Chemical catalyst turns 'trash' into 'treasure,' making inert C-H bonds reactive

For decades, chemists have aspired to do carefully controlled chemistry on carbon-hydrogen bonds. The challenge is staggering. It requires the power of a miniature wrecking ball to break these extremely strong bonds, combined with the finesse of microscopic tweezers to single out specific C-H bonds among the many crowded onto a molecule. The journal Nature published a method that combines both these factors to make an inert C-H bond reactive—effectively turning chemical "trash" to "treasure." "We can change a cheap and abundant hydrocarbon with limited usefulness into a valuable scaffold for developing new compounds—such as pharmaceuticals and other fine chemicals," says J.T. Fu, a graduate student at Emory University and first author of the paper.