ABSTRACT
When I was a student I wanted to be an organic chemist. I was fascinated by the beauty of a synthesis and the geometry of organic molecules. At that time education in analytical chemistry was only devoted to chemical equilibria in solutions and identification of functionalities through spot tests as proposed in the textbook from Feigl [1]. I graduated from the School of Engineering Chemistry in Marseille, France, in 1961 and started a Ph.D. thesis. I then joined a lipid chemistry laboratory, where I studied ally lie bromination of unsaturated fatty acids. The gap between what I learned and what I was working on was enormous. The reaction of N-bromosuccinimide gave rise to a great number of products. At that time organic chemists heavily relied on distillation. It was impossible to do so with fatty esters, and we were not at all sure that isomerization could occur during distillation.
