As 2016 is slowly winding up, let’s turn to Scopus and see what’s been cooking in this chemistry universe of ours. Tonight we will take the unfortunate misnomer “metal-free”. It turns out that in 2016 the synthetic community has churned out a whooping 1391 papers containing this topic. The vast majority of these papers are interesting and potentially useful. But this is despite being labeled “metal-free”, not due to some features of this dubious concept. This whole thing reminds me of Rosie Ruiz, who won the 84th Boston Marathon in 1980 in the female category. Her title was later taken away when it was uncovered that Rosie took the subway for a good chunk of that run. I liken many of the metal-free approaches to Rosie’s feat. Thankfully, these papers expose a huge gap in chemistry education: we do not provide our students with the origins of industrial chemicals. How many of us know how common components (such as benzaldehyde, pyridine, aniline, etc) of “metal-free” reactions are made in industry? Armed with this information, we might be able to better appreciate that the heavy lifting is often done early, using metal-based chemistry that is far less glorious than the picture painted later by those “metal-free” routes. In this age of sustainability, I always want to keep in mind that synthesis is not a sprint but a gruelling marathon.