Natural products have probably been, and remain, the main
source of investigations and discoveries for organic chemists to
date. The discipline of organic chemistry is considered to be born
in 1828 when Friedrich Wöhler serendipitously achieved the synthesis
of urea from cyanic acid and ammonia in an attempt to prepare
ammonium cyanate, thereby breaking the dogma of the vital
force theory of the influential Swedish Professor Jons J. Berzelius