Eschenmoser, Albert Chapter 16

If you think some of the synthesis problems at the end of this chapter are hard, try devising a synthesis of vitamin B12 starting only from simple substances you can buy in a chemical catalog. This extraordinary achievement was reported in 1973 as the culmination of a collaborative effort headed by Robert B. Woodward of Harvard University and Albert Eschenmoser of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. More than 100 graduate students and postdoctoral associates contributed to the w ork, which took more than a decade. 

Thus, when confronted with the task of chairing a Panel Discussion on some aspect of organic synthesis for this NATO Workshop, I chose as a topic the rhetorical question that is the title of this chapter. As panelists for the discussion, I selected five distinguished participants in the Workshop Paul A. Bartlett (Berkeley), Derek H. R. Barton (Texas A M University), Ronald Breslow (Columbia University), Albert Eschenmoser (ETH), and Stephen Hanessian (University de Montreal). 

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