Wednesday, November 7, 2012

The Wreck of 1CJ196

"Fellas, it's bin good t'know ya!"
A question for #RealTimeChem Day (click to enjoy hundreds of chemists around the world, tweeting their results):

What should you call a dead reaction in your hood that you just haven't cleaned up yet? A derelict? Something that CJ should clean up, but just can't bear to pitch into the red can?

Suggestions being taken. (And yes, it got pitched. Sigh.) 

12 comments:

  1. Fallen soldiers? Or perhaps that's just a dirty, empty vessel.

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  2. Just had our annual RCRA training this morning. The moment you decide that a material is a) obsolete or b) can no longer be used for its intended purpose, it becomes "waste". Hence, I think you made the right call CJ (assuming you placed it in the appropriate waste stream!)

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  3. We commonly refer to these as DTSers (down the sink, meant metaphorically, of course.

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  4. RCR. Red Can Reactions.

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  5. We'd mark them NFG's, as in No F'ing Good.

    Or we'd give them to underemployed undergrads to see what they could isolate from the mix.

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  6. 'Strategic asset'. Since, if you're not planning to set up anything else soon, it will keep the human parasites born from lack of lab-space away from your fumehood. Other good 'strategic assets' include flasks with some copper salts dissolved in water and stirring away with a drying tube on top (if you desperately need something and there is no real dead reaction handy).

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  7. NFTK - notebook filler, thesis killer.

    I had a colleague in grad school who had a tough natural product synthesis project. He ran by far the most reactions in our group and filled up notebook after notebook. However, he'd get to key steps in the proposed routes and then just run into brick walls - every reaction ended up in the waste after a handful of awful looking TLC's and no desired product formation by H-NMR or MS. He finally got his PhD after 5 years, but never made the natural product, had just one marginal publication, and probably ran a couple hundred "NFTK"'s.

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  8. They are called deficiencies on the safety audit checklist.

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  9. WWD- Waiting for Waste Drum (reminiscent of WMD but much easier to produce)

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  10. we call it accelerated workup. Remove the stirbar, then with gentle swirling by hand agitate the solids and pour the resultiong suspension into the waste drum

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  11. A German postdoc I once worked with smiled and told me this kind of reaction needed a 'French Workup.'

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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