Cornell chemists have garnered three of the American Chemical Society's 10 Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awards for 1997, and a fourth member of the chemistry faculty, Harold A. Scheraga, has earned the ACS Award for Computers in Chemical and Pharmaceutical Research.

The three Cope Scholars are: professors of chemistry Barry K. Carpenter, David B. Collum and Jon C. Clardy, the Horace White Professor of Chemistry. Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awards recognize excellence in the field of organic chemistry and require the recipient to deliver a lecture at the annual Cope symposium held in conjunction with the ACS national meeting in August 1997 in Las Vegas, Nev.

Scheraga, the George W. and Grace L. Todd Professor Emeritus of Chemistry is a protein chemist who was recognized for his "use of computers in the advancement of the chemical and biological sciences."

Scheraga's research group has long used computer modeling and simulations in computational analysis of the complexities of protein folding. In early studies of proteins and other polymers, he pioneered the development and application of physico-chemical methods to understand interactions in model polypeptides, in proteins, and between enzymes and substrates. He was first to recognize the implications for physical chemistry in the discovery that amino acid sequences dictate the three-dimensional structures of particular proteins.

Carpenter's research group uses both experimental and computational techniques to understand the mechanisms in reactions of organic molecules. Recently, these studies have focused on the behavior of transient intermediates, often unobservable factors in organic reactions which may not be properly described by current theories. Carpenter is developing new theories that may change the way organic chemists think about such reactions.

Clardy's investigations in chemical biology have determined the structures of 'red tide toxins,' extraordinarily potent neurotoxins produced by marine algal blooms that help to understand the functioning of nerve cells. His group also described the structure of anticancer agents such as bryostatin, now undergoing human clinical trials. The team currently is investigating how natural products from fungi that live inside plants or insects exert their biological effects, and the larger related question of how small organic molecules interact with their much larger biological receptors.

Collum uses computational models, sophisticated analytical instruments and physico-organic techniques to investigate organolithium compounds under varying conditions of solvation. Lithium is one of the most widely used metals in organic chemistry with wide applications -- everything from catalyst in anionic polymerizations for the synthesis of rubber to an increasing role in the synthesis of pharmaceuticals. Organolithium species form complex clusters by chemical self-association, and the understanding of these clusters is rendered more intractible because different solvents under differing conditions produce different ligands.