The thing that's being missed here is that it's a chemistry total synthesis group. Organic chemistry's pretty bad, but total synthesis is evil. Total synthesis

The thing that's being missed here is that it's a chemistry total synthesis group. Organic chemistry's pretty bad, but total synthesis is evil. Total synthesis (designing programs to build molecules from scratch) is a global never-ending footrace - first to make the molecule wins. That's almost uniquely startuppy/pressure-cookery among science; even among chemistry. I was a postdoc in one of the world's leading chemistry departments, but that was in chemoinformatics, which was less crazy. Before that I did my PhD in a prestigious earth sciences department, working on problems in mineral physics, and that was fine. Total synthesis is unique.