The click concept
To some, 'click chemistry' is simply a relabelling of standard organic chemistry practices. Others follow its principles almost religiously
When chemistry is compared to cookery, that’s not just because it involves mixing the ingredients and baking them, but also because you can’t always be sure what will come out of the oven. Your chemical souffle may have sunk, or gone black, or separated. Or more often than not, you get a bit of souffle mixed with a lot of other unappetising junk. Chemistry just isn’t as reliable as we’d like.
That’s what led Nobel laureate Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, US, several years ago to advocate a new approach to making molecules, called click chemistry. If you prepare all your recipes using so-called ’click’ reactions, say its advocates, you’ll get perfect results every time.