Chemical High-Flyer's Strategy: Take Away the Safety Net

摘要

The way synthetic chemists tell it, three things in life are unavoidable: death, taxes, and protecting groups. Phil Baran can't do much about death or taxes. But the 29-year-old chemist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, California, is making considerable headway on the third item: a class of molecular stoppers that chemists append to key sites on their molecules to keep unwanted reactions from creating chemical garbage. Among the scientific artisans who craft big, unwieldy molecules—the sort that biology has spent eons perfecting—protecting groups are a must. But they carry a high price tag. Tacking them on and later stripping them off adds so many steps to a typical synthesis that they make the work maddeningly hard and the final yield of the desired compound vanishingly small.