Riding the microwave: three chemists share their stories

Twenty years ago, microwave chemistry was still something of a mystery. As researchers began to take advantage of the faster, cleaner and more efficient reactions offered by using microwaves in the lab they observed things that did not align with traditional physical organic theory. And so began a heated debate on the existence of non-thermal or ‘magic’ microwave effects. ‘Very few people went from one [camp] to the other,’ says Nicholas Leadbeater, a synthetic chemist at the University of Connecticut in the US. ‘You would either argue until you were blue in the face that there was a microwave effect, or that there wasn’t. And you would pick apart experiments that had been done and do your own. It was quite a controversial time.’