As I write, chemists are designing molecules that exhibit all kinds of intriguing shapes, or that will assemble themselves into fascinating and complex structures. As with all vital fields of endeavour, chemistry is changing. And as some aspects mature, exciting topics develop. Among these are two different but important growth areas. The first lucidly explained in Nicholas Terrett's Combinatorial Chemistry , and the second covered in Frank Jensen's Introduction to Computational Chemistry .
Combinatorial chemistry is essentially jazzed-up synthetic chemistry.
Traditionally, a synthetic chemist will spend a lot of time and effort making a single pure compound. Along the way, intermediates need to be isolated and purified. This is all too slow for the pharmaceuticals industry, for example, which demands rapid ways of testing large numbers of compounds as potential drugs. I would have found the techniques a godsend when I started out as research student. I tried to make it by solid-phase peptide synthesis, a technique which won Bruce Merrifield a Nobel prize.