John Hartwig is co-discoverer of the Buchwald-Hartwig amination – a widely used palladium-catalyzed coupling reaction for the formation of C-N bonds. For his research, he received the Emanuel Merck Lectureship last year. A discussion about creativity, useful reactions and pricey metals. Nachrichten aus der Chemie: You were quite young when you developed the reaction named after you. How did this affect your career? John Hartwig: I worked as a postdoc in bioinorganic chemistry, on anti-cancer-drugs. Afterwards, I then started working on compounds with metal boron bonds. The reaction that I was interested in discovering, this named reaction was...