FASTER, PLEASE: Long-Sought Method to Efficiently Make Complex Anticancer Compound Developed.

When I saw this, I thought of Derek Lowe, and sure enough, he’s got it covered. I like this layman’s description of the difficulties: “Let me speak metaphorically, for those outside the field or who have never had the experience. Total synthesis of a complex natural product is like. . .it’s like assembling a huge balloon sculpture, all twists and turns, knots and bulges, only half of the balloons are rubber and half of them are made of blown glass. And you can’t just reach in and grab the thing, either, and they don’t give you any pliers or glue. What you get is a huge pile of miscellaneous stuff – bamboo poles, cricket bats, spiral-wound copper tubing, balsa-wood dowels, and several barrels of even more mixed-up junk: croquet balls, doughnuts, wadded-up aluminum foil, wobbly Frisbees, and so on. The balloon sculpture is your molecule. The piles of junk are the available chemical methods you use to assemble it.”