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When a suggestion sounds familiar or unlikely, resist dismissing it before you understand what it could show. Chemist Vy Dong described how a student’s proposed experiment led her group somewhere neither expected: it became the starting point for a ketone hydroacylation project. Her lesson was not to accept every idea uncritically, but to explore it together before ruling it out.
How a student’s suggestion became a research direction
In a 2013 Chemistry World interview by Marie Cote, Dong recalled a student proposing an experiment. She could have dismissed it because the approach had already been tried with a different catalyst. Instead, she agreed to see what happened.
“The result was not what either of us expected,” Dong said. The group then explored possible directions for the finding; Dong described that process as how their ketone hydroacylation project began. This is her account of the project’s origin, not an independently verified history of the experiment.
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Dong said ideas often emerge through back-and-forth conversations with students: one person suggests something, another adds a thought, and the exchange develops the possibilities. Her advice was, “It’s important for both sides to never shut down the other person’s ideas, but rather build upon them.”
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In practice, that means treating a proposal as something to investigate, not as something that must be approved. Ask what assumption it depends on, what a small test could reveal, and how the result would change the next question. A suggestion may not work; even then, discussing it can clarify why. Dong’s anecdote illustrates the value of giving an idea a fair examination before deciding it has nothing to offer.
The chemistry behind Dong’s example
In the interview, Dong described her group’s then-current focus as catalytic hydroacylation. The stated goal was selective activation of aldehyde C–H bonds to make ketones, esters, and amides. She also described possible applications to heterocycles and polyketides, with regio-, enantio-, and chemoselectivity as aims. These were goals presented in 2013, not claims that every outcome had been achieved or that the group’s work remains the same today.
Dong also pointed to a broader challenge in catalysis: moving from novel reactivity to wide application. She cited metathesis, hydrogenation, and cross-coupling as catalytic methods that had changed how molecules are made. The context matters: the student’s unexpected result was a starting point for exploration, not proof on its own that a new method would become broadly useful.
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Asked where she looked for ideas, Dong joked, “I wish there was a journal we could just flip through.” Her answer pointed instead to the collaborative work of listening, responding, and testing. In a lab or any team, an idea can become more useful through questions and revisions rather than immediate judgment.
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The interview was published in 2013 and identifies Dong as a professor at the University of California, Irvine at that time. It supports what she said then; it does not establish her current role or the current status of her research. The Royal Society of Chemistry’s Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry Blog mirror, published the following day, provides a corroborating version of the interview.
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