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Professor Stephen Angyal was interviewed in 2004 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Angyal's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract discusses what inositols are and how he started using conformational analysis to study carbohydrates. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Stephen Angyal was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1914. He studied science at school and university and in 1937 received a PhD from the University of Budapest for his research in carbohydrate chemistry. When he finished his studies, he prematurely decided never to work with carbohydrates again, arguing that all the important problems in the field had been solved!
Angyal’s first job after graduation was at the Chinoin Pharmaceutical Works in Budapest where he worked from 1938 to 1941. His work was mainly on the production of synthetic oestrogens and the development of sulfathiazole. As tensions in Europe increased, he decided to emigrate and had acquired a landing permit for Australia when World War II broke out. He left Hungary in early 1940.
From 1941 to 1946 he was employed as a research chemist by Nicholas Pty Ltd, in Melbourne, Victoria, where he worked on the synthesis of vitamins and the preparation of essential drugs. He moved from industry to academia in 1946 when he was employed at the University of Sydney as a lecturer in chemistry. Here he taught and began his research into inositols – a family of simple carbohydrates.
In 1953 Angyal moved to the New South Wales University of Technology, which later became the University of New South Wales (UNSW), where he remained until he retired in 1979. Appointed first as an associate professor, in 1960 he became the University’s initial Professor of Organic Chemistry. From 1970 to 1979 Angyal also served as the Dean of the Faculty of Science. While at UNSW his research centred on the chemistry of inositols and other sugars, particularly using the approach of conformational analysis. He received the first DSc awarded by UNSW in 1964.
Angyal was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1962. In 1977 he was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).
This was really where your research on inositols took off. What was special about this group of compounds? What did you do with them?
They are closely related to sugars – the sugars are ring compounds, with six-membered rings, and so are the inositols – but in many aspects they differ from them. They are well known in nature, but not all of them. One is widely spread in nature. There are nine possible inositols, depending on the shape of the molecule, but two of them were still unknown and we were the first to make them so you had the complete group.
When you have got all the possible compounds and all the different variations, you can study which physical, physiological and chemical reactions differ just because of the shape. This seemed a neglected area – a natural product, an interesting compound but not studied sufficiently – and I thought, 'Let's go.' That was in the early '50s.
As soon as we started going we found some reactions which are applicable to sugars, and then we found a very interesting reaction which allowed us to measure the energy of various sugars. And once we had that, we applied it to sugars and so I branched off to carbohydrates. But I kept on developing inositol chemistry, publishing about 50 papers on it. So later, when inositols became biologically important, we had all the chemistry on a firm basis.
You had started getting into the new field of conformational analysis. Would you say this was the key to understanding the inositols?
It was. It is about studying the shapes of the molecules. We knew the structure of the molecule, nicely written down on paper, but that didn't indicate the shape, yet it turns out that how the compound reacts depends on its shape. Other molecules have to approach it, it has to fit against other molecules. The theory became so important that several books were written on it – I wrote the carbohydrate part in one of them – and the two people who introduced it won Nobel Prizes.. But now there are no separate books because it has become an essential part of organic chemistry.
I realised that the inositols are ideal compounds for studying the shape and then purely by chance I discovered a reaction which was relevant to carbohydrates. Previously we hadn't understood why compounds react the way they do. Even more important than the shape is the energy contained in each of these compounds. And that is what I approached now: I could for the first time really define the energies of the different shapes, which then explained why they take up the shape that they do. Applying that unexpected reaction to carbohydrates solved one of the problems in carbohydrate chemistry, and that is when I got back suddenly to carbohydrate chemistry. Ever since, I have found there are still plenty of problems.
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