The Triumphant Return from Man-Flu

Following the aformentioned bout of man-flu, I have in fact had an exceptionally productive week this week. My lab book informs me that I finished 14 reactions, 13 of which worked (the starting material was at fault for the one that didn’t work, I left an acid chloride in the fridge for too long and it hydrolysed). Exceptionally, not one of these reactions required purification by the dreaded column chromatography either, which is possibly why I got so much done. Nothing makes a coffee break sound so appealing as the prospect of a column at 4pm on a Thursday afternoon. 

A bit of chemistry for a change...

After what can only be described as a rant post yesterday I thought I would actually talk about chemistry today. Everything worked today, I ran an excellent old-school esterification. Bubbling HCl gas (made by adding conc. sulfuric acid to sodium chloride) through a methanol solution of a carboxylic acid for 10 minutes gave 100% yield of the methyl ester I was after. I love chemistry like this.

The Curse of Man-Flu

            Evening all, apologies for the lack of a post over the weekend. I’ve been all over the place this weekend and haven’t had a chance to do much at all blogwise. I had a game yesterday which involved a 6 hour round trip and standing in a field for 3 hours in between. As such, I have been struck down finally with that most terrifying of maladies, the one which strikes fear into the hearts of all it inflicts. That’s right folks, I’ve got man-flu. To the female readership, none of you can possibly imagine the minor flu-like symptoms which constitute man-flu but I can assure you that I am currently at the brink of death and am far more ill than you can possibly contemplate.

A few of my favourite things...

Chemjobber, the guys at CBC, Azmanam, LabMonkey4Hire, ScienceGeist and others I'm sure I've missed have been posting about their favourite things in the lab so I thought I would wade in with some of my own personal favourite moments inside and outside the lab:

Midweek Blues

I arrived slightly later than I would have liked this morning due to the fact I may or may not have had one too many midweek lagers last night.

Lab Mishaps No. 4 - How Not To Clean Your Glassware

Today passed in the lab pretty swimmingly, I got two steps done on one thing I am working on along with the final step of making that precursor I was talking about last week AND the work-up of the N-phenylproline methyl ester I was working on over the weekend. To top this off I managed not to drop anything, break anything and managed to maintain a fairly decent mood throughout the day. All in all, I can’t complain. 

Saturday at work...

Yesterday was largely uneventful and I decided against boring you all with the details. The week ended on a moderately high note in that nothing went wrong and everything seems to be working. I put on a reaction last night, one that I had never done before; a Cu(I)-catalysed N-arylation. Refluxing proline, bromobenzene, K₂CO₃ and copper (I) iodide in everyone’s favourite solvent DMF (according to my last post) sounds pretty nasty but it does go blue, which is always nice to see.