Virtual Princeton ACS Section Meeting
Wednesday, December 21, 2022
GoToMeeting
6:00 PM – 7:30 PM
"To Think Anew, An Autodidact's Discourse on the Actinide Element Plutonium”
David Jones, VP of Business Development, Sannova Analytical LLC
Biography: David Jones is currently Vice President of Business Development at Sannova Analytical LLC, a contract research organization (CRO). He advises sponsors on choosing appropriate analytical approaches to support developmental efforts for both small molecule and large molecule programs for the treatment of human disease.
After completing his education at SUNY Stony Brook, he worked on the production of original ligand binding assays, radioimmunoassay, (RIA) for Diagnostic Products, now part of Siemens. He then moved to the technology development company, Bioresearch, where he worked on the synthesis of a series urethane protected N-carboxyanhydrides, (UNCAs) novel reagents for fast, clean peptide synthesis. He has since worked for a variety of companies in roles ranging from chemical synthesis, to laboratory management and business development. These included Immunopharmaceutics, now part of Pfizer, SNPE/Isochem, a French fine chemical company, CRO Frontage Labs, Primera, and finally, for the last eight years, Sannova Analytical. His non-professional interests include environmental chemistry
Abstract: In December of 1862, Abraham Lincoln, one of history’s greatest autodidacts, sent a message to Congress just as he was about to formally change the direction of the American Civil War to confront a then widely held, yet criminally absurd, belief. The belief in question was the popular opinion, North and South, that it was acceptable to treat a group of magnificent human beings little better, and sometimes worse, than farm animals. While overall, the message to Congress was largely a dry technical document hardly as eloquent as other Lincolnian rhetoric, much of the language in the soaring final two paragraphs might well speak to any time.
In this talk, I will appropriate, (or misappropriate and scramble) excerpts from these two paragraphs from the 1862 message, taking them completely out of context to address some widely held beliefs about the 94th element in the Periodic Table, the synthetic (or not so synthetic) element plutonium. I will attempt to briefly review how the history of the element played into the reasons that the element is negatively viewed by the general public today, touch upon some aspects of plutonium chemistry including its large-scale industrial processing, consider how its unique phase diagrams dictate its use and possible use while offering a path to preventing abuse, and finally, discuss its nuclear properties, to make the argument, surely controversial, that access to the element may prove to be “the last best hope of earth.”
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