The Chemical Society publication Annual Reports on the Progress of Chemistry for 1963 attempted to inform readers of all the highly significant advances in all the major fields of pure chemistry during that year. Fortunately, the section on peptide chemistry drew attention to a paper by R. B. Merrifield which had just been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society: A novel approach to peptide synthesis has been the use of a chloromethylated polystyrene polymer as an insoluble but porous solid phase on which the coupling reactions are carried out. Attachment to the polymer constitutes protection of the carboxyl group (as a modified benzyl ester), and the peptide is lengthened from its amino-end by successive carbodiimide couplings. The method has been applied to the synthesis of a tetrapeptide, but incomplete reactions lead to the accumulation of by products. Further development of this interesting method is awaited. I remember thinking at the time that in this paper we had possibly seen both the beginning and the end of the interesting new technique of solid phase peptide synthesis. To many organic chemists, the described result was that anticipated—difficulty in bringing heterogeneous reactions to completion resulting in impure products. Both this and purification problems were expected to worsen as the chain length was increased beyond Merrifield’s tetrapeptide limit. In fact, I probably had at the time an inadequate appreciation of the difference between truly heterogeneous or surface reactions and those in the solvated gel phase. The latter approaches much more closely the solution situation. However, the new technique also flouted many of the basic principles of contemporary organic synthesis which required rigorous isolation, purification, and characterization regimes following each synthetic step. In Merrifield’s new technique, isolation consisted simply of washing the solid resin, there was no other purification of the products of each reaction, and little or no characterization of resin-bound intermediates was attempted. The first two of these are of course the important characteristics which give the method its speed and simplicity and contribute to its efficiency. Small wonder, though, that in many minds there was doubt about the future of the new technique.
Role of capping in peptide synthesis
