Novartis Symposium ‘06
Although he probably doesn’t read this blog, I’d like to congratulate Professor Evans, who is being honored at the upcoming Novartis Symposium on Advances in Organic Synthesis. Novartis assembled an excellent lineup of speakers and printed out some fancy posters to announce it:
Hmmm. I had no idea all those EDC couplings I’ve been running qualify me as an advanced synthetic chemist.
Explore posts in the same categories: Harvard, Chemistry
November 20th, 2006 at 9:51 am
If that coupling qualifies as ‘Click Chemistry’, then you’re an advanced ‘Click Chemist’. Thing is, I’m still hazy on what ‘Click Chemistry’ is despite reading a few papers that had ‘Click Chemistry’ in the title. All that I can say is that it involves either a Gold catalyzed coupling reaction, or a dehydration reaction that couples two thingies. Maybe this qualifies too…
November 20th, 2006 at 10:11 am
The guy in that picture is my former coworker, we were instructed to wash all structures off our hoods before the photographer took any photographs, but the photographer was sad all the “pretty pictures” were gone, so had us draw generic reaction schemes on for show.
November 20th, 2006 at 10:26 pm
Best. Comment. Ever.
November 20th, 2006 at 11:33 pm
I agree. Thanks for the behind the scenes info. Do they use this pic a lot or was it made recently, with the Evans’ poster in mind?
If I had carte blanche to write a reaction across the sash, I’d have drawn something with C60 just to make people wonder “what is Novartis doing with Buckyballs?”
November 21st, 2006 at 2:30 am
I’m told from people in pharma that on the days when rich businessmen or journalists would be walking through the labs, they would do column chromatography on pen ink… lots of pretty colors = good chemistry, apparently.
Photographers also tend to love rotovaps… things that spin and have glass coils in them, apparently, are high-tech.
November 21st, 2006 at 9:59 am
Not my piece of shit rotovap! I wish it would be walking in the dark late at night, and something bad could happen to it, so that we could get a new one. Or maybe the next time I take the motor apart to fix it, I could lose a vital part…
November 24th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
I’ve been running on such an EDC/NHS reaction for the last two years (no joke in this case), and it has not always turned out well, but sometimes it did. In the end, the conditions matter to make it work.
November 24th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
Try using HATU instead of EDC. It’s magic dust that makes any coupling work.
November 25th, 2006 at 12:38 am
1st. We don’t do such simple things like substituting EDC for HATU or ETRF.
2nd. In this simpled (??) case, it just turned out that there was too much PEG on our surface (which makes it protein repellent, as you may know), and so we had to take some of it off, just based on experience, and make our system less perfect. Surprisingly, it worked (but that took some people quite some time to acknowledge). May be I’ll send you the article, but I need to say that of course none of these acknowledgements will occur there. We will say that we are perfect.
November 25th, 2006 at 3:03 am
I have another question: how many children does G.M. Whitesides have ? if I had any, I could not write that many articles
November 25th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Why do you think he writes the articles?
November 27th, 2006 at 9:03 am
www.che.iitm.ac.in/misc/dd/writepaper.pdf
December 1st, 2006 at 11:10 pm
so what ? so just how many children does he have ? money makes the world go round