About eight years ago, the catalytic carbonylation of organic nitro compounds was a research field developed enough to justify a rather long review on this subject. Now, we feel that the scientific results and new achievements in this field, very important even from an industrial point of view, require a book in order to be adequately presented. The competition between the catalytic carbonylation of organic nitro compounds and other chemical routes for the synthesis of a variety of organic compounds has not yet come to an end, but many progresses have been done in the former field. We also like to emphasize that this type of research does not only involve relevant industrial problems to be solved, but it opens a research field where the academic interests (mechanism of the reactions, isolation of the intermediates in the catalytic cycles, synthesis of model compounds and so on) can find a lot of opportunities.

Prior to 1979, consideration of the problem of the carcinogenicity of the aromatic amine class of chemicals took place primarily in poster sessions and symposia of annual meetings of the American Association for Cancer Research and analogous international associations. In November 1979 the first meeting concerned with the aromatic amines was held in Rockville, Haryland under primary sponsorship of the National Cancer Institute. The proceedings from this meeting were published as Monograph 58 of the Journal of the National Cancel' Institute in 1981. The second meeting in this series, the Second International Conference on N-Substituted Aryl Compounds, was held in March/April of 1982 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The National Cancer Institute and The National Center for Toxicological Research were the primary sponsors of this meeting. The proceedings were published as Volume 49 of the journal En-vil'onmental Health Perspectives in 1983. The third meeting in this series was held in April of 1987 at the Dearborn Hyatt in Dearborn, Michigan. The principal sponsor of this meeting was the Heyer L. Pre ntis Comprehensive Cancer Center of Metropolitan Detroit. The proceedings, Carcinogenic and Mutagenic Responses to Aromatic Amines and Nitroal'enes, were published in 1987 by Elsevier Press. The fourth meeting was held in Cleveland, Ohio, on July 15-19, 1989.

The work described in this paper is a continuation of that started in this laboratory last year by James W. Ferguson (1). While the use of platinum oxide is only recent (since 1922 (2)) hydrogenation of a large number of nitro compounds using platinum black catalyst has been studied. It has been pointed out in Ferguson0́9s thesis (1) that a study of the hydrogenation of a compound containing both an aliphatic and an aromatic nitro group would be particularly informative. It was found necessary to synthesize such a compound as none available were suitable for the purpose. In this paper the reductions of nitromethane and of the compound made by Ferguson are described.