1. Hap on February 20, 2009 1:19 PM writes...

Sorry if I said anything bad (well, the goalposts comment was catty). I don't wish Dr. La Clair any ill, but it would be nice to have a complete picture of the whole hexacyclinol shebang.

2. HOMO-LUMO on February 20, 2009 1:43 PM writes...

To me the point is how an article without any supporting information and with notorious mistakes and irregularities got in Angewandte Chemie.Usually referees ask for lots of stuff before accepting a good paper with isolated and punctual mistakes. Another issue is why some people does not need to comply with rules applicable to almost everybody.

My earlier point is that without controversy the system would not be corrected.

3. Anonymous on February 22, 2009 9:16 AM writes...

HOMO-LUMO: I hope you are kidding. ACIE, along with JACS and other journals, are full of papers with incomplete data for key compounds, including target molecules of natural product syntheses. After years in the field, it is clear to me that there is no real honor for being in one of these "high impact" journals. It rather implies that you know someone on the editorial board or have suggested a very, very friendly (read: they are your friends) set of reviewers. Sadly, the literature has degenerated to this state, with the funding agencies are blindly following the same folly.

4. HOMO-LUMO on February 22, 2009 1:45 PM writes...

Exactly, that´s why controversial cases are good to show how the system is far from perfect and needs fixing.

Always there is an honour in been in that high impact journals if your science is relevant, influential and reproducible.

5. Mad Chemist Chick on February 22, 2009 1:46 PM writes...

I find it very frustrating that you can pull 10 references for procedures and you are lucky if 2 work as described.

For the older literature, this doesn't seem to be a problem. Give me a procedure from a 1940s JACS any day over a 2008 JACS.

6. Anonymous on February 22, 2009 2:13 PM writes...

I will say that J.Org.Chem., and Org.Lett, are now very fastidious about requiring complete compound characterizations in the Supp Info. This makes me more confident that the syntheses described will be succesful. You may not get the same yield, perhaps, but at least you will get product.

7. HOMO-LUMO on February 22, 2009 4:45 PM writes...

Tetrahedron till the 90s is also quite good. In my little experience 8-9 out of ten preps works.

Chemistry before the 70s was a craftmen job, without the comprehensive analysis techniques exiting nowadays is amazing how so many things were discovered and developed. I guess that is one reason why reproducibility was at that time at the top of the academics priorities when publishing a paper.

8. Bill on February 22, 2009 10:24 PM writes...

HOMO-LUMO has hit upon a key point. In the past, most of the top organic chemists were focused on structure elucidation of natural products. This required a wide variety of highly developed lab skills with success still not guaranteed. A good
example was the German chemist (Loucks?) who spent
over 40 years working on the structure of strychnine, only to be 'scooped' by R. B. Woodward. Now modern NMR methods using state-of-the-art equipment could determine the structure of strychnine in, at most a weekend, using no more than 1 mg of sample. In fact, as an NMR spectroscopist, I have been accused by senior organic friends as being one of the ones who
ruined the natural product area by making it too easy. While there is an element of truth in this, nevertheless, one type of skill set has been replaced by another. Modern spectroscopic methods, incorrectly applied, can still give wrong structures. I believe that hexacyclinol is an example where inadequately resolved 2D spectra gave ambiguous results which the original authors interpreted incorrectly, yielding the wrong structure. This is not uncommon, as evidenced by a 2005 article by K.. Nicolau which listed well over 100 structures where spectroscopic methods gave wrong stuctures, mostly I suspect because
authors convinced themselves that their spectra fit their prefered structure, rather than letting
the data lead them to the structure. Overall, I believe that authors, reviewers and editors are all too willing to accept limited data as proving structures, which may at least in part for literature synthetic methods which don't work in
other hands. Certainly. there is a pressing need for editors to insist on detailed procedures and
actual spectra (if only as supplemental material) so that literature reports are reliable and can be reproduced.