ABSTRACT
The eld of glycobiology is connected to the very origins of organic chemistry through the monumental work of Hermann Emil Fischer (Figure 7.1). At a time when horses and trains were the common mode of transportation, Fischer worked out the relative stereochemical structures of all the common sugars, and completed the total syntheses of three stereochemically rich monosaccharides: glucose, fructose, and mannose. ese achievements, made over the course of a single decade (18841894), are all the more remarkable when one considers that the tetrahedral nature of carbon had only been proposed 10 years earlier by van ’t Ho and Le Bel.
