Friday, February 26, 2010

The most useful thing Nicolaou has ever done

I typically think that Nicolaou has contributed very little to the endeavor of total synthesis (unless you count using the same series of 3 reactions over and over again to make 1 mg of huge molecules important). But he has finally done something useful (while still managing to just combine two separate and well established reactions). I could have used this when I was banging my head against a wall for 6 months-a year trying to do an oxidative cleavage.

5 comments:

scientist 1 said...

I thought that was a rather interesting paper with interesting wording such as "The disadvantages involved with these methods (e.g., safety, drastic or inconvenient conditions)" when talking about old methods.

So far as I know this method has no advantages over the Johnson-Lemieux, within the aforementioned framework.

I, personally, don't look at having water in a reaction as inconvenient, but I do see the absolute requirement of column chromatography to remove reactant by products as pretty inconvenient.

So even his 'most useful' work isn't really that useful.

Unknown said...

I think you are giving him to much credit, he combined two known reactions. I guess we won't know how useful this method is until someone can't get anything to work and tries it out and it works better.

You could probably make a career out of republishing modern varients of all sorts of forgotten reactions published back in the days in journals not written in english and not readily accessed.

I should have filled out a table with the oxone/2-iodobenzoic acid conditions I was using to try and oxidize that 1,2 diol you left me for Noto M, since all it did was cleave it in good yield to the acid.

scientist 1 said...

What do you mean "You could probably make a career out of republishing ..."?

That's the time honored standard method of getting tenure and then famous.

person 1 said...

Just because this is the most useful thing he was ever done doesn't mean that it's important. It just means all his other stuff really sucks.

Unknown said...

I can't wait for part 3 of his autobiography, I mean "Classics 3"!