Glimpsing how a chemist views the world — both inside and outside of science — enlightens and inspires on The Sceptical Chymist, NPG's chemical-community blog. In the 'Reactions' series, Nature Chemistry associate editor Neil Withers probes the personalities behind the pipettes.

In the latest instalment, Jonathan Clayden, an organic chemist at the University of Manchester, UK, shares why he switched from molecular biology during his first year at university (http://tinyurl.com/cpp4rc). “The way that mechanistic explanations apply equally in flasks and in cells intrigued me. I found the ... way you can write a structure on paper and then plan how to make the molecule in the lab very appealing too. I spend a lot of my time now trying to bend those same mechanistic rules to see when they break.”

And if he weren't a chemist? Clayden says he'd like to be a gentleman farmer, circa 1910, with a well-stocked vegetable garden for cooking. It seems he cannot completely escape his teenage fascination “with the way that complicated things grow when simple rules collide.”