Contrary to common belief, the primary literature is not 100% stiff. The correct figure is acutally much closer to 99.9%. There are true gems out there, if you just look hard enough. The following is one of my favorites, from JACS 1961, 83, 4729-31. (Available here.)

What are your’s?

As undergraduate students, one of the first things they teach us is that Friedel-Crafts alkylations can be performed in the presence of catalytic amounts of AlCl3, while Friedel-Crafts acylations, on the other hand, always require stochiometric amounts of AlCl3 (presumably because of complexation between the Lewis acid and the carbonyl oxygen of the product).

Every […]

On the topic of nomenclature (and nothing else): My wife, who is a medical doctor, and I, as an organic chemist, sometimes fail to agree on the meaning of names for some pretty basic concepts, in our respective areas.

Take “MS” for instance. A clear case of mass spectrometry to me. To my wife, it […]

Let’s say someone asks you to find all instances of the preparation of paracetamol (acetaminophen, to you North Americans) in the primary literature. How would you go about? I’m pretty sure that my basic instinct would be to just draw the damn structure in SciFinder, stick a “product” label on it and hit “search for […]

We are good to go. Finally. These URLs should work now: syntheticremarks.com, syntheticremarks.net and syntheticremarks.org — all will now take you here!