Classics in Total Synthesis

We will now begin our journey in total synthesis from the 1950s to the 1990s. As you read through these pages we hope your journey to Ithaca will be as adventurous, educational, and enjoyable as was our odyssey of putting together this book on Classics in Total Synthesis . 

This forty-year exposition of the state of the art should serve to put total synthesis in perspective as the 20th century draws to a close. 

Sarton, G. In Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece, Dover Publications New York, 1980, p. 253. 

The Logic of Chemical Synthesis, John Wiley Sons New York, 1989. 

(a) Perkin, W. H. J. Chem. Soc. 1904, 654 (b) See also, Fleming, I. Selected Organic Syntheses, John Wiley Sons New York, 1973. 

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As mentioned by the authors in their preface, the achievements in total synthesis have been so numerous and so important that it is clearly impossible to include them all in a single volume. My hope is that Classics in Total Synthesis will be successful and that it will be followed by a continuing series. Such a collection will add to our reading pleasure and further encourage and inspire new generations of chemists to dare the impossible (or even the unfashionable). There is much still to be learned and to be discovered. Humanity will be enriched beyond measure if the twenty-first century is a period of continued vigorous development of synthetic chemistry. 

For overviews of applications of the Heck reaction in natural products synthesis, see (a) Link, J. T. Overman, L. E. In Metal-Catalyzed Cross-Coupling Reactions, Diederich, F., Stang, P. J., Eds. Wiley-VCH New York, 1998 Chapter 6. (b) Brase, S. de Meijere, A. In Metal-Catalyzed Cross-Coupling Reactions Diederich, F., Stang, P. J., Eds. Wiley New York, 1998 Chapter 3.6. (c) Nicolaou, K. C. Sorensen, E. J. Classics in Total Synthesis VCH New York, 1996 Chapter 31. These authors refer to the Heck reaction as "one of the true "power tools" of contemporary organic synthesis" (p. 566). 

K. C. Nicolaou and E. J. Sorensen, in Classics in Total Synthesis, Targets, Strategies, and Methods, VCH, Weinheim, 1996. 

Uemura, T., Zhang, X.Y., Matsumura, K., Sayo, N., Kumobayashi, H., Ohta, T., Nozaki, K. and Takaya, H. J. Org. Chem., 1996, 61, 5510 a classical example is the Monsanto synthesis of (l)-DOPA using ruthenium complexed with the diphosphine DIPAMP, see Classics in Total Synthesis, Nicolaou, K.C. and Sorensen, E.J. VCH, Weinheim, 1996. 

Nicolaou KC, Sorensen EJ (eds) (1996) Classics in Total Synthesis. Wiley, Weinheim... 

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