Talk:Aspidophytine

Wrong interpretation of reference

According to https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/29/magazine/lethal-chemistry-at-harvard.html, which is the actual reference (No.6) in this article, the sentence "... attempting to devise a synthetic pathway for the aspidophytine sub-unit of haplophytine ..." seems to be wrong:

In the reference it says:" ...he completed the synthesis of the second part of the molecule. Not quite five years into his graduate work, all that separated Jason from the goal of a total synthesis was a single bond. But bringing the two parts together meant solving the most difficult part of the problem -- forming a bond with what's known as a quaternary carbon, a carbon atom with highly complex, tightly packed structures surrounding the bonding site."

Because there is no difficult single bond formation to a quaternary carbon in the aspidophytine synthesis, but in haplophytine there is a single bond between aspidophytine to a quaternary carbon of the other "half" of haplophytine, this clearly means that Jason already had aspidophytine and the other "half" of haplophytine synthesized (separately) but struggled with forming the single bond between them to yield haplophytine.

Thus, this article should rather say that Jason Altom was the first to succeed in the synthesis of aspidophytine (he actually is on the relevant paper (J.Am.Chem.Soc., 1999) as third author - which strangely is not found in PubMed but via Google) and there should be a separate Wiki article about haplophytine with a reference to Jason Altom.

--Felix Tritschler (talk) 16:11, 29 June 2018 (UTC)