Michael McBride continues Yale's Freshman Organic Chemistry II with a lecture on classic and modern synthetic tools. He opens with periodic acid's ability to cleave the C-C bond of vicinal diols and alpha-hydroxycarbonyl compounds, the reaction chemists once used to determine sugar and ketal structures before spectroscopy existed. From there he moves to designing alcohol syntheses with organometallic and hydride reagents, weighing which method avoids competing side reactions, then covers Grignard addition, reduction, and enolization, and Wittig olefination for converting carbonyls to alkenes with control over isomer outcome. The lecture closes with a discussion of green chemistry, looking at why pharmaceutical manufacturers are redesigning solvents and reagents to cut hazards and environmental impact. Recorded in Spring 2011 as part of the Open Yale Courses series, the lecture is chalkboard and slide based, tracking closely with the course's structure-determination and synthesis themes.