Moving Day

Effective immediately, all new Chemical Musings posts will be found at www.milomuses.com/chemicalmusings. Hopefully you’ll all come by and visit.

This blog will stay put until I figure out how to move everything over.

Standard Reaction Conditions

I have come to the conclusion recently that I was lied to in graduate school. Ok, not really lied to in a firm sense, but I was not told the whole truth about chemical reactions. You see, when I was a new graduate student, my PI sat me down and told me that in order to run a reaction in his lab, there were a couple of things I needed to remember:

1. always use a solvent
2. always try to keep the [reactants] = 0.1 M
3. always cool to -78C for alkyl lithium and grignard additions
4. never kill a reaction without have TLC data confirming that the reaction is done

These were hard and fast statements that could not be argued with. But like much in chemistry (and science), these were open to interpretation. For example, why must we use a solvent in a reaction? Let’s say that we are doing a Knoevenagle condensation between malonitrile and an aldehyde (take your pick…).  A lot of people would use something methyl alcohol as the solvent and something like piperidine as a base. Maybe you stir it overnight…

Instead, why not take both reagents and a base and heat them up and distill off water, thus driving the reaction? We have used no solvent, and catalytic base and generated only water.

Sometimes you need a solvent. Heterogenous reactions, while useful, can sometimes be a little slow or difficult. The right solvent can help immensely. Also, sometimes the polarity of the solvent is critical for stabilizing transition states. But in these cases, do we need to run at the standard 0.1 M? As far as I can see, no! (macrocyclizations and the like excluded…) You will most likely get the same impurities, just faster. You may need to watch for exotherms, but that just means you have to pay attention to your reaction (shocking!).

So, with regards to those rules given out to me by my PI all those years ago, they were useful training tools, but not the whole truth. There is often lots of room to maneuver when running chemical reactions. Be not afraid to try things out.

I would be interested in reading examples of reactions that have been positively modified by tinkering with the “standard” conditions.

p.s. I’ll talk about # 3 and #4 later

A Testament to Nature

I am always amazed at what the human body can endure. Consider, if you will, the story of the guy with, literally, half a brain. 

 Amazing.

Chemical Bloggin’

Hey, is it me or is the whole chemistry blogging thing slowing down a little bit? I seem to remember a while ago that there were tons of active blogs out there…now there are fewer and fewer and fewer. I know that I personally have exponentially less time to come up with things to say, what with work, family and sleeping all tugging at me for a slim share of my time, though I still like to write things (despite my best efforts though… the ideas are not as forth coming as I would like…).

Here is something for all you working folks to chew on (non-working folks can gum it to death if they like…): How long was it before you felt like you really knew your job/company/industry? To put it another way, how long was the “training period”?

Just curious.

Global Warming, the Other Side

As a scientist, I ask questions and look for answers. I am also open to alternate interpretations and explanations. In light of this, I would like to share the following video that questions the assertion that global warming is anthropogenic. If nothing else, this tries to show another side of the global warming debate. Remember, this is as much a political issue as a scientific one… so we must try to look at the facts.

Of course, this does not mean that you should all run out and buy big Chevy cars with big Chevy V8 engines to burn all that petrol…. And yes, solar and wind power are good things.

Enjoy.

 

Click here for the video….

The Web in 1994

I was in my junior year of college in 1994. Email was on DEC terminals (the green and black ones). The library gave us a choice: use a green and black terminal to ind things, or a real card catalogue. The only computers I knew of that had any graphical web browsing were in the chemistry department.

Mmmmm…. Causticy Goodness….

This story involves NaOH:

BEIJING - Chopped cardboard, softened in an industrial chemical and made tasty with pork flavoring, is a main ingredient in batches of steamed buns sold in a Beijing neighborhood, state television said.

 

While this one on the other hand deals with science, greed and death.

BEIJING - China executed a former director of its food and drug agency Tuesday for approving fake medicine in exchange for cash, illustrating how serious Beijing is about tackling product safety, while officials announced steps to safeguard food at next summer’s Olympic Games.

TB Patient Sued

MONTREAL (AFP) - A US tuberculosis patient who ignored warnings not to board a transatlantic flight with a potentially deadly strain of the disease is being sued by seven Canadians and two Czechs who flew with him, media said Thursday.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070712/hl_afp/uscanadahealth_070712153754

The Marketing of Controversy

Time to climb up on the ol’ soapbox…

I was walking through the local super sized book store sipping an unusually strong “mild roast” coffee (with 2% milk), when I happened upon a quite disturbing sight: an entire table dedicated to books that were 1) pro-evolution or 2) pro-intelligent design.

I was appalled. There was something about the sight of 8 titles (4 pro and 4 anti-God) sitting on a small table together that just screamed “stirring up controversy for a potential profit”.

The titles of the book were quite catchy: ” The First Scientific Proof of God: : Reveals God’s Intelligent Design and a Modern Creation Theory ”, “God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist” and “The God Delusion“. See? They do have a certain hook to them…

But why are people wasting their time and money on this silly debate? Don’t we have more important things to do… like have our own opinions (while respecting other people’s opinions on this, the most intangible of topics).

Oh, I was steamed.

And all I went in there for was to read an article about the new Transformers Movie (which, BTW, rocks…).

C&EN 070207

This week’s Chemical and Engineering News presented me with two gems that I felt compelled to share.

The first gem comes from a letter that deals with the recent ruling by the Supreme Court regarding obviousness in patents. To briefly review: the court said that it is not reasonable to patent something that is obvious. If someone skilled in the art can think of it as a logical extension of the work, then it is obvious.

Now, the letter in question from C&EN argues that because some racemates are extremely complex, and resolving them into component stereoisomers is hard, anyone who succeeds in actually separating the isomers deserves a patent not only on the process, but the isomers as well.

Hmmm…. nope. Wrong.

This is obviousness in its full obvious glory. Any goon who knows anything about chemistry will clearly say that is a racimate is good, the individual isomers could be good (or better). Yep… obvious. If you come up with a whippy process for doing the isolation, sure… patent away. But the individual compounds? Sorry…. obvious.

The main question here is: what effect will this have on all those big pharma and academic patents? Time will tell.

Ok, gem number 2 comes from the same issue in the Science and Technology Concentrates section. It was reported that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has decreed that all researchers publishing work obtained with HHMI money must publish in open access journals.

This is good news!

Read a little farther down and you see that there are 300 researchers who publish in the almighty ACS’s journals who are using HHMI money. And, for the lowly sum of $1000-$3000, the authors can buy free access to their articles and thus fulfill the HHMI requirements. “Please don’t leave us for PLOS one! For a small fee, you too can be free!”

Dang. $1k - $3k for open access? Heck, that is a lot of scratch for an academic researchers. And what are you really getting by publishing in an ACS journal? Bragging rights? Since when does that equate to good research? Man… don’t they see the writing on the wall?