Sucrose is formed from glucose and fructose

This line brings to mind a wonderful story told to me by Professor Harry Wasserman (Yale), who during the late 1940's was a graduate student of Professor R. B. Woodward at Harvard. Apparently Woodward had received a notice of a $1,000 prize for the first person to accomplish a chemical synthesis of sucrose. He went into the laboratory and said to his students that all they had to do was connect two molecules of glucose together [...and lose a molecule of water] and they would have themselves $1,000. One student, obviously not overwhelmed by Woodward's stature in the field even at such a young age, replied that if you did it that way, the prize would be $2,000!