Jorunnamycin A

As someone with a couple of biomimetic total syntheses under my belt, I can certainly see the appeal of this approach to making molecules. ‘Of course nature knows best,’ the argument goes, ‘it’s been doing this for ages!’. One problem with this approach is that nature can do a lot of things that we just can’t yet. But the inverse is also increasingly true, and limiting ourselves to nature’s reaction set is a handicap at times.