I’ve managed to wangle free access for everyone to a News & Views article about a chemistry paper in this week’s issue of Nature. You can access the News & Views article here, but hurry, because it’s only available for one week, starting today.

The article is written by Karl Hansen, one of the Directors of Process Chemistry at Amgen, and describes a great piece of organic methodology from Varinder Aggarwal’s group. Briefly, the work describes a simple enantioselective method for making chiral tertiary alcohols. The really cool thing about it is that both enantiomers of the target alcohol can be made easily from the same starting material, without using any fancy catalysts or weird reagents. As Hansen points out, the method should be extremely useful for medicinal chemists in particular.

This free-access thing is a bit of an experiment, so do take advantage – if it’s a success, then I should be able to persuade the powers that be to provide more News & Views articles for free in the future. The paper itself is available by subscription only; but if you are a subscriber, then you can access the paper here.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)