An hour in the library...

In a follow-up to a Pipeline story about a chemical synthesis, Greg Hlatky gives us a memorable quote:
A Dog's Life: Never Make What You Can Buy

Moral of the story: in the chemical arts, like in all others, an organized and thorough approach without preconceptions to gathering information is important. The old dictum "an hour in the library can save you a week in the lab" still holds. In the old days, wrestling with Chemical Abstracts was sufficiently tedious that I reversed the saying to "a week in the lab can save you an hour in the library." In the 20 years since then, online searching makes the job much easier. The answer you want is out there, you just have to know how to ask the question.