Fly in the Cathedral

Cathcart, Brian. The Fly in the Cathedral How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom. New York Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004. 

In this final reaction I am going to show you in the broadest of outlines how chemists build the equivalent of a cathedral. That is, how they synthesize a complicated molecule from scratch. The aim of a synthesis is to take a reasonably readily available laboratory chemical and process it—add bits on, take things off, close rings of atoms, open rings, build flying buttresses, and so on— until the target compound has been made. 

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