So, you’re a scientist, huh? Ph.D. and God knows what…

You know, this is your girlfriend’s/wife’s, parents’, (CSI watching) non-scientist friends’ mental image of your work place

 
…while it in fact looks more like

(Peter, I am sorry. You’re an awesome chemist, really. But it was kind of difficult [...]

I would like to try something completely new, something I have never done before, something I have wanted to do for a long time now; I would love to make a couple of guest appearances on other science and chemistry blogs. Whether you are a chemistry undergraduate with a fresh WordPress installation, or a chief [...]

It’s funny when you start a new business, how many titles you (in theory) could add to your resume, without bending the truth. Today, I was a photographer. We needed a couple of good images for an upcoming ad campaign, so I brought my camera to the lab. Even though we are not nearly close [...]

I have been thinking a lot about research ethics. It is a subject of utter importance. They say that all is fair in love and war, but please; science is neither love nor war. Science is about the truth. It is that simple.

That is all I have today. To be [...]

Dear responsible web strategist dude at Thieme Online. I think you need to oversee your SEO strategy. I find it difficult to believe that you intended your second hit on Google to appear like this when I type the word ‘synlett’.

If you have nothing good to say – you can always quote and link to others! The reason updates over here have been a bit sparse lately is not because I am slowing down (like Phil), but because I am terribly, terribly busy with my real jobs. Here we go:

I [...]

I’ve been working late nights for some time now on transferring a relatively large catalog of chemicals (>1200) from an Excel database into a webpage for a client. I have relied heavily on ChemDraw for Excel. Nomenclature is, as always, a bitch. When working with these quantities, you cannot manually go [...]

Say you need to silylate something, like an alcohol or a ketone. Boy, have I got the recipe!

Dissolve 1.25 eq dry sodium iodide in dry acetonitrile. Dissolve your starting material in hexanes (pentane or heptane, all good). Don’t worry if everything doesn’t dissolve properly; solubility will increase during the course of the reaction. [...]

Hydrogenation using palladium on carbon and ammonium formate is my favorite reaction to perform, because:

It typically doesn’t take more than 10 minutes to get the reaction going, from weighing out the starting materials until the first promising bubbles appear. Almost any solvent is good. I prefer low-boiling alcohols; methanol or ethanol. [...]

We were watching Goldfinger (1964) the other day. Again. You gotta love the real Bond movies. Anyways, in the opening scene, about 1 minute and 47 seconds into the movie, I was able to snap a frame with quite a lot of (medicinal) chemistry in it. The whole shot lasts for about two seconds and [...]