Making impossible molecules

Bringing Chemistry to Life

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For decades chemists have challenged themselves to reproduce in the lab incredibly complex molecules that can usually only be extracted from plants or other highly evolved (micro)organisms. These are often painfully complex efforts from researchers to design and execute multi-step chemical synthesis, where consideration must be given to intramolecular interactions from to multiple functional groups as well as many stability, configuration, and conformational issues. Yet this is how modern synthetic chemistry has evolved its toolbox of useful reactions and how skilled chemists exhibit creativity in addressing some of the most complex scientific problems.

Hans Renata left native Indonesia as a young child to study in Singapore and later emigrated to the US for his academic career, partly spent in the lab of a Nobel Prize recipient. Perseverance and the ability to adapt skills learned at an early age played that played a key role his becoming the chemist he is today: a chemist that make molecules everybody else struggles to imagine. Hans is known for his chemical creativity and his synthetic approaches look like nothing else out there. In this episode we discuss how combining traditional organic chemistry with the use of enzymes is at the foundation of his research and how this could change organic synthesis as we know it.

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