If I asked you about synthesis, you’d probably give me the skinny on every total synthesis ever done. Woodward, you know a lot about him. Life’s work, academic aspirations, him and the MIT chemistry department, his marathon drinking binges, right? But I’ll bet you can’t tell me what it means to spend two years’ worth of your life synthesizing even a moderately complex organic molecule and having your efforts fail in the twenty-fifth step. You’ve never actually stood there and compared the NMR spectrum of your product with its natural counterpart. If I ask you about drug design, you’d probably give me a long synopsis of the challenges in drug development. You may even have talked to an actual pharmaceutical scientist. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to be a part of a multidisciplinary team of scientists, work on a project for five years, guide it through false alleys and a litany of frustrations, and then see it fail in Phase 2 clinical trials. And I’d ask you about the philosophy of science, you’d probably throw Kuhn at me, right, "Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments". But you’ve never been part of a paradigm shift yourself, seen the world shift beneath your feet the way the creators of quantum mechanics did
