YOU are in HELL. Bow down to your new god. Bwa-ha-ha.
  Unfuckingbelievably cool stuff. Shiny, too.

Merging Photoredox Catalysis with Organocatalysis: The Direct Asymmetric Alkylation of Aldehydes: aldehyde, α-bromocarbonyl compound, 20 mol. % Imidazolidinone™, 0.5 mol. % Ru(bipy)3Cl2, 15W household lamp. Boom.

  Thursday discovery of that Nature issue from two posts ago in our lunch room dramatically influenced my weekend. A good part of Sunday I spent in efforts to find out from David MacMillan's papers how did they manage to put tert-butyl group cis to the existing benzyl group from phenylalanine in his Fairy Imidazolidinone catalyst. This ( Read more... )

  He says that less than a drop of it destroyed the glass trap and the Dewar flask of the cooling bath they used to isolate it.

- Nature, 447, 141 (10 May 2007)


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