Hugh Felkin

Hugh Felkin ( born January 18, 1922 in Neuilly; † 9 November 2001) was a British chemist acting in France ( organic chemistry, stereochemistry, organometallic catalysis).

Felkin went to school in England, studied during the Second World War in Switzerland chemistry with the Lizenziatsabschluss 1944 in Geneva and then went to France, where until 1990 he conducted research in 1947 for the CNRS. He was first in the group of Bianca Tchoubar at the Laboratory of Jeanne Levy at the Medical Faculty in Paris and dealt with stereochemistry. In 1954 he received his doctorate. In 1955 he became Chargé de recherche en 1955 and 1959 maître de recherche. Most recently, he was Director of Research ( classe exceptionelle ) at the Institut de Chimie of Substances Naturelles in Gif- sur- Yvette, where he was since the mid- 1960s. There he dealt with organometallic chemistry, in the mid-1960s with Grignard reactions with nickel complexes and later, among others, activation of alkanes with rhodium and iridium complexes.

He worked in the 1970s closely with Malcolm LH Green on organometallic catalysis with transition metals together. In 1975 she organized in Saint- Raphael to one of the first major international conferences.

He is known especially for the 1967 proposed Felkin -Anh rule ( expanded in the early 1970s by Nguyen Trong Anh and Odile Eisenstein ), a model for predicting the stereochemistry of the nucleophilic addition to carbonyl compounds. They extended and corrected a rule of Donald J. Cram. With this theme Felkin dealt roughly from 1958 to 1970.

He married in France, the chemist Irène Elphimoff, with whom he had ( born 1962), a daughter. With his wife, he received the 1954 Prix Le Bel of the French Chemical Society. Until the Prague uprising in 1968, he was a member of the Communist Party.