After a postdoctoral stint at Purdue University, USA (with H C Brown), Mariappan Periasamy has been in the faculty, School of Chemistry, University of Hyderabad. His research interests are in the development of organometallics and chiral reagents for applications in synthetic processes. Recently, as a hobby, he has initiated a project on the conversion of ‘Farm waste to chemical feedstocks’ with an objective of developing sustainable, renewable and environmentally benign energy sources.

Ever since the time of Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), stereochemistry played an important role in the advancement of science. If Pasteur’s landmark deduction that the formation of optically active organic compounds during the spoilage of wine is due to a biological process, led to his discovery of microbes, his resolution of sodium ammonium tartrate based on the shapes of the crystals led to the idea of requirement of non-superimposable mirror image relationship for an organic compound to be optically active. In the ensuing years, J H van’t Hoff (the first Chemistry Nobel Laureate 1901, for his work on osmotic pressure)1 and J A Le Bel recognised that attachment of four different groups around a tetrahedral carbon atom would lead to non-super imposable mirror images and discovered the tetrahedral geometry of organic compounds in 1874. A similar idea helped A Werner (Chemistry Nobel Laureate 1913) to elucidate the geometrical structures of co-ordination compounds.

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Address for Correspondence
Mariappan Periasamy
School of Chemistry
University of Hyderabad
Hyderabad 500046, India.
Email: mpsc@uohyd.ernet.in