Dr Stuart Warren is a retired lecturer in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge.
Dr Warren is renowned for his textbooks on organic synthesis, and for his research group, which has an incredible track record for producing chemists who go on to be highly successful researchers and outstanding lecturers in their own right.
Warren group alumni I know of include:
I went to interview Dr Warren at his house in Cambridge on Saturday 17 July 2010. I wanted to find out how he got into writing textbooks and how his group produced so many good lecturers, authors, and researchers.
It'll take me a while to transcribe it all, but I'll add it here, bit by bit.
For now, I'll leave you with Dr Warren's reply to my question of how he got into writing textbooks:
"I wanted to write the first books because of the appearance of the disconnection approach to organic synthesis in the works of E. J. Corey. But those works were not easily approached by undergraduates. It was quite obscurely expressed using lots of technical terms which were very, very difficult to understand. There's a book by E. J. Corey and a Chinese post-doc called Xue-Min Cheng and it's almost unreadable."
"The whole point about Corey's system is it's simple. Anybody can do it, an undergraduate can do it. What's he's trying to say is you look at the functional groups, you count the relationship between them and you use that to decide which bond to make. Now that's very simple, but when you talk about 'retrosynthetic transforms' and 'simplifying retrons' and stuff, you don't need any of that jargon."
"The real value is in the part on the syntheses of lots of different molecules, all by the Corey group, where you have a discussion about why this route was chosen, and then when you get beyond that, immensely valuable to lecturers but not to students, molecules and references to their synthesis. So when you want an example of something, when you set an exam paper, you think 'OK, I'll go for that one' and you've got all the references there, you just go straight to it, you see if it's any good and so on."
"E. J. Corey's method is clearly ideal for undergraduates, but had not been expressed in print anywhere in a way that's suitable for undergraduates. Ted MacDonald, who had been working with Corey on this very thing, came back and gave us a series of lectures to the research department on how it works.
Jim Staunton and I thought the undergraduates deserve this to help them with their synthesis, so we offered to develop a course for the second year students on synthesis. We got away with it because we were also going to teach the reactions that were needed to carry out the disconnections. And we did it, twelve lectures, six each.
The year before we did this course, the synthesis questions were the least popular on the examination paper and got the lowest marks. So the students were wise not to try and answer them. I mean, how would they do them, anyway? Guess?.
The year where the exam followed our lecture course, the synthesis questions were the most popular and the best answered, so there was a clear call that this course should be continued. And we did continue it, and I said to Jim 'we've got to write this as a book'. He said he was very busy with research, so I agreed to do it myself, and I wrote the very first of the synthesis books. My carbonyl book had already been selling well, so Wiley were keen for another, and the synthesis book sold very well, better than the carbonyl book.I'd said to Ted, 'you should write a textbook corresponding to this programmed book', and he said 'Yes, yes, very good idea, I'll do it.'. Then time went on and he didn't do it, and then he decided to leave the university, and he went to work for Glaxo. So after a while I thought, well, there's only one way this textbook is going to be written, and that's if I do it myself, so I did it.
I wouldn't claim I was a good writer but what I would claim is that I'm a simple writer. That was my main aim, having experienced this convoluted and impossible-to-understand style, I thought that really won't do. It might do, I don't think it does do, but it might do for research workers who'll be able to understand what it means in spite of the language, but for undergraduates it's got to be very plain and straightforward, which in any case is the best type of English.
When we came to do the textbook, there was no question, Jonathan Clayden was by far the best writer of the four of us, and I already knew that because of his PhD thesis, which was extremely well written. Ian Fleming was the internal examiner and he is the most avid critic of people's English style. In his report, he said 'I almost never describe a thesis as well written. This thesis is very well written."