I did not know there are so many black bears here in BC… I can’t say that I saw one, but the stories I heard from Rob Britton earlier today were fabulous. Rob was the host during my visit to SFU, which is located in Burnaby, about a 30-minute ride from Vancouver. Rob’s work in the area of chloroaldehydes has been of particular interest to me. The chemoselectivity of this process is notable, given what’s brewing in the reaction mixture (I refer to NCS and proline co-existance). His lab has put this process to some great use in natural product synthesis.

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/ol401370b

While there were no bears in sight, our dinner with Rob Britton and Bob Young (a former VP of Chemistry at Merck-Frosst, now a Professor at SFU) in Deep Cove, North Vancouver, was a great conclusion to the scientific part of the trip…