Spinneret - Weaving the chemical web one molecule at a time...

Interesting idea. Perhaps you could organise a petition and approach IUPAC with the suggestion. I have a contact I could ask whether this kind of change is ever possible.

Left by David Bradley on August 30th, 2007

I spoke with the RSC’s Alan McNaught who is on the IUPAC committee and he explained how such a name change might not come about.

“IUPAC doesn’t have a mechanism for approving so-called trivial names for natural products (i.e. names that you can’t immediately decode to a structure) – it’s for the community to reach informal consensus over such matters, and then for IUPAC to use such names as basis for naming natural product parent hydrides.

I think it would be next to impossible to persuade the community that this kind of thing should be handled in a more formal way – usually the ‘discoverer’ comes up with a name that the community accepts. In fact there are surprisingly few cases where more than one name is widely used for a new natural product. My feeling is that it would be very difficult to get people using a different name instead of the well-established azadirachtin, however well-founded the arguments for doing so (never mind the potential literature confusion).”

So, sorry Venkat, I think we’ll have to find an alternative method of honoring the name of Dr T.R. Govindachari.

Left by David Bradley on August 30th, 2007