James Tour

James Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Computer Science, and Professor of Materials Science and NanoEngineering at Rice University. He has over 590 research publications and over 100 patents, and has received numerous scientific awards.

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Chemistry Much Ado About Nothing [long_description] Rather than leading to any sort of chemical model, recent research by Eddy Jiménez, Clémentine Gibard, and Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy serves only to underscore that their particular approach is unlikely to yield any clues about how life emerged. It is further evidence, if any were needed, that eminent synthetic chemists—and scientists in general—remain clueless about life’s origins.
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Chemistry Time Out [long_description] Should researchers who study the origins of life take a time-out? Chemist James Tour says they should hit pause on their work, in order to critically assess what they have accomplished, and what more is even possible to accomplish.
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letter The Importance of CISS
In response to “Spin in Quantum Biology”
[short_description] The neglect of chiral induced spin selectivity (CISS) can and has caused data misinterpretation regarding the manner by which biological systems respire, synthesize, process, and transfer information.
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Chemistry An Open Letter to My Colleagues [long_description] James Tour challenges his fellow chemists to admit that the complexity of a cell, or even of its lipid bilayer, is beyond man’s ability to duplicate, even with all of nature’s building blocks at his disposal.
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Chemistry Chiral Induced Spin Selectivity [long_description] Synthetic chemist James Tour examines a newly discovered biological effect, chiral-induced spin selectivity, in his review of Karen Michaeli, Nirit Kantor-Uriel, Ron Naaman, and David Wadleck, “The Electron’s Spin and Molecular Chirality—How Are They Related and How do They Affect Life Processes?”
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Chemistry Two Experiments in Abiogenesis [long_description] Two new papers on prebiotic chemistry are reviewed by James Tour. The first claims to find further support for the RNA World hypothesis and the second suggests that nucleotide formation and selection may have been robust processes on the prebiotic Earth. Tour expresses skepticism on both counts.
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Chemistry Animadversions of a Synthetic Chemist [long_description] Chemists study molecules. Synthetic chemists make them. What Nature does is anyone’s guess. James Tour describes constructing nanovehicles from scratch, and considers the implications. Do we really know anything about abiogenesis?