuvre, oxygen is remarkably central and he returned to it again and again. First, it is found in the oxocarbons and radialenes and then in the siloxanes (“silicones”) which was one of his favorite research topics. Bob studied the acidity of silanols, investigated H-bonding to siloxanes, and was fascinated by the unique flexible structure of the Si−O−Si linkage and how it vastly differed from the analogous C−O−C linkage. The curiously wide range of Si−O−Si bond angles that exist in nature found its most acute limit in the West laboratories—a crystalline 1,3-cyclodisiloxane featuring a Si−O−Si angle smaller than 90°. In other siloxane linkages, the Si−O−Si bond angle approaches and occasionally reaches linearity. We must, of course, mention two seminal discoveries in organosilicon chemistry for which Bob is best known, and which dramatically changed organosilicon chemistry: 1) the synthesis and characterization in 1981 of the first ever stable and beautifully orange crystalline tetramesityldisilene with a Si=Si bond (collaboration with Josef Michl and Mark Fink), which broke the 100-year-old so-called “double-bond rule” (which stated that main-group elements below row two of the Periodic Table do not form isolable compounds with double bonds); and 2) the synthesis in 1994 of the first bottleable N-heterocyclic silylene (the “West silylene”), a silicon analogue of Arduengo's N-heterocyclic carbenes. These compounds revolutionized silicon chemistry, created a wave of activity, and paved the avenue to many other isolable subvalent (low-coordinate) silicon species and new silicon-based functional groups that hitherto had not been accessible or even imagined before. Then there were the polysilanes (investigated in collaboration with his lifelong friend Josef Michl), some of remarkably high molecular weight, which display unprecedented thermal and optoelectronic properties and again possess properties very different from those of polyolefins. It is undeniable that Bob, the “Silicon Kid” as he called himself, had a favorite element—even though he treated the other elements with equal respect. Bob was a pioneer also in bringing fleeting subatomic particles such as muons, which are similar to electrons in charge (−1) and spin (1/2) but 207 times heavier, to the attention of his fellow chemists. At TRIUMF, Canada's particle accelerator center in Vancouver, Bob and his collaborators trapped muons by a variety of silicon and germanium compounds, adding insight into their electron distributions. Bob published 485 scientific papers and was for almost two decades one of the world's most cited chemists. In 1970 he received the Kipping Award of the American Chemical Society and in 1989 the Wacker Silicone Award for his outstanding achievements in organosilicon chemistry. In retrospect, considering all his research—Bob's experience probing the chemistry of lithium, carbon, oxygen, and silicon—it seems perfectly natural that he was in a position to bring all of them together and create an improved lithium ion battery, in his company, Silatronix Inc., which offered new commercial materials with greater charge capacity, higher voltage, improved safety, extended operating temperature ranges, and longer life times for lithium batteries. Bob's concern and general love of people is a theme that was always present. He had a special empathy for those not in a position to help or protect themselves and had an abiding sense of fairness that was manifested in many different venues and situations. If there was anything singular and unchanging about Bob it is this character quality. He was particularly concerned about population growth, unwanted or unplanned pregnancies, and the plight of powerless women. West acted decisively to help many women in need by co-founding the Women's Medical Fund in Wisconsin in 1972, and continued to serve on its Board of Directors until his last breath. Bob's political, social, humanistic actions and great empathy for his fellow man and woman had far more impact on the people around him than he probably felt comfortable taking credit for. His students, postdocs, and visiting faculty came from all over the world. At the very same time, and with great frequency, Bob was on the other side of the world serving as a scientific, cultural, and silicon ambassador to every continent, except Antarctica. Already in the 1970s, Bob was very much interested in the Japanese culture; he learned Japanese which prepared him for many visits to numerous Japanese universities and he even presented a public lecture in Japanese in Kyoto in 1999. Bob had also great interest in archaeology and he owned a large collection of ancient pottery from the Middle East which he acquired on his frequent visits to Israel. He even published a paper in Palestine Exploration Quarterly about an archaeological site (Ephraim) in the Palestinian Authority. Bob made many hiking expeditions to claim previously unclimbed peaks in western North America. In fact, he preferred to conquer mountains that no one had ever climbed before, like he did in chemistry. He claimed 60 first ascents, primarily in the Selkirk Mountains in British Columbia. He was also a passionate pilot of small airplanes. Looking at things from above, together with his soulmate partner Petey Young, Bob could tell us endless great stories about adventures they took. Bob and Petey have now embarked on a new journey. We and many others will remember them fondly.

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