"What gets me about this current paper, though, is the concept behind it. This has the potential to take a large part of organic synthesis into the realm now occupied by peptide and nucleotide synthesis. Those two are certainly easier problems - you have one kind of bond between every subunit, and a limited number of subunits themselves. But the advent of solid-phase iterative methods to synthesize these sorts of molecules was still a huge advance. It took making such things out of the realm of every-one-a-new-individual-challenge, and into the world of "Sure, we should be able to make that. Fire up the machine." That first category, we should note, is where total synthesis of natural products has traditionally been. And proudly so. I've had a lot to say about that over the years around here, going back to 2002, but I'll summarize: I think that total synthesis was, at one time, one of the most vital and important parts of organic chemistry. But that day is past. Modern analytical methods have largely (although not quite totally) eroded the structure determination reasons for doing it, and modern synthetic techniques have put a vast number of molecules within theoretical reach. "Theoretical", in this case, meaning "Given enough postdocs, enough grant money, and enough time". That certainly wasn't always the case. When Woodward, Stork, or (fill in your favorite here) started out to synthesize some complex molecule back fifty years ago, it was often not very clear at all how one might go about it. Just coming up with a semi-plausible synthetic route was a real intellectual accomplishment, and dealing with what happened when these ideas met the real world was another. Total synthesis took all the brainpower and all the skill that could be brought to bear on it." - Todd Hoff