An Exceptional Scientist and Human Being. in Memorial Ivar Ugi

HETEROCYCLES, Vol. 73, 2007 1 Ivar Ugi: An exceptional scientist and human being. In Memorial Ivar Ugi Ivar Ugi, a great scientist and exceptional human being recently left us. He died after a long and painful disease at the 27 September 2005. In memoriam Ivar Ugi this special issue of Heterocyles is edited with many contributions of his scientific friends and colleagues. He was born 1930 in Kuresare on the island Sareemma in Estonia. In 1941 the family Ugi left Estonia and moved to Dillingen an der Donau in Bavaria/Germany. There he went to high school. He studied mathematics and chemistry at the University of Tübingen. At the Ludwig Maximilian Universität in München he performed his PhD under the guidance of Prof. Rolf Huisgen. At the same university he performed his Habilitation “Isonitrile und Pentazole”. In 1962 he become married with his wife Helga and his son Ian was born. In the same year the family Ugi went to Leverkusen, where he joints the central research laboratory of the Bayer AG. Soon he became promoted to the “Research Director” and “Chairman of Bayer‘s Basic Research Committee”. During his time at Bayer Ivar Ugi and Otto Bayer became very good friends. However he realized that his managerial positions at Bayer mostly involved organisational work and prevented him from following his scientific ideas in the lab. Therefore, he was very lucky when he got a full chair for chemistry offered at the University of Southern California (USC) in the US. He stayed there form 1969 to 1971 and partially till 1973. In 1971 he moved back to Munich/Germany where he became offered the prestigious “Hans Fischer” chair at the Technische Universität München. In the line of his famous predecessors Hans Fischer, Stephan Goldschmidt, Emil Fischer and Heinrich Wieland, Ivar Ugi clearly was a worthy successor. He stayed there till his retirement in 1999. Ivar Ugi’s honors and awards are summarized in Table 1. When the Ugi family left Estonia in 1941 Ivar Ugi lost his mother tongue as time went by. However he learned again fluently to speak Estonian after he regularly visited Estonia after the fall down of the Iron Curtain. Moreover he was fluent in speaking Estonian, German, English, Russian and Polish. Awards, Honors • 1964 Research Prize of the Academy of Sciences of Göttingen (“Theoretical Stereochemistry”) • 1987 Member of the Swedish Royal Society of Science • 1987 Honour Member of the New York Academy of Science • 1988 Philip Morris Research Prize (“Dugundji-Ugi model of computer chemistry”) • 1990 Member of the Estonian Academy of Sciences • 1992 Emil Fischer Award of the German Chemical Society (“MCR”) • 1995 Dugundji medal (“Mathematical Approaches to Chemistry”) • 1999 Max Bergmann Medal of the MBK Table 1. Ivar Ugis Honors and Awards. Ivar Ugi became interested in Chemistry as a youngster in Germany when explosives where abundant and available during the Second World War. He collected lost bombs, extracted the explosives and experimented with them. However, sometimes he also noticed the chemical similarity between the anti- headache compound Phenazetin and the artificial sweetener Dulzin (Scheme 1). He bought all available Phenazetin form the surrounding pharmacies he could get hands on. In mothers kitchen he then converted 2 HETEROCYCLES, Vol. 73, 2007 Phenazetin in Dulzin. Because sugar and sweeteners where very rarely available in the Germany of the second world war he sold his synthesized Dulzin gaining high prizes. This extra income secured the food supply of the Ugi family in this time. Thus, sometimes even honey was affordable to them. H N H N NH2 O O O O Phenazetin Dulzin "anti-headache" "artificial sweetener" Scheme 1. Phenazetin and its conversion into Dulzin in Ivars mother “kitchen laboratory”. Ivar Ugi was a very exceptional person and scientist. He had his own and strong sense for humor (Figure 1). As a human person he was very generous and open minded to other ideas and habits. He used to have many friends from all over the world. Figure 1. Ivar had his own great and unique sense of humour. Left: Ivar during a bull-fight in Estonia, below: Ivar taking a bath in the Baltic Sea, right: Ivar trying an old Russian tank driver cap. (Photographs reproduced with the kind permission of his wife Helga Ugi). Ivar Ugi’s research was devoted to fundamental questions in Chemistry by utilizing his strong mathematic and chemistry background, successfully marrying Chemistry and Mathematics. His research HETEROCYCLES, Vol. 73, 2007 3 had an immense impact in an extensive variety of scientific fields, including applied sciences. These range from investigations on the formation and synthesis of pentazoles, isocyanides, the ever growing field of multi component reactions with important applications in combinatorial chemistry and drug discovery, phosphorous chemistry, stereochemistry and computational chemistry (“the logic of chemistry”). He published more than 300 scientific papers and several books. His major scientific achievements are summarised in the following paragraphs, but by no means this intends to be comprehensive summary (see however Ivar Ugis publication list!). Pentazoles, the way to isocyanides, the discovery of the Ugi four component condensation and the start of combinatorial chemistry. Pentazoles constitute a great challenge. Their existence was postulated already in the 19th century. Many famous chemists, e.g. Hantzsch (1903), Dimroth (1910), Lifschitz (1915), Curtius (1915), Wiberg and others tried to synthesize pentazoles by different means, without success. However Ugi and Huisgen synthesized the first time pentazoles by reacting phenyl diazo compounds with azide salts at low temperatures. Moreover by performing elegant kinetic measurements and 15N labelling studies they were able to prove their formation, existence and decay (Figure 2). Pentazoles are so labile and explosive that only recently the X-rays structure of phenyl pentazole and some other pentazoles could be obtained at - 100°C.1 Figure 2. First synthesis of crystalline pentazoles described in Chemische Berichte in 1958. Isocyanides were basic materials for Ugi’s early pentazole research to obtain reference tetrazole materials, to study the difference between these isoelectronic heterocyclic systemes. A very efficient and fruitful synthetic access to the substituted tetrazoles is the 1910 discovery Oliveri-Mandalá and Alagna-synthesis employing isocyanides and HN3. However Ugi realized that time known and “classical” approaches towards isocyanides, the 19th century Hoffman carbylamine, Gautier and Liecke methods, where by no means good methods for an efficient and general access towards these compounds. Therefore he thought about alternative routes and came up with the 2 step sequence of amine formylation and subsequent dehydration. Interestingly already 1867 Gautier tried this rather “obvious” route for the synthesis of isocyanides. However missing the addition of a base to capture the formed acid byproduct of the dehydrating agent Gautier could never obtain any isocyanide by this route, due to the acid labile character of isocyanides. Despite many elaborated ways to access isocyanides, Ugi’s method comprise today’s standard synthetic route to this important class of organic molecules (Scheme 2). Today thousands of isocyanides are prepared by this method and are commercially available. 4 HETEROCYCLES, Vol. 73, 2007 HCOOH H dehydrating agent NH N O NC R 2 R R or base HCOOR H O O Cl Cl O Cl dehydrating agents: POCl3, TosCl, Cl Cl Cl O Cl Cl O O Cl Cl Cl Cl base: NEt , Hünig, pyridine 3 Scheme 2: The dehydration route to form isocyanides form N-formamides, today’s standard method of isocyanide production. Investigating the properties and reactivity of the that time hardly broadly accessible isocyanides lead to the discovery of the fare leading four component condensation which eventually started the totally new area of multi component reaction (MCR) chemistry (Figure 3). Shortly before Christmas 1957 Ugi ordered his PhD student Steinbrückner to put the reaction between the four components isocyanide, primary amine, aldehyde and a carboxylic acid. It happened that Steinbrückner - already in Christmas mood - put the four components grudgingly together. That time a usual scale for a chemical reaction was at least 100 mmol. As most of the Chemical Institutes that time, the one of the Ludwig Maximilians Universität in Munich located in the Karlstrasse didn’t have central heating. Therefore students worked with coat at the benches in winter times. Being distracted by other means Steinbrückner didn’t control the reaction carefully and it soon went through and the reaction was spilled over his new coat. Steinbrückner now was very angry about Ugi blaming him for the loose of his expensive coat. In the new year, however, Ugi told Steinbrückner to carefully repeat the reaction. Thus in between only 6 month the essential variants of the Ugi multi component reactions where discovered, including α-aminoacylamides, β- lactames, hydantoin-4-imides, 2-thiohydantoin-4-imides, α-hydrazinocarbonamides, urethanes, selenoamides, thioamides, amides, diacylamides and amidines of α-amino acids, as well as tetrazoles. In the most general definition the Ugi reaction comprise the reaction of a Schiff base or an enamine, an isocyanide and an acid, followed by a suitable rearrangement. Figure 3: The ground braking paper on the discovery of a new condensation principle in Angewandte Chemie 1960. HETEROCYCLES, Vol. 73, 2007 5 Ivar Ugi soon realized the immense practical advantages of his reaction. Due to its one-pot character MCRs are very easy to perform. In contrary to the classical assembly line of complex organic molecules (multi step sequential preparations) with many necessary standard operations including reaction set up, reaction observation, work up, purification and analysis, these operations have to be performed only once in the case of MCRs. Multicomponent processes are at a premium for the achievement of high levels of brevity and diversity, as they allow more than two simple and flexible building blocks to be combined in practical, time-saving one-pot operations.

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