When did SORD begin looking for lost chemical reactions?
The term “lost chemistry” I first coined in the mid-nineties, mainly as a means to make the world wake up and appreciate how much chemistry has been done but not reported in a way that other people could access it, but also to point out how much chemistry there still was to be done. We had some algorithms that gave insight into the missing compound structures in chemical space. It painted a depressing picture—150 years of organic chemistry had produced so little compared to what was actually feasible. And since 80% of what had been done was not accessible, the picture was even more depressing. Sadly, this was a message that no-one wanted to hear. We had discovered lost chemistry and no-one was that interested. Then we started to access it, and that is when people started to get interested. We were not just accessing it but we were presenting it in a way that people could data-mine! We were the first company to do this. What problems does the company face in tracking down reactions? Non
