Have you had fun reading through all the hilarious send-ups on the Twitter hashtag
#HonestChemTitles? This tag tries to dig down to the subtext behind highfalutin words and strange symbols, uncovering the hidden motivations behind scientific papers. And...it's a hoot.
Remember the tweet that kicked off this brouhaha? A harmless convergent synthesis of some
Lycopodium alkaloids. Kudos to
@AlexFGoldberg for highlighting the authors'
rather overblown title:
 |
Classic children's literature;
my first exposure to superlatives |
Amazingly, that 10-word title is 30% superlatives and 30% chemistry, with a smattering of conjunctions and articles to connect them. As others
pointed out, how do you measure "elegantness," anyway? And when does a total synthesis cross the line from concise to
exceedingly so; can anything more than a one-stepper be really succinct?
Sort through the paper with a grammarian's fine-toothed comb; one wonders if it wasn't run through some sort of excitement thesaurus, perhaps to get people really stoked about these routes.
Here's all the intense words and expressions I found:
Diverse
Useful
Unique
Challenging
Efficient
Complete
Direct
Achieved
Accomplished
Value
Exceedingly concise and convergent
Attractive
...and that's just in the
first paragraph, folks.
 |
| Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest), ca. 1984 |
Honest opinion? Aside from the goofy title and superlatives liberally sprinkled into the text, the chemistry seems
solid. Nothing's breathtaking - setting an early quaternary center through steric control is nice, and telescoping the three steps before the desired tetracyclic dione works well - but there's no "killer reaction" for me in this paper. The NMRs are clean, and the synthesis represents a decent improvement over existing methods.
Thus, I'd like to accept this publication into the "
Spinal Tap Synthesis" category, so-named for the hard rock auteurs profiled in 1984's
This is Spinal Tap, the tongue-in-cheek rock mockumentary. If you've never watched the movie, I won't spoil it, but I highly recommend the sequence in the middle where Nigel Tufnel, the vapid, misunderstood lead guitarist, obsesses over a "special" amp he designed that "goes to 11."
Fits this paper to a T.
