New results vindicate suspect 63-year-old claim on synthesis of first catenane

Over six decades after Edel Wasserman from Bell Telephone Laboratories claimed to have made the first mechanically interlocked hydrocarbon rings – without direct evidence – UK chemists have supported his findings.¹ For six years David Leigh’s team at the University of Manchester sought to show that Wasserman’s 1960 letter to the Journal of the American Chemical Society was wrong. ² In it, the US chemist claimed the first interlocked pair of rings, which he called a catenane. But after Leigh’s group painstakingly reproduced Wasserman’s work, ‘it must have been formed in his reaction’, he concludes.