Key taxol group easily made in three

(DHQ) 2-PHALa

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Methyl cinnamate

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> 99% enantiomeric excess 30% yield from methyl cinnamate

a Phthalazine core attached to identical dihydroquir units, b From Chloramine-T (/V-chloro-p-toluene-sulfonamide, sodium salt) and K2Os02(OH)4.

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\ ^ OH β-Hydroxysulfonamide

crystallizes from reaction mixture

\ Acid 1 deprotection

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\ ^ OH α-Hydroxy- β-amino acid

sitive also could survive such brutal treatment.

Catalytic AA is the third catalytic, en-antioselective, and practical reaction de­veloped in Sharpless' lab. His previous fishing expeditions netted catalytic asymmetric epoxidation (AE) in 1980

The Department of Energy has estab­lished a $50 million-per-year program to involve for the first time the basic research community in cleaning up nuclear waste at DOE's widely scattered, heavily con­taminated nuclear weapons facilities.

Cleanup of waste at DOE's nuclear weapons facilities—at Savannah River, S.C.; Oak Ridge, Term.; Hanford, Wash.; and Paducah, Ky.; among others—is ex­pected to take at least 50 years and cost at least $300 billion. For years, DOE has been heavily criticized for its poor stew­ardship of such deadly material and has been trying to come up with an overall strategy for dealing with the contamina­tion problem.

University researchers already receive about $80 million annually for helping DOE and its national laboratories to de­velop technological fixes for the prob­lem. However, "what we are currently doing at universities is much more akin to near-term applied technology devel­opment/' explains Thomas P. Grumbly, DOE's assistant secretary for environ­mental management. This program "will be a significant increment above

and catalytic AD in 1988. If catalytic AA "can be fine-tuned to give even better enantiomeric excesses, it will have the same impact on organic chemistry as the Sharpless AE and AD reactions," says Perm State's Weinreb.

Maureen Rouhi

that," he says. It "is really a major depar­ture in terms of what we were doing."

Outlines of the program appear in the Feb. 9 Federal Register. The program so­licits grant requests from basic research­ers leading to "environmental manage­ment and restoration actions that would decrease risk for the public and workers, provide opportunities for major cost re­ductions, reduce time required to achieve mission goals, and in general should ad­dress problems that are considered in­tractable without new knowledge." Pre-proposal applications are due by Feb. 28. The DOE contact is Bobbi Parra (e-mail bobbi.parra@oer.doe.gov).

Some priority research areas ad­dressed in the program are chemical characterization of wastes; physical and chemical behavior of such wastes; chem­ical principles for waste separation and treatment; modeling of multiphase chem­ical systems in natural systems, waste tanks, and processing streams; and bio­logical and geochemical reactions that se quester or degrade contaminants.

The program is a collaboration be­tween Grumbly's environmental man­

agement division and DOE's Office of Energy Research, and much of the work will involve DOE's national laboratories. Martha A. Krebs, director of that office, calls the program, announced Feb. 14, "a valentine for the American people."

She says the academic research com­munity has the talent to perform impor­tant research on the waste problem, but "has not, in fact, formed a community around the problems of the cleanup. This $50 million will begin to form that community."

Krebs stresses that the proposals will undergo external peer-merit review un­der the strictest National Science Foun­dation standards. She indicates that NSF's environmental division, which supports related work, will have an ad­visory role in the new initiative. DOE, she says, has also contracted with the National Research Council to do a study to assess research needs.

"It may be eight to 10 years before we really see major fruition from this," says Grumbly. "But it will still be plenty of time to deal with some of the major problems we have out there. Putting this program together under such a short deadline involved a herculean effort. We hope the scientific community will buy into this."

Wil Lepkowski

Panel looks for causes of Gulf War illnesses A White House panel looking at the possible causes of illnesses reported by troops who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf War last week commended the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency for reconsidering whether ex­posure to chemical and/or biological warfare (CBW) agents could explain some of the problems.

In its interim report, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Vet­erans' Illnesses recommends develop­ment and deployment of better equip­ment to detect and alert troops to the presence of CBW agents, saying such equipment "would improve the health care surveillance of troops involved in future conflicts." Especially needed, the panel finds, is improved technology to monitor low-level exposures to chemi­cal warfare agents and development of a real-time detector/alarm system for biological warfare agents.

DOE woos scientists for nuclear waste work

FEBRUARY 19,1996 C&EN 7

NEWS OF THE WEEK

The Defense Department still insists there was no widespread use of chemi­cal or biological agents during the war. But mounting evidence being collected by the United Nations Special Commis­sion on Iraq has prompted the Pentagon to revisit the issue. Last spring, the Pen­tagon created the Persian Gulf Investiga­tion Team to look into possible troop ex­posure to CBWs. The team is reviewing operational and intelligence records as well as eyewitness accounts. The CIA is reviewing intelligence documents to re­assess its conclusion that troops were not exposed to CBW agents.

The two agencies are coordinating their activities, which the advisory pan­el applauds. "We will monitor their progress carefully," the panel warns.

The panel berates the Food & Drug Administration for not yet devising bet­ter methods governing military use of drugs and vaccines used to defend troops against CBW agents. Under spe­cial rulemaking five years ago, FDA al­lowed the Pentagon to vaccinate troops with pyridostigimine bromide and botu-linum toxoid as antidotes against CBW agents, although neither vaccine had FDA approval for that purpose.

Whether the vaccines contributed to the symptoms and illnesses now being reported is difficult to ascertain. The Pentagon is unable to produce records of the service members who were vaccinat­ed. The panel strongly recommends "wholesale improvement" in the Penta­gon's medical record keeping. Deputy Secretary of Defense John P. White says the Pentagon is in the throes of upgrad­ing its system.

Government studies to determine if Gulf War veterans have mortality, symp­toms, or diseases attributable to service in the conflict are well designed, the panel finds. But the panel faults the various agencies, including the Pentagon, for in­adequate attention to peer review and for not communicating effectively with vet­erans who participated in the research.

White notes that most of the panel's recommendations "are either already [being] implemented or will be imple­mented shortly." The advisory panel will issue its final report by Dec. 31. President Clinton praises the commit­tee for its "impressive start," and says he looks "forward to reviewing [its] fi­nal recommendations."

Lois Ember

Flexibility urged in environmental regulation The existing command-and-control envi­ronmental management regime has served the nation well over the past 25 years, but if s time for the U.S. to set its sights on sustainable development and embrace more flexible, cost-effective, so­cially responsible management tools. That's the conclusion reached indepen­dently by a presidentially appointed pan­el cochaired by a chemical company exec­utive and an environmentalist and by a Paris-based international organization.

But instead of calling for a rollback in the current scheme of standards, dead­lines, permits, inspections, and enforce­ment penalties—as the Republican-led Congress has sought—both reports call for its retention, but with improvements.

In rare unanimity, the 25 members of the President's Council on Sustainable Development advocate "the harnessing of markets and the innovative capabili­ties of the private sector—giving it greater flexibility in return for a com­mitment to higher levels of perfor­mance," explains Council Cochairman Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, Washington, D.C.

The council notes that the current reg­ulatory scheme has to be retained as a baseline from which companies can in­novate to achieve those higher levels of performance. To accomplish this, council members suggest that companies be giv­en the leeway to seek less costly strategies to prevent—not control—^pollution. Mar-

Lash: commitment to higher performance

ket-based incentives and mechanisms and performance-based standards could pave the road to flexibility, pollution preven­tion, and sustainable development.

The council insists that the Environ­mental Protection Agency must be given greater authority to follow this two-track course to regulatory reform. Failure to do so would prevent the U.S. from bal­ancing environmental protection, eco­nomic prosperity, and social equity—the hallmarks of sustainability.

Council members also call for a re­view of the current tax structure and tax and spending subsidies to shift revenue-raising burdens from individual and corporate income taxes to taxes on pollu­tion and consumption. Council Cochair­man David T. Buzzelli, vice president and corporate director of Dow Chemi­cal, tells C&EN he expects the report's emphasis on regulatory reform, market mechanisms, and reform of taxes and subsidies to be favorably received by the chemical industry. He notes that the Re­sponsible Care Program of the Chemical Manufacturers Association is "highlight­ed [in the council's] report as an example of a road to sustainable development."

The consensus report, three years in the making, was the effort of leaders drawn from industry, government, and environmental groups. President Clin­ton is expected to release the report in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, in its just-released review of U.S. environmental performance over the past 25 years, the independent Orga­nization for Economic Cooperation & Development (OECD) takes note of the work of the president's council and in­dependently reaches many of the same conclusions. (The report is the 12th in an ongoing series reviewing environmental performance of OECD's 26 member countries.)

U.S. environmental policies "are now . . . at a crossroads," the OECD study states. The existing regulatory re­gime has accomplished significant im­provements in air, water, and waste pollution. Most important, these suc­cesses have been achieved without ad­versely affecting the economy as a whole. The report also takes account of the "major environmental progress" made by the chemical industry.

But, the report notes, significant air and water pollution problems persist. Also, the U.S. remains the largest per capita generator of municipal waste and, because of tax and spending subsidies,

8 FEBRUARY 19,1996 C&EN

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