"My job, the way I see it, is to develop chemical reactions to allow people to make whatever they want to make. There's no specific application, but when done well they can be universally applicable," said Denmark, an organic chemist at the University of Illinois. "Pharmaceuticals, coatings, new materials, agricultural chemicals - access to all these substances depends on ever-better chemical reactions."
Denmark likened his work to one who makes paint pigments: "The greatest painter couldn't paint a landscape if no one knew how to make the color blue," he said. "But once you have the right blue, just think of all the ways you could paint with it."
One kind of reaction he and his research team study impacts the pharmaceutical industry in particular. Molecules in nature often come in sets of mirror images, like hands do, but the body and its exquisitely controlled processes usually make or can only use one of them. Denmark tries to mimic the body's methods to make mirror-image compounds, but with simpler, cheaper, and more readily available materials.
The chemist said he's been interested in science nearly as long as he can remember. "At age 6 I got a Gilbert chemistry set, and I've never looked back," he related with a laugh. "I had one decked-out laboratory in the basement. I remember taking my mother's vacuum [cleaner] canister to make a fume hood -- I was generating some pretty noxious stuff like chlorine and bromine. It worked great until the fumes burned out the motor."
Denmark received his undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and his doctorate from Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1980. He is the Reynold C. Fuson professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois. Denmark is a member of the ACS division of organic chemistry.
The ACS Award for Creative Work in Synthetic Organic Chemistry is sponsored by Aldrich Chemical Co., Inc.