Thoughts on organic chemistry
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Abstract
Allow me to preface: I am addressing primarily the area of organic synthesis and I fondly reflect on an article by Nobelist John Cornforth whose theme, ‘The Trouble with Synthesis’ (Austr. J. Chem. 1993, 46, 157) which is timeless. Academic organic chemists are all in process of solving specific, self-inflicted problems; pharmaceutical industrials are provoked by laudable goals of human health and, more realistically, by company dictates. For academic synthetic organic chemists, the challenge is to avoid repetitive, me-too chemistry evident in the plethora of papers appearing of reactions that vary only in the conditions, catalysts, and ligands and pay little heed to showing that the reported method has advantages over previously published results from other and even their own laboratories. An ancillary challenge is to provide a mechanism that has real experimental evidence rather than reducing the understanding of a reaction to the results of 15–20 robotic screening experiments carried out during optimization. If me-too chemistry is avoided and fundamental mechanism is understood, serendipity will have a greater opportunity which, in turn, will lead to discovery of new chemistry.