Elias James Corey’s work revolutionized organic synthesis, significantly impacting modern medicine and drug development. He developed retrosynthetic analysis, a method for planning syntheses by breaking down target molecules into simpler components, and pioneered the use of computers in retrosynthetic analysis to generate potential synthetic pathways. Such computer-assisted synthetic analysis has become widespread.
Corey’s research group successfully synthesized over 100 natural products, including prostaglandins and leukotrienes, which are biochemically important molecules. His work also led to the creation of original reagents and synthetic reactions, as well as several molecular robots, molecules that function like catalytic enzymes.