Chemistry Blog

Blessings and curses

Hello!

My name is Phil. I’m doing my Ph.D. at ETH Zürich (that’s right, in Switzerland), where I’m working in the field of Medicinal Chemistry. This is my first post, hooray!

One of my group jobs is to take care of the LC-MS system we bought last year. You know, that magic box where the people from CSI can put some saliva sample in, and ten seconds later the display tells them exactly which drug the person was abusing at his/her time of death. Unfortunately it’s not all that easy in reality. For synthetic chemistry, it is both a blessing and a curse. As long as it works, it is extremely useful, especially for complex reaction mixtures like the ones in cross-coupling reactions and such. However, it requires a lot of maintenance because something seems to go wrong several times a week. In a way that’s not so surprising because more than 50 people use the machine, and I imagine not all of them think much about what kind of substances they inject.

Still, it sometimes annoys me when the technical difficulties are completely left away in TV series. You never see one of the CSI people cursing at a clogged HPLC column. But I guess that’s why I know I’m a Chemist.