Sprague Lectureship

The Sprague Lectureship was initially established in 1959 by James Sprague with funds from a Merck Board of Directors' Scientific Award (a program which honors especially valued scientific leaders within the Merck Pharmaceutical Company)

James M. Sprague received his AB at Franklin College in 1930 and his PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison with Homer Adkins in 1934, studying the hydrogenation and hydrogenolysis of diketones. He then did postdoctoral work at Yale, and started at Sharpe and Dohme in 1937, and then continued at Merck Sharpe and Dohme when the two companies merged in 1953. Sprague worked extensively in the area of heterocyclic compounds. He made important discoveries in the area of sulfa drugs, which initially became important as the first effective antimicrobial drugs, but later found broader uses. Particularly important was the development of a new class of drugs, the thiazide diuretics. One of these, the drug Diuril, dramatically altered the treatment of congestive heart failure and high blood pressure. Other products he helped develop are Elavil, an antidepressant, and Benemid, a treatment for gout. Sprague died in 2000 at the age of 91.

The Merck Lectureship in honor of Sprague started in 1959, when the first speaker was George Wittig, who later won the Nobel prize.

Wittig, George	1959	Nobel Prize 1979
Winstein, Saul	1960-61
Heilbronner, Edgar	1962-63
von Doering, William	1963-64
Bartlett, Paul D.	1965
Roberts, John D.	1967
Hammond, George S.	1969
Wiberg, Kenneth B.	1971-72
Battersby, A. R.	1972-73
Cram, Donald J.	1973	Nobel Prize 1987
Dewar, Michael J.	1974
Burgess, Edward M.	1975-76
Vogel, Emmanuel	1976
Chapman, Orville	1977
Whitesides, George M.	1978
Mukaiyami, Teruaki	1979-80
Streitwieser, Andrew, Jr.	1982
Hogeveen, Hepke	1983
Grubbs, Robert	1984	Nobel Prize 2005
Barton, Derek H.	1987	Nobel Prize 1969
Schleyer, Paul v. R.	1994
Williams, Dudley	2002
Feringa, Ben	2004
Komatsu, Koichi	2007