Research

From the Foreword. When Dr Martin asked me to write a Foreword for his new handbook, I was really enthusiastic. Indeed I met Dr Martin for the first time when joining the Institute Curie at the beginning of the 1990's to take the direction of the team of medicinal chemists. At that time Dr Martin was retired from the Sanofi company but was working at the bench from early in the morning to late in the evening like a young and brilliant student. He devoted all his time and energy to make complete the description of what constitutes the subject of his published handbooks. Tireless reader of a huge lot of periodicals, he collected, day after day, a large amount of data about the hydroxyacetophenones and the hydroxybenzophenones. As a continuation of this already published two handbooks of both classes of compounds, Dr Martin now takes care of substituted hydroxyacetophenones. As these new collected compounds have been added to the unsubstituted analogs, one can say that this book constitutes and enlarged second edition of the first hydroxyacetophenone handbook. Not less than 3000 molecules and 3500 references can be found in this new volume. The presentation is the same as in the first two volumes with consistent data on the synthetic route or on the natural origin or each compound, and their physicochemical and spectroscopic characteristics available in the literature. I am sure that, even at the internet era, this handbook will be helpful for the readers concerned by the use of these compounds in all the aspects of chemistry covering pharmaceutical, agrochemical, perfume, plastic preservatives domains or elaboration of small libraries of organic compounds for biological screening. Besides, consulting such a handbook is greatly facilitated by the presence of three comprehensive tables, including CAS number, official nomenclature and usual names. This will be helpful to the reader and I am sure that this book will meet the success it deserves. Claude Monneret, Research Director at the CNRS