Why modern chemists need to think big
The lessons we can learn from the larger reaction scales of the past
I recently had the chance to talk with an 85-year-old chemist, Don Batesky, who’s still doing bench work at the University of Rochester, US, after a long career at Kodak and working as a contract synthetic chemist. At one point I asked him what he thought the biggest change was in the sort of work he saw chemistry graduate students doing today. His immediate answer was ‘size’.