End of First Week-- GR

I had written this on Friday while on the train, but forgot to post it...

Alright, so it's the end of my first week already.  I honestly don’t believe how much I've learned this week.  I can now going around saying TLC, THF, Rotavapor, LC/MS, Column Chromatography, Extraction, Filtration, etc. and actually understand what I'm saying!  My overall lab skills are already improving as well.  I'm learning how to be more accurate in my procedures as well as my documentation.  I can already tell that my experience now is going to make me a pro for Chem lab next winter.

So, what the lab is actually trying to accomplish is to make a drug that can eventually be tested in vivo as a possible Alzheimer's treatment… and this is way more complicated then I had previously believed it to be.  Creating the final product involves a number of steps that all need to be carried out efficiently. Also, five grams needs to be made, which is a fairly large amount. The catch is that its not as easy as scaling up the reactions to make the right amount.  The reactions don’t work at that large a scale, so there has to be many iterations of the same small-scale reactions over and over again.  What I also found surprising was that the actual reactions themselves aren't that complicated or difficult to carry out. The arduous parts are the purification and isolation of the product that you actually want from the garbage that results as by-products of the reactions.  Another thing that I thought was interesting was how imprecisely everything is done in the lab.  While there is an overarching procedure, much of the work done is by trial and error.  You try a bunch of different ways to carry out one reaction, and then figure out which one works the best. And because each step needs to be repeated many times, this is actually the most efficient way to get the job done.

My experience has been great so far! I can’t wait to start up again next week!

Thanks,

GabRoss