Far Side of the World October 11, 2007
Posted by gaussling in Angst, Business, Chemical Industry, Chemistry, Chemistry Blogs, Science.2 comments
In chemistry, nothing is easy. Everything has failure modes. It’s possible to screw up when putting water in drums. My ham-fisted attempts at a new reaction pathway for a thorny, expensive process have thus far lead to naught. Nature has hidden some subtle requirements that are yet unknown to me. Application of known processes to new substrates may suffer failures that seem obvious afterwards, but are opaque going in.
I used to joke that if one in ten reactions lead to a good result I was doing well. It’s not always that bad, but you can have stretches where the most reasonable transformations fail in one way or other. Unfortunate side products, poor yields, wrong selectivity, yada, yada, yada. Try doing the last experiment first, they say.
Th’ Gaussling is off to the far side of the world next week for a conference. A week in Bangkok will offer some needed punctuated disequilibrium. The down side- 20 hours of confinement in an aluminum tube with wheezing strangers. I would prefer to be sedated and put in a box for transport than sit in an airline seat for that long.
