Question: what is the hardest experiment you have had to do ?

Lesley Howell answered on 20 Mar 2022:

this is tricky to answer as any experiment when it does not work automatically becomes hard! But I think the hardest or the most frustrating one was when I was working on the synthesis of a natural product. On paper it should have been simple but in reality it produced a complex mixture that was really difficult to purify. To this day I am not sure if I ever made the compound I was trying to!