This series stemmed from a group of weekly seminars in our research group aimed at keeping its members abreast of recent developments in organic synthesis. The seminars tended to consist of several syntheses of natural products or related systems with particular emphasis on the general strategy inherent in the effort, new and interesting reactions which were utilized in the work, and specificity (or the lack of it) in arranging the relative stereochemistry of asymmetric centers and the geometry of double bonds. We found that natural products offered an attractive setting in which the larger science of organic chemistry could be put to crucial tests. A truly elegant synthesis is a major advance in that it epitomizes how an imaginative mastery of the course of organic reactions can achieve a sophisticated objective by an economy of operations. Indeed any successful synthesis of a reasonably complex product, however cumbersome and graceless, is an important event for those who delight in the problem-solving dimension of science.
