1963

Most drugs and vitamins have toxic qualities that almost never cause a problem. That's because drug companies are required to perform rigorous tests for years before their products ever receive FDA approval. But sometimes, in rare cases, tragedies happen, as with thalidomide, a sedative administered to pregnant women in Europe in the 1960s. If Barry Sharpless could have his way, such tragedies would not occur in the future.

Barry became the youngest person (yes, we still think of ourselves that way) to receive the Arthur C. Cope Award, one of the highest awards given to an organic chemist. He is widely considered a world leader in the area of asymmetric catalysis, according to Chemical & Engineering News.

In his lab at the Research Institute of Scripps Clinic, La Jolla, Calif., Barry works on developing catalysts to mimic enzymes in the making of "pure" drugs. Easier said than done. As Barry explains it, "with scant exception" chemists only produce racemic mixtures, with twin substances call enantiomers. Because of the high costs of resolving one enantiomer from a racemic mixture, most synthetic drugs and vitamins are sold as racemates, even though one of the enantiomers can cause problems.

Barry is credited with leading-edge work in this field. It took him years to find the way to make enantiomerically pure substances, but he has, and the results are expected to have significant commercial applications.

Barry earned his Ph.D. at Stanford and spent 20 years at MIT before moving to La Jolla on the Pacific Coast. He and Janet have three children, Hannah, William, and Isaac. They have been married 27 years. Janet is a public relations consultant and writer.

John Hicks of Lake Bluff, III., has been made a a partner of William Blair & Company, a prominent Chicago investment banking firm. John leads the high-pressured life of an equity trader representing mostly Bostonbased mutual funds, banks, and institutions in the buying and selling of stock. His day begins at 7:30 a.m., Central time, and he stays on the phone, with little time for lunch, until 3:00 p.m. John started out with Continental Can selling beer cans to brewers, a bent he believes he acquired in Hanover. He got into stocks at Blythe & Company and A.G. Becker in the early seventies. John has three children, daughter Shreven, who works in theater, and teenagers Hunter and Kathryn. Kathryn is at Williston School in East Hampton, Mass. John sees a lot of classmates including a colleague at Blair, Dick Kiphart. He also runs into Psi U buddies Charlie Logan and Jim Irwin, and classmates Dewey Crawford, SteveRosen, Sam Cabot, Chris Wiedenmayer,Hugh Klebahn, and Bob Henderson.

Another classmate active in the securities industry, Launny Steffens has been nominated by the Securities Industry Association for a third term as vice chairman. Launny, who has appreared on ABC TVs "Business World," is executive vice president of Merrill Lynch & Co., New York.

The appointment of Rick Braddock as president of Citicorp two years ago was described by Christopher Byron, financial writer for New York Magazine, as a "smart choice." In a major critical piece on the bank, Byron calls Rick "tough-minded, direct, and almost obsessively oriented toward performance and results."

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