A number of years ago, during a scale-up campaign, I worked to try and convert a relatively simple, high-yielding Suzuki coupling from a relatively standard set of homogeneous coupling conditions to heterogeneous conditions using a palladium on carbon (Pd/C) catalyst. The reason for making the change was that although the homogeneous conditions worked very well,

A couple of weeks ago I attended the 20th annual Bristol Synthesis Meeting at the Victoria rooms in Bristol, UK.1 Always an excellent event, and this one was no exception. I was intrigued by a presentation given by Franziska Schoenebeck from the University of Aachen, Germany on the application of organogermanes in cross coupling chemistry.

In March 1989, two chemists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann, stunned the world by claiming that an electrical current from a palladium electrode immersed in a test tube of water had resulted in nuclear ‘cold fusion’ at room temperature.1 For many years, attempts to understand and reproduce this seemingly impossible result- with sketchy information from

When I started my PhD one of my then colleges spent months trying to make something that was sitting on a shelf in the chemical store room less than ten feet from their bench. Could there really be anything more frustrating? Well yes there could. Imagine finding a new catalytic process or synthetic transformation only