Today I learned what it is like to actually be a real scientist. We tried to take a shortcut in the purification process… and it failed. What we know will know have to be done is to purify the material after each step in the process. While this overall takes a great deal more time, effort, materials, etc., it will overall make the final product cleaner and easier to purify. I also learned today that some things can take FOREVER if you don’t optimize the conditions. And its not so fun to watch liquid trickle out of a column for 4 hours… trust me. But, this was not in vain, because now we know that it needs a greater percentage of strong solvent to run in a reasonable amount of time.
One thing I'm having trouble with are the calculations that I need to do for some of the reactions. I'm starting to learn how to do them more efficiently with the help of Kevin (the undergrad in my lab), but I'm still not getting them 100% right. I guess it'll come with more practice.
Other than that though, everything's going pretty well, I'm able to set up the HPLC and LC/MS machines by myself now and I'm pretty much a pro at TLC's ( I do a LOT of those).
Still no train stories… hopefully I won't ever have any…
Thanks,
GabRoss
P.S. There are a couple of corrections that I need to make regarding my first post: 1) Carlo is not the PI of the lab (I actually haven't even met the PI) and 2) the "grad student" I'm working with is actually a post-doc. But hey, it’s all a learning process...
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