The bold legacy of Emil Fischer

A century has passed since Emil Fischer won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. From his first synthesis of glycyl‐glycine in 1901 he has been a luminary to peptide chemists over the past 100 years. In this paper, a brief summary of some of the major accomplishments in peptide chemistry will be covered followed by a description of several of our own endeavours in peptide chemistry which arose from the discoveries of the giants of our field. We will include the development of a novel activating agent (DEPBT), the synthesis of a novel building block, α‐methyl‐ D ‐cysteine, its incorporation into biologically active opioids, and conclude with the synthesis of dendritic collagen mimetics. Copyright © 2003 European Peptide Society and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.