Heterocycles, molecular rings found in many pharmaceuticals, have a reputation for stubbornly resisting modification. That is, in a heterocycle, heteroatoms of one type aren’t easily swapped for ...

As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Mark Levin started sketching out ideas for how to do something no chemist had ever managed before: swapping one of the carbon atoms in ...

Replacing a carbon atom in an aromatic ring with a nitrogen atom is one of those exercises that’s easy to do on paper with a pencil and eraser but tough to accomplish in a reaction flask. Chemists ...