(–)-Scabrolide B (and friends)

In the early decades of the field, total synthesis was inextricably linked with structural elucidation. Long before chemists were making targets for fun, or to showcase their new reactions, they were making them because they had no choice. Textbooks talk endlessly about classic syntheses like Marshall Gates’s mastery of morphine or R B Woodward’s conquest of strychnine, but what’s often elided are the years-long arguments about the structures of these targets. In those days, degradation, derivatisation and reconstitution demanded grams of material, and the final ‘proof’ always came from synthesis. Now, in the modern age of high-field NMR, DFT calculations and tandem mass spectrometry, structure elucidation is often carried out by specialised (non-synthetic) research groups and rarely involves anything as messy and imprecise as bench chemistry.