Steve Ley and his team (some 40 PhD students over the last two decades) have finally cracked the total synthesis of the natural insecticide azadirachtin. This hugely complex natural product extracted from the Indian neem tree put up quite a struggle from the year it was isolated (1968) till its structure was unequivocally elucidated (seventeen years later) till the publication of Ley’s paper in Angewandte Chemie outlining the 64-step strategy for making it from standard starting materials. Check out the Angewandte press site for a more detailed write-up and the paper itself for full details of the completion of these chemical odyssey.