Category Archives: Chemistry

Mea Culpa

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Today I found myself attending a talk on mortar propellants. It was delivered by a shy young woman who looked to be no older than a high school senior- she looked like a babysitter you’d hire to stay at home with the kid while you treated the wife unit to a night out on the town. Yet she was an expert in mortar shell propellants.

Next, I attended a talk on flare compositions delivered by a tiny woman who could barely see above the podium.

I rounded the day off by attending a talk by a woman who presented her results on igniter design and in developing a new explosive propellant manufacturing process. During the Q&A, my questions on ignition mechanisms were answered by yet another woman who was exceedingly knowlegeable in this field.

What I have noticed is that the gun and rocket propellant R&D field is populated with women to a much greater degree than the industrial organic or organometallic chemistry waters in which I normally swim.

Before you fire a rude comment alleging some sexist malfeasance, please understand that I was raised by a single mother as the eldest of 5 kids. That, and having witnessed the birth of my child, I have no doubt whatsoever about the robustness and Ability of women.

That women do this isn’t news. What is noteworthy is the extent to which my ignorance remains so great at age 51. My caveman misconception was that explosives chemistry would not appeal to women. I had mistakenly and foolishly assumed that a career with explosives was largely a male domain and driven by male fascination with power. Holy cats. I was quite mistaken.

I seem to be wrong about  a lot of things these days.

Research and Playfulness

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As a kid I noticed that many cats seemed to lose their playfulness as they matured. What were once playful kittens would mature into rather less playful adult animals with irritability issues. Many humans I know seem to have “matured” away from a general disposition to playfulness in a similar way. It is a shame. Playfulness is an important expression of brain vitality.

Play can be manifested in many ways. One form is where one teases out a response from a stimulus. It can be done for simple joy, as in the case of teasing your sister. Or it can be directed to somewhat more useful and enduring outcomes as in the case of research.

As I look back on my meager list of useful developments in the laboratory, I can see that most were the result of play. I was just curious as to a particular outcome. If I had simply paid more attention to my boss and focused on getting expected results (a production activity), it is unlikely that I would have fallen into some interesting and useful insights. No doubt almost every scientist can make the same claim.

On the other hand, if I had paid more attention to my boss, perhaps I’d be  a tenured prof at a decent university or a mid-career manager at Pfizer. Hmmm.

What happens to many people when they age is the same thing that happens to cats. They settle into comfortable patterns and try to exclude surprises from their lives. Just like it takes discipline to get regular exercise, it also takes some discipline to keep imagination and playfulness a central part of your consciousness.  Go out there and try something that has been on your mind all these many months! See if it works.

Safety Communication by Walking Around

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For people who are working in the chemical process business, there is always the question of adequate information for the safe conduct of a process. How does one fold new process safety details into an organizational structure so as to gain the greatest benefit?

One method is to simply issue memos and rely on management SOP’s for enforcement.  This kind of passive distribution of information must compete with all the other channels of information flowing into the brains of coworkers. Memos that are badly written or bursting with details are sure to be poorly absorbed. Eventually, people cannot reliably digest additional information on top of an already complex task.

The word that always comes up is “communication”. True enough, but too often communication comes in the form of training which consists of a PowerPoint recitation to a passive audience. This is not training- it is a briefing.

Communication often manifests as a memo or as a new folder on some disk drive. Again, this is a passive form of communication that does not necessarily engage the recipient.

I think that effective safety communication requires “management by walking around”. If safety information arises that is critical, then what better way than to walk around and collect disciples of safety? Mobility and strength of personality can be far more effective than even the best memo, SOP, or policy. 

Much of specialized expertise resolves to a finite number of rules and specialized awareness on top of a foundation of more generic knowledge.  Specialized expertise may be difficult to acquire, but in practice it is of finite scope. An engaging and ebullient manager can help people absorb complex information by breaking it down into a hierarchy of pieces and rules. The practice of filing information into a folder and relying on people to go out and look for it is a poor substitute for active engagement.

Software from Symyx

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I was interested to learn that Symyx offers a chemical structure drawing package called Symyx Draw 3.1. Naturally, a company as deep into cheminformatics as Symyx is has much to offer in regard to data management. The company offers a large variety of software packages. Unfortunately, I was unable to get any pricing information straight off the web. They require that you contact them for a quotation. Having been in sales, I understand the reasons for this, but it is still less than convenient.

It would be interesting to hear from readers who have used Symyx Draw do a compare and contrast with ChemDraw.

The lab as a shop

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Just sent multiple kgs of a rare earth reagent out the door. It may have been one of the larger scaleups of this stuff. I hope it does the job for the customer. Meeting certain specs turned out to be more difficult and time consuming that I had anticipated. But getting it certed and shipped is quite satisfying.

Lots of new projects in the shop for examination and custom synthesis. Some process safety tests, some analytical development, and some synthesis. It’s a good mix and quite diverse in chemical elements.

The ARC, the CHETAH, and the Organikker

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Just received a copy of CHETAH 8.0.  This is a program for thermochemical and energy release evaluation and is distributed by ASTM. It will calculate enthalpy of combustion and thermochemical properties of compounds and reactions including- LFL, LOC, MIE, lower limit flame temperatures, maximum flame temperature, fundamental burning velocity, and quenching distance.

I have only had it installed for 2 days, so it’s way too early to give an appraisal. It came highly recommended by several colleagues in the process safety field.  The only snag so far is a balky SMILES input module. This feature was very appealing because it allows one to copy a ChemDraw structure in SMILES format and paste it into the CHETAH GUI. The rep at ASTM gave me a link which ended up offering very cryptic instructions. Naturally, the problem is some obscure setting in Windows.

Until I get this fixed, I’ll have to enter Benson groups by hand. As it happens, I began studying guitar in my spare time, so there are all kinds of new things for my addled brain to stumble over assimilate. So when I’m not picking at strings, I’m picking at Benson groups.

Update 3/5/09:  After a service pack download, the SMILES module is functioning. This is a very powerful tool.

We’ve recently caught up with the times and have been pressing Accelerating Rate Calorimetry (ARC) into service. Or more accurately, paying to have the data collected.  ARC is really quite informative in that it can offer a Time to Maximum Rate (TMR) equation from which a TMR can be determined for any desired temperature. You can calculate an adiabatic delta T as well. I do not know how reliable this number is, but it certainly reminds one of the importance of considering the effect of phi factor in process scale up.

The ARC data I get includes an Antoine curve which can indicate that the accelerated rate behavior is or is not characteristic of classical liquid/vapour equilibrium behavior. What this says to the wary is that other volatiles (besides the subject material) may be generated which are not condensable. This is helpful in considering what kind of controllability is available to the process engineers.

Djerassi-v-Trost. Clash of the Titans.

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The January 26, 2009 C&EN has an interesting letter to the editor. Carl Djerassi sent a letter critical of the manner in which Professor Trost cites authors in his references. According to Djerassi, Trost didn’t cite the discoverer of a natural product for which the Trost group had just reported a total synthesis. He took Trost to task in diluting the accomplishment of the workers who had isolated, characterized, and tested the compounds for biological activity by not citing the original work.

Trost’s treatment of Pettit is particularly egregious given the well-known fact in the chemical community that the spectacularly laborious decade-long efforts of one of the heroes of marine natural products chemistry—the person who personally collected the bryozoan, isolated the bryostatins, established their constitution, and pursued their anticancer activity against all odds—were terminated through a draconian closure of his laboratory by the new administrators of Arizona State University. [C&EN, Jan. 26, 2009]

Trost and Djerassi are two of the rock stars of organic chemistry. When such people “go nuclear” in their open personal criticism, it is so compelling that you can’t help but take notice. Far from being unseemly, I think this kind of thing is healthy for the field. Neglecting key early workers while trotting your own references up to the front of the line is a kind of misdemeanor racketeering of scholarship. If true, Djerassi has a good point.

But, I can sympathize with Trost to some extent. Eventually, past progress becomes part of the background. Do we have to cite Henry Gilman everytime we use BuLi to remove a proton? There must be some juicy backstory that has Djerassi riled.

Plea from China

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I don’t know what others are experiencing, but I am flooded with desperate email pitches from Chinese chemical manufacturers- “Please, let’s make cooperation!”  Everything from solvents to generic drugs.

A receding tide beaches all boats.

Update:  Just got an offer for bulk Vinblastine Sulfate. Golly, I think I’ll decline. The last thing a guy needs is a few kg of that stuff sitting in a cabinet.

Transformative Research in Many Ways

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A friend who is presently on sabbatical has started a blog about his academic experiences in primarily undergraduate institutions (PUI). It is called Sabbatical Epistles. He mentions a key phrase that is being batted around; it is Transformative Research. According to the NSF, transformative research is-

research that has the capacity to revolutionize existing fields, create new subfields, cause paradigm shifts, support discovery, and lead to radically new technologies.

The context of the use of this phrase was that research funding at PUI’s will increasingly be put to the merit test of transformative research. As such, research into chemical synthesis at PUI’s is especially at risk of not qualifying for funding. I suppose the concern is that multistep synthesis projects for undergrads requires lots of time and skills that undergrads do not have.

Who is against transformative research? It is like motherhood and apple pie. Everybody wants to fund or be part of this kind of effort. We should always ask that research funds be put towards this end. But there is more to it than just an affirmation of meritocracy.

What I sense is that the golden age of undergraduate research programs may be fading into some darker period of scant interest.  The scientific establishment continues to grow larger with each passing year. And in parallel, major research universities continue to add programs, courses, grad students, faculty, bricks and mortar, and administration based on the allocation of grant money. Big institutions depend on grant money to a large extent. 

As grant money gets tighter, program requirements will increasingly filter the small fish from the big fish. Large institutions have many alumni in influential positions and in the end, the programmatic mind-set of large research institutions in conjunction with the definition of success as understood by administrators of first tier schools will win the day. 

There is a pecking order to this. A kind of snobismus. And undergraduate research is not too high in the pecking order.  In relation to undergraduate research in the area of synthesis, in most schools this is the only opportunity for an undergrad to get some advanced experience in the synthetic arts. If you have tried to hire a synthetic savvy BA/BS, you know they are hard to find. In my experience, most synthetikkers want to go to grad school. They want more.

Just in case anybody is listening, I want to make a pitch for continued and stronger funding of undergraduate research. As a student, it changed the course of my life in terms of growth and development. As a former mentor of undergraduate researchers as a post doc and prof, I can say that nearly all of my students are now either PhD’s or MD’s. They are all contibuting greatly to the benefit of our society in industry, teaching hospitals, and academia. I am proud of them and I’d do it over in a heartbeat.  The pedagogy isn’t in dispute, I suppose. But the method of funding is.

Calamity, Interrupted

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JOC will no longer appear in my mailbox. I decided to let go of this icon of my earlier years. Organic Process Research & Development will “arrive”, but this time I have taken a web subscription for $40/year. In the interest of domestic harmony, the rate of paper accumulation will drop somewhat.   The trouble with this form of access to the literature is that I can’t take a journal to the local taco joint where I lunch on occasion.

The recent subscription, the Journal of Loss Prevention, is quite interesting. Lots of articles on the dynamics of explosions and fires as well as studies on calamaties, disasters, and general industrial mayhem. I can dig it.

Both imagination and knowledge are an important part of chemical process safety. A process safety person should have a solid chemistry background to grasp what is happening in a reactor or piece of equipment. Imagination comes in to play when trying to anticipate failure modes leading to initiation and propagation of incidents.

It isn’t possible to anticipate all possible failure modes in a chemical process. And not every failure leads to an incident or casualty. What is possible is to collect as much information as you can for a group to do a process hazards analysis.

A properly facilitated group can unearth many possible failure modes and root causes. Once identified, an effort to remove initiation sources or uncouple possible propagation pathways can be made. The first and best goal is to eliminate a hazardous condition. Management and engineering controls should always be secondary to elimination of a hazardous condition. 

AIChE is a great source of information for process safety.

Update:  The web subscription is quite agreeable to use.