Chemical Bonds

While Michael Haley is impressed when he reflects on the achievements of the last fifty years of chemistry--plastics, synthetic fibers, pharmaceuticals, to name just a few--the assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon believes that these are only the earliest contributions of a young, rapidly developing science that is destined to provide humanity with an ever-richer treasure-trove of ingenious and useful discoveries.
Haley's own research focuses on the promising and rapidly evolving chemistry of carbon-rich molecules. Working in this same area of research, Rice University's Richard Smalley recently won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of carbon-rich "buckeyballs," soccer ball-shaped molecules composed of sixty carbon atoms.
"With a buckeyball, you have a large molecule‹a polymer‹of one set shape that has some very interesting properties," says Haley. "In contrast, our group is interested in building up lots of carbon rich molecules of differing sizes and shapes. Our achievement is that we have created a simple method for building these complex compounds from smaller, easy-to-handle component parts. It's almost like snapping together LEGOs."
What doors might this basic research open? Haley notes that commercial plastic production--an enormous industry--has been severely constrained due to chemists' inability to build up polymers from anything except stable compounds. For example, the common plastic polyethylene is made up of large numbers of stable ethylene subunits (technically called monomers). When banded together, these components form polymers that are remarkably useful and versatile. Haley's group is now able to prepare monomers that are considerably more volatile than ethylene. By allowing for the safe and commercially viable production of materials using volatile compounds, his innovative technique gives scientists a much larger set of building blocks to combine into whole new families of polymers.
"These molecules simply could not be created using old methods," Haley says. "Now that we have developed the technique, other scientists will creatively apply our basic research to innumerable applications--new materials with exciting and exotic properties, superconductivity or nonlinear optical properties, for example. It should be quite exciting."

Haley credits much of his own success to the help he received from supportive and inspiring professors when he was a student. He now places a high value on training the students who work in his laboratory. "One of the most important things I do, and the chemistry department as a whole does this really well, is to teach undergraduate researchers to think about a problem critically--to be thinking, resourceful, high-quality scientists. These are skills they can use later on in their careers, whether at a chemical company, a pharmaceutical company, or at some other job that requires critical analysis of problems."
Charles Johnson, an undergraduate chemistry major now in his senior year, has worked in the Haley lab for eighteen months. His name appeared as a coauthor, along with two other undergraduates, on the article that presented Haley's breakthrough.
"The article appeared in the Journal of the American Chemical Society," Johnson says, "which is America's top chemistry journal."
In addition to adding a prestigious publication to his résumé, Johnson explains, working in Haley's lab "has shown me what the field of chemistry is like. It was a truly amazing feeling using Mike's technique to create molecules that no one else had ever made. I felt right on the cutting edge of technology."
Inspired by the experience, Johnson plans on pursuing a career as a chemist--another "chemical reaction" that snapped into place in the Haley lab.

Back to INQUIRY, Fall 1997