Art is always a bonus to synthesis . . . . the artistic aspect of synthesis, beautiful and marvelous as it is, should not be a justification for carrying out a total synthesis. If your problem is truly essential then you don't care about the elegance. The more essential your first E is, the less important your last E becomes." 1 "Will we be able to recapture the many millions of presumed 'transient'natural products that were evolutionarily de-selected along the paths that eventually led to the natural products synthesized on Earth today? . . . I cannot imagine that in a young synthetic chemist's lifetime, it will not be accomplished." 2
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Victor Snieckus (1999) studied this question.
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