I have heard that total synthesis is painstaking. Barry Trost should know; he seems to have devoted his life to master the art.

I have heard that getting a paper published in JACS is tough.

I assume that devising and performing a jaw-dropping total synthesis of enantiopure morphine, the […]

I have teaching in my blood. My mother is a teacher and my father was a text-book writer (now retired), so one could say I was brought up under pedagogical conditions 🙂

In 2002, I believe the year was, I was teaching advanced organic chemistry for undergraduates as part of my thesis work. One of […]

We often think of and draw Grignard reagents like so:

Reactivity-wise and when we draw mechanisms, we sometimes make it even simpler for ourselves and picture Grignard reagents as relatively stable carbo-anions (even though the carbon-magnesium bond is in fact covalent and not ionic).

This works very well in almost all cases. But the […]

I haven’t been able to post anything here for a couple of days. I believe I am excused.

Figure 1. Cute panda bears.

I have left my old job after six years with the big company and just started a new one in a small company. Three days into it today. Wish me […]

Remember the Masked Magician? The illusionist who gained fame by exposing magic secrets, which sparked controversy as many other magicians feared that their illusions were now worthless. He emphasized, however, that he felt revealing the secrets would encourage kids into trying magic instead of discouraging them, and that the entertainment of magic shows […]

The phlogiston theory reigned for quite a while. It held that all combustible resources contain phlogiston, a substance without color, odor, taste, or mass* that is liberated in burning. Once burned, the “dephlogisticated” substance was held to be in its “true” form, the calx.

The theory made good sense for hundreds of years […]

In 2003, give or take a year or so, a fellow grad student showed me this hilarious paper. I’m 85% sure it was in JOC and by one of the top dogs; I mean Katritzky or someone like that. It was usually long, even for a full paper. One of the paragraphs towards the end […]

Just to be redundantly clear: The following artwork is a mere work of fiction (and some alone time with Photoshop).

But seriously, wouldn’t it be awesome if some of our dusty old applications were spiced up with a couple of Web 2.0 functions?

– Hey SciFinder, the time has come for you to […]

3. Kurt Vonnegut

Slaugtherhouse-Five is good. Really good. But how many of you would have guessed that in 1940, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. – the world-famous author – majored in chemistry at Cornell University, NY?

2. Dolph Lundgren

In 1982 Hans “Dolph” Lundgren graduated with a M.Sc. in chemical engineering, […]

A thermal runaway is the chemical equivalency of a nuclear meltdown. It is scary stuff, believe me. Here is a horrible, real-life example:

Clearly, these guys had no idea of what forces they were dealing with. Going directly from 1 L to a 2500 gallon (roughly 10000 L) scale is bananas. Especially with […]