Wednesday, April 27, 2011

12 lies told in chemistry


1. That reaction is incredibly clean.
2. Our budget just doesn't have any more room for capital equipment.
3. We just maintained that instrument last month!
4. We have a well-trained staff of emergency responders -- I think we'll be fine.
5. No, we think this department is just the right size. No major changes coming.
6. I really think this molecule is going to be the one.
7. You just need to put a little more effort into that project.
8. Shenzhen ABC Chemical Corporation offers only the finest in materials and reagents.
9. You know, that instrument is really easy to learn to use.
10. You just need to run a few more experiments and then we can publish!
11. This vacuum distillation delivers beautiful material cleanly and quickly.
12. Please tell us what you think -- we're all friends here.

16 comments:

  1. number 10 is motto of my boss, like everyone else's, too.

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  2. 13. That reaction worked great both the first AND second time!

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  3. Your adviser will treat you with the same respect as the other students in your group.

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  4. Recrystallization is an easy and convenient way to purify compounds.

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  5. "you'll be out of here in 4 years"

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  6. We definitely ran that reaction more than once...you think we'd publish a single data point?

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  7. Spot to spot, no problem.

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  8. #14: chemists know how to make stuff; they will be always in demand

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  9. "quantitative yield following a standard workup".

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  10. Major LOLing at:

    representative spectrum
    Typical data are shown

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  11. We think science is honest and people are after the truth about Nature. If you come up with something that goes against the trend, you can get your papers rejected. These are the referee comments:

    1. It is wrong: reject
    2. It is not wrong, but it is not important: reject
    3. It is not wrong, it is important, but we have known this for a long time: reject

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  12. Safety is more important than productivity.

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  13. Don't order that, I'm sure I saw a bottle of it under my hood...

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20