Recently, the 100th anniversary of the birth of the famous chemist Derek Barton was celebrated with a symposium. One of the many wonderful talks presented was by Tobias Ritter and entitled “ <em> Late-stage fluorination for PET imaging </em> ” and this resonated for me. The challenge is how to produce C-F bonds under mild conditions quickly so that <sup> 18 </sup> F-labelled substrates can be injected for the PET imaging.