[tikej]

I want to make remark about organic synthesis from the perspective of person who is engineer of chemistry by training as did his fair share of organic synthesis (and eventually moved to computational atomic and molecular physics).

It is one of the oldest and very established fields. Unfortunately practices aren’t great. The preparation formulas are often vogue, imprecise and difficult to reproduce. This comes from the fact that often the sizes and types of glassware are not specified, some informations are omitted (how quickly something is changed not only to what value e.g. heat up to 100 degrees but it does not say over what time) etc. Chemists usually (except some theoretical/computational specialisations) don’t have any training in algorithms or programming.

There are novel developments such as https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2018/november/headl... and references therein. I’m optimistic about them but I expect strong opposition from older faculty. They see synthesis as more than art and think that one has to have “good hand” in order to be a good organic chemist.

I think some generational shift will be necessary in order to change this discipline to more reproducible, strict and reliable. It will come but not that soon :)