Dear Reader, Two basic reactions that were taught to us in the organic chemistry courses were the aldol condensation reaction and the Diels-Alder reaction. In aldol condensation, discovered by the French chemist Charles Wurtz in 1872, an enolate ion reacts with a carbonyl compound in the presence of an acid/ base catalyst to form a β-hydroxy aldehyde or a β-hydroxy ketone, usually followed by dehydration to give a conjugated enone. If the enolate ion and the carbonyl group are present in the same molecule, then the aldol reaction is intramolecular. It is an extremely useful carbon-carbon bond-forming reaction. The Diels-Alder reaction, discovered in 1928 by the German chemist Otto Diels and his student Kurt Alder, is the reaction between a conjugated diene and an alkene, a so-called dienophile, to form an unsaturated six-membered ring. It is called a cycloaddition reaction, since the reaction involves the formation of a cyclic product via a cyclic transition state. Uncatalysed Diels– Alder reactions usually require extended reaction times at elevated pressures and temperatures with the formation of by-products, hence various catalysts are employed. The Diels-Alder reaction also has great industrial relevance and the discoverers were crowned with the 1950 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The aldol condensation reaction and the Diels-Alder reaction typically require catalysts, basically Brønsted acids, Brønsted bases, Lewis acids or Lewis bases. This triggered the minds of Dr. David MacMillan and Dr. Benjamin List for different reasons at different locations in USA around not so different times, more than twenty years ago, culminating in their being jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for this year.
Correlation between carbon–carbon bond length and the ease of retro Diels–Alder reaction