Volume 80 in the venerable Organic Reactions series contains two chapters. The first describes the use of chiral rhodium complexes to effect catalytic, asymmetric carbon-hydrogen insertion reactions intramolecularly. It details the structural scenarios in which diazocarbonyl compounds can be generated and activated to form, inter alia, lactones, lactams and cyclic ketones. The second chapter describes the use of (chiral) rhodium complexes in combination with diazocarbonyl compounds, but in this case to effect a remarkable transformation that dramatically increases the molecular complexity of the substrates.

Scott E. Denmark received his undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and his graduate degree (D.Sc. Tech.) from the ETH-Zürich in 1980. He joined the faculty at Illinois in the same year. His research interests are in structural, synthetic and mechanistic organic chemistry.