Fantastic artwork from the RSC
Paul Dochety's blog at Totallysynthetic.com was a massive inspiration to me in my early days as a blogger, showing me that there was enough of a synthetic organic chemistry community online to make writing seemingly very esoteric posts on a small, specialised sub-field rewarding and worthwhile. A couple of years ago, Paul moved away from the online community, but continued his excellent monthly column for the RSC's Chemistry World (think British C&EN, if you're not familiar with it). However, his tenure there has recently also come to an end, and to try to fill the organic-shaped hole in its opinion pages the RSC has commisioned a new column – Organic Matter. As you've probably heard already, authorship will be shared between myself, Karl Collins (of A Retrosynthetic Life) and the legendary Chemjobber (anyone who needs a link to CJ should really rethink their blog-reading priorities). Karl was up first in the January issue, with this piece on some recent C-H oxidation chemistry, and I'm pleased to announce that my contribution to January's issue is now available online for free here. I'm super excited to be given this opportunity to be a part of the Chemistry World team and share authorship with two awesome chemists—and to see what Chemjobber gets up to in March!
Finally, I would like to wish Paul all the best; although unfortunately we've never made it past two degrees of separation, if I'd never read Tot. Syn. I would not have started this blog, and would never have considered writing or publishing as possible career moves. Thanks, man!