Foreign Perspectives

The day got off to a relatively slow start as it took quite a while to check that we’d all the various items of glassware on the checklist and that they were clean.

Our first experiment was to prepare carboethoxymethylenetriphenylposphorane from carboethoxymethyltriphenylphosphonium bromide. That requires a fair number of steps and helps a lot in getting back into the swing of practical chemistry with steps ranging from the simple dissolving of various chemicals, handling assorted chemicals that are toxic, irritants, flammable or indeed all of the above, separating out two different layers of chemicals, evaporating to get rid of solvents and finally weighing what you’ve made to see how efficient your methods were. Along the way, we picked up where the various solvents and reagents were in the lab, built increasingly fancy structures with the clamps, wrote it all down in a lab notebook and finished up with an overall yield of 87% which is pretty amazing. Since we weren’t fully up to speed that ended up taking most of the day and was quite a busy one.

All of us doing the stabilised Wittig procedure followed the above starting approach but we broke up into about half a dozen separate teams later in the afternoon as we used a variety of different reagents to make our alkene.

Catering-wise, the breakfast was excellent with a full English breakfast cooked quite nicely. Lunch was a bit of a let-down as it’s just sandwiches with tea/coffee. The evening lectures were optional with one on interpreting NMR spectra and the other on retro-synthetic analysis (which went way too quickly over the material for me so it’s just as well that the notes will be on the forum in due course).