Brown hydroboration/oxidation, synthetic methods

The synthetic method used to accomplish this is an indirect one known as hydroboration-oxidation. It was developed by Professor Herbert C. Brown and his coworkers at Purdue University in the 1950s as part of a broad progran designed to apply boron-containing reagents to organic chemical synthesis. The number of applications is so large (hydroboration-oxidation is just one of them) and the work so novel that Brown was a corecipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize in chemistry. 

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