Synthetic studies on natural products

科学和技术的进步越来越依赖于获得具有新特性的新（或稀有）材料。化学在新材料的设计和分子结构中发挥着重要作用，从制药工业的新药到电子工业的新设备。要建造与许多这些“设计师”材料相关的复杂结构，需要新的和更强大的策略。手性是在分子水平上特别难以控制的结构元素之一。例如，沙利度胺的一种手性形式是镇静剂，但另一种手性形式导致出生缺陷;无法控制合成的手性形式意味着两种形式都存在于市售药物中，并导致了50年代和60年代众所周知的悲剧。

Increasingly, advances in science and technology depend on access to new (or rare) materials with new properties. Chemistry has a major role to play in the design and molecular construction of new materials ranging from new drugs in the pharmaceutical industry to new devices for the electronics industry. To build the sophisticated structures associated with many of these "designer" materials requires new and more powerful strategies. Chirality is one of the particularly difficult structural elements to control at the molecular level. For example, one of the chiral forms of thalidomide is a sedative but the other chiral form causes birth defects; the inability to control the chiral form synthesized meant that both forms were present in the marketed drug and led to the well known tragedy of the 50's and 60's.