I don't know if anyone's come up with this before or if it is known not to work, but I came up with a synth using general knowledge of organic chemistry to make mdp2p from acetone and catechol. Take a look at it and see if anything won't work:
1) Methylate catechol to give methylenedioxyphenyl. Easy as fuck to do.
2) Brominate aromatic ring using Br2 (lewis acid catalyst shouldn't be necessary since the ether group is extremely activating for electrophilic substitution).
3) Convert to a grignard reagent (there's an example of this in my organic textbook. would only require magnesium strips).
4) Brominate acetone at the alpha carbon with Br2. Should be easy as fuck.
5) Convert carbonyl group on acetone to an acetal with ethylene glycol and acid. This is one step that might not work since the electronegativity of the alpha bromine might make the intermediate carbocation unstable. Probably will work though.
6) React acetal/bromide with grignard reagent. If this synth doesn't work, this is the step that will fuck it up. The basic grignard should attack the alpha carbon, displacing the bromide in an sn2 fashion. The main difficulty is that the ajdacent carbon is fully substituted and may give steric hindrance. Then again, the grignard is such a strong base that the reaction will probably occur anyway.
7) Convert the acetal back to a ketone to get the fucking product!!
If this shit works, is could mean a fairly quick and easy synth of ketone from fucking catechol and acetone. The best part is that the two *pieces* are made separately in quick, easy, and most likely already documented processes, producing maximum efficiency due to the cheap ass starting materials. This would prevent the loss from building up as a single path synth would (as opposed to this two path syth). Also, you can carry out both paths simultaneously (make acetal/bromide and grignard at the same time in two separate ba...
