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the breadth and share the excitement of organic chemistry. The conference program included eight plenary lectures, the Birch Medal lecture by Associate Professor Michael Sherburn (ANU), and invited and other oral presentations by researchers and post-graduate students. Topics covered exemplified the diversity of our discipline, and included natural products chemistry and synthesis, new synthetic methods and catalysis, bioorganic and medicinal chemistry, physical and mechanistic chemistry, and supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology. The papers published in this special issue of Aust. J. Chem. include review articles from three of the plenary lec-tures at ORGANIC-08. Professor Ian Paterson (Cambridge, UK) reports on ‘Recent Advances in the Total Synthesis o