Synthetic studies on natural products

科学技术的进步越来越依赖于获得具有新特性的新材料(或稀有材料)。从制药行业的新药到电子行业的新设备，化学在新材料的设计和分子构造中发挥着重要作用。要建造与许多“设计师”材料相关的复杂结构，需要新的、更强大的策略。手性是在分子水平上特别难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，但另一种手性形式会导致出生缺陷；无法控制合成的手性形式意味着这两种形式都存在于上市药物中，并导致了众所周知的50‘S和60’S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.