I grew up in Syracuse, NY. As a teenager I decided to follow my father’s footsteps by going into the profession of Chemistry. Also I enjoyed writing and looked forward to opportunities to write. Penn State was admired for its strong Chemistry curriculum. After my junior year in high school, my family moved to State College, Pa. so that I would qualify for in-state tuition. The town of State College was a great place to live after the hard winters of Upstate New York. The people of Pennsylvania were welcoming, and I blended right in.
I started classes at The Pennsylvania State University in the Fall of 1959. Now the educational philosophy seems to be to push as many students as possible through in four years. But in 1959 at Penn State the educational philosophy could be informally called “weeding out” or meritocracy. About 900 to 1000 Pennsylvanian kids were admitted to Penn State’s Chemistry program each year. Four years later about 35 of the best and brightest graduated.
Freshman Chemistry was taught in a lecture hall that sat about 1000 students. Back in those days cigarette smoking was allowing in classrooms, and I got my share of second-hand smoke. The labs and recitations were good, but the textbook was a poor selection because it was irrelevant to the rest of the course. After the freshman year, I had exceptionally good professors and textbooks in Organic Chemistry, Physical Chemistry and Analytical Chemistry.
Four years later, I had built a good Grade Point Average. Some graduating seniors were looking for a job, and one bright young man planned to run his father’s chemical business. I and a handful of other seniors applied to graduate schools. All Penn State graduates were required to go elsewhere to graduate school in order to gain a broader experience. Being optimistic I applied to Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Cornell, and Berkeley. I was accepted at all. I was not sure I could measure up to Harvard’s reputation but I decided to go there along with two other Penn Staters. I think one thing that helped me get into Harvard was my senior research project at Penn State. One of the Penn State organic professors, Dr. Norman Deno, was interested in carbonium ions. His graduate students had not been able to recover the new hydrocarbons produced after an alkane was exposed to strong sulfuric acid. I conceived and implemented a way to achieve that. I think Professor Deno may have written a strong letter of recommendation for me. During my first year at Harvard, a publication with my name among the authors came out in the prestigious Journal of the American Chemical Society.
At Harvard, graduate students were pushed onto a research project after only a few courses. The Physical Organic course I took spent time reviewing Quantum Mechanics. My Inorganic course spent time talking in detail about Quantum Mechanics. I took a course in Quantum Mechanics and Theoretical Chemistry. I got the idea that I should go into Quantum Mechanics and that required using big computers. Harvard had one. Computational Chemistry had not yet jelled into a recognized Science, but that was the direction I was headed.
At Harvard I had the unique experience of doing research with Professor William Lipscomb, the 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on boron compounds. He was an amazing man who worked six and a half days per week every week. He directed three groups: there were graduate students doing boron chemistry, another group of students and “postdocs” were doing protein crystallography, and graduate students doing Theoretical Chemistry. My dissertation was on ab initio and semiempirical molecular orbital calculations of phosphorus-containing molecules. The thesis was approved by a panel of Harvard Chemistry Professors. Dr. Lipscomb advised me to gain further experience in theoretical chemistry by “postdoc’ing” with Professor Roald Hoffmann at Cornell University. I did as advised. Professor Roald Hoffmann was inventive in his own right and subsequently shared a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981 with the famous synthetic organic chemist Robert Burns Woodward at Harvard. Their subject was orbital symmetry, which derived from semi-empirical molecular orbital calculations that Roald had done with Lipscomb at Harvard.
After I qualified for the Ph.D. in 1968, Eli Lilly and Company made the best job offer I received. My father had worked for Lilly during World War I. My wife, two daughters, and I moved to the Midwest.
Back in those early days what I did was called Theoretical Chemistry, and most of the medicinal chemists and managers at Lilly held a strong opinion that Theoretical Chemistry was totally useless for discovering new pharmaceuticals. With the technology of the 1960s and 1970s, their opinion had validity. Fortunately my Lilly boss, Mr. Max Marsh, defended me and another theoretical chemist from the naysayers. Lilly had one of earliest efforts in this new area of research. It took over ten years for the computers and methodologies to advance enough for us to produce useful information for the medicinal chemists. Meanwhile I tested methods, worked to improve methodologies, and investigated new data sets as they became available. I published papers and gained recognition. It was also important that I increased the feelings of teamwork between the medicinal chemists and computational chemists. The size of the computational group at Lilly grew from two scientists in the 1960s to about 15 by 1990. Most other pharmaceutical companies followed suit.
In 1993 the Lilly Board of Directors suddenly had to fill a vacancy in the CEO position. They hired the CEO from AT&T. His knowledge of chemistry and pharmaceuticals were limited, but many CEOs in that period had the opinion that they could run any company in any field. The AT&T man’s first major, company-wide decision was to get rid of Lilly employees above the age of 52. I was 52. The new CEO offered an attractive early retirement package to the company’s most knowledgeable and experienced employees. The new CEO expected about 1000 employees would leave but twice that number signed up to retire. Lilly was becoming a company the founding Lilly family members might have trouble recognizing.
At the time (1993) I had already been collaborating with “Kenny” Lipkowitz, a respected Chemistry professor at IUPUI. He was an organic chemist by training and wanted to learn about the burgeoning fields of Computational Chemistry and Computer-Aided Molecular Design. I retired from Lilly and joined IUPUI as a volunteer Research Professor in January 1994. I had worked at Lilly 25 years. I donated my services to IUPUI for another 25 years. One of our goals was to increase the visibility of IUPUI as a center for chemical research and innovation. I purposely avoided using any internal funding in my endeavors.
One of my activities in collaboration with Ken was creating a respected new book series entitled “Reviews in Computational Chemistry.” I helped produce 18 volumes, about one every 8 months. Compared to other colleges our size, IUPUI had a relatively large cluster of five scientists working in computational chemistry in the 1990s. Also Ken and I conceived and initiated a series of international conferences, the first of which was held on campus in Indianapolis. Subsequent conferences were held in New Hampshire and Switzerland. These were called Gordon Research Conferences on Computational Chemistry. In addition, I served as co-editor of the Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modeling for the ACS Division of Computers in Chemistry. By invitation, I wrote a book chapter on the pivotal role Indiana University played in sharing and spreading software used in Quantum Chemistry. I was also invited to evaluate internationally known researchers developing one aspect of Computational Chemistry. Another activity I enjoyed was directing undergraduates in research projects. I appreciate the opportunity IUPUI provided to continue my professional work endeavors.
Lindsey (Fischer) Horty (M.S. 2010) is a recipient of the 2023 Division of Organic Chemistry Technical Achievements in Organic Chemistry award from the American Chemistry Society (ACS).