My first experiences of radical chlorination where something of a baptism of fire. Generation of chlorine radicals from chlorine gas under intense UV irradiation in a custom-made photochemical flow reactor was as scary as it sounds to a very young, yet to be trained chemistry technician starting out in his carrier in the chemical industry.

Medicinal chemists love introducing aromatic rings into their pharmacophores. These flat rings make important lipophilic and pi-stacking interactions with proteins and are good synthetic handles for attaching functionality to reach and bind to all the nooks and crannies of an active site. With the advent of cross-coupling chemistry and the simplicity and efficiency of transition

Photochemistry is an attractive synthetic method but has not been used widely in industry, except for one or two special processes. In batch processes, the efficiency of light usage is poor, partly owing to the reactors becoming fouled up in the region of the lamp and continuous processes should have more favourable characteristics. There has

As someone who did his PhD on photochemistry, I have always been surprised at how little photochemistry is used in making new molecules, given the unusual transformations that photochemistry can enable. However, there has been a resurgence in the use of photochemistry in the last decade in academic laboratories. But the equipment had hardly changed

Photochemistry has to me always seemed to be an area whose potential for industrial manufacture has never been realized. I may be biased (I did my PhD on photochemistry from 1967-1970) but I feel the tremendous synthetic potential of photoreactions has not been exploited enough.  One of the reasons is that scale up of batch