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Preface
for whom this book is intended. They can be graduate students, upper division
undergraduates, or teachers. This work should also appeal to marine biologists, oceanographers, pharmacologists, and their students. It can be the
basis of a special topics course or can be used for supplementary reading in
a course dealing with structural organic chemistry. Hopefully, there will be
some people who will read it mostly for pleasure.
Historically, all organic chemistry was the chemistry of naturally occurring
carbon compounds. Over the years, natural product chemists devoted themselves to the study of what we now often refer to as secondary metabolites.
Some natural products, among them amino acids, carbohydrates, and their
polymers, were recognized as the universal constituents of living matter and
were considered to be primary metabolites. They became the domain of
biochemistry.
Quantitatively, the number of known naturally occurring organic compounds is vastly outdistanced by the number of known synthetic organic
compounds. Economically, organic natural products of commerce (sucrose,
quinine, antibiotics notwithstanding) are no match in value for the tremendous empire that has resulted from organic synthesis (solvents, dyes, monomers for fibers, rubbers, plastics, drugs). Yet natural products continue to
hold a unique fascination not only because of their relationships to the
organisms from which they are derived, not only because plants that can
photosynthesize possess synthetic power that far surpasses that of man, not
only because of their potential usefulness to man in their natural form or as
templates for synthetic analogs, but chiefly because each new structural type
reveals something of nature's molecular architecture and poses new questions
of how and why these compounds are being produced. Since few natural
products have been isolated so far from marine organisms, it is not yet
possible—except in a few isolated areas that have been well studied—to make
intelligent predictions about the likely outcome of an investigation, a feature
that makes this area of natural products research particularly attractive.
The time has long passed since a book on chemistry—no matter how
narrow its scope—could hope to offer an exhaustive treatment of the subject.
This book makes no such attempt. My major emphasis has been structural
organic chemistry. In this context I have tried to exclude active principles or
factors and functional types whose structures are incompletely known. I
have attempted to include structural formulas of even relatively simple
organic compounds because it has been my experience in recent years that
nomenclature of organic compounds, particularly that of many time-honored
trivial names, is no longer emphasized in undergraduate curricula. As a
result, many potential readers would have to consult an organic chemical
dictionary with considerable frequency if fewer structural formulas were
presented. Furthermore, I have attempted to minimize the use of a single
Preface
for whom this book is intended. They can be graduate students, upper division
undergraduates, or teachers. This work should also appeal to marine biologists, oceanographers, pharmacologists, and their students. It can be the
basis of a special topics course or can be used for supplementary reading in
a course dealing with structural organic chemistry. Hopefully, there will be
some people who will read it mostly for pleasure.
Historically, all organic chemistry was the chemistry of naturally occurring
carbon compounds. Over the years, natural product chemists devoted themselves to the study of what we now often refer to as secondary metabolites.
Some natural products, among them amino acids, carbohydrates, and their
polymers, were recognized as the universal constituents of living matter and
were considered to be primary metabolites. They became the domain of
biochemistry.
Quantitatively, the number of known naturally occurring organic compounds is vastly outdistanced by the number of known synthetic organic
compounds. Economically, organic natural products of commerce (sucrose,
quinine, antibiotics notwithstanding) are no match in value for the tremendous empire that has resulted from organic synthesis (solvents, dyes, monomers for fibers, rubbers, plastics, drugs). Yet natural products continue to
hold a unique fascination not only because of their relationships to the
organisms from which they are derived, not only because plants that can
photosynthesize possess synthetic power that far surpasses that of man, not
only because of their potential usefulness to man in their natural form or as
templates for synthetic analogs, but chiefly because each new structural type
reveals something of nature's molecular architecture and poses new questions
of how and why these compounds are being produced. Since few natural
products have been isolated so far from marine organisms, it is not yet
possible—except in a few isolated areas that have been well studied—to make
intelligent predictions about the likely outcome of an investigation, a feature
that makes this area of natural products research particularly attractive.
The time has long passed since a book on chemistry—no matter how
narrow its scope—could hope to offer an exhaustive treatment of the subject.
This book makes no such attempt. My major emphasis has been structural
organic chemistry. In this context I have tried to exclude active principles or
factors and functional types whose structures are incompletely known. I
have attempted to include structural formulas of even relatively simple
organic compounds because it has been my experience in recent years that
nomenclature of organic compounds, particularly that of many time-honored
trivial names, is no longer emphasized in undergraduate curricula. As a
result, many potential readers would have to consult an organic chemical
dictionary with considerable frequency if fewer structural formulas were
presented. Furthermore, I have attempted to minimize the use of a single