Looking back: How was cross-coupling invented?
I was looking back at some reviews of the major cross-coupling reactions, and found that Ei-ichi Negishi's Nobel prize lecture is available both as a recording (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2010/negishi/lecture/) and also as a paper in ACIE (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.201101380). Similarly, Tamao (in the middle of the name of the Kumada-Tamao-Corriu cross-coupling reaction) published a short retrospective on their discovery of cross-coupling with organomagnesium reagents. Background: The idea behind cross-coupling reactions did not spontaneously arise in anyone's head. The general idea of a "cross-coupling reaction" had existed since Victor Grignard's time, with the reaction of the nucleophilic organomagnesium reaction and an electrophile. However, these reactions generally didn't work . If you mix an organometallic reagent and a C(sp2) halide, you generally get no reaction. If you mix an organometallic reagent and a C...