ABSTRACT
Chemistry is a science of compromise. A chemist needs to decide at any given time what are the advantages and what are the liabilities of each process for consideration. Moreover, that decision changes daily as economies governing the availability of starting materials change and as new advances and discoveries are made with respect to new synthetic methodologies and new reactions. Perfection can never be achieved though chemists strive to that ideal. The payoff of this drive to this virtual goal is the continuous and steady small steps of discovery that are made. From the Stone Age to modern times mankind’s understanding of what constitutes matter and how to transform one substance into another has evolved and progressed over the millennia from magic to the modern science called chemistry as shown in Figure 2.1. Among the cast of players in this game are well-known, but not yet labeled, workers. These people hover somewhere between alchemists and chemists and are here referred to as “che“sts.” A “che“st” (combination of “chef” and “chemist”) is a kind of chemist who synthesizes molecules by trial and error and is “xated on getting the correct structure of the target compound only, but puts mechanistic concerns and understanding at a low priority. His or her success is largely governed by drawing upon a vast memory bank of personal experiences of handling various reagents, using many kinds of laboratory equipment, and carrying out many kinds of reactions. They may have great chemical intuition and hands-on savvy but they suffer from inadequacies in basic numeracy, physical chemistry, and quantitative reasoning. In fact, they “nd the idea of incorporating any kind of calculations in synthesis beyond weighing out masses of materials repugnant, even contemptuous. The following reviewer comment from an industrial synthetic chemist puts it well: “I became a synthetic organic chemist precisely to get away from numbers.”
