Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.
Chemists have a familiarity with many elements and many compounds, from having worked with them or studied them in the literature. You get a feel for what’s “normal” and for what’s unusual, and there are quite a few degrees of the latter. Take compounds of bromine, for example. Most any working chemist will immediately recog… Read More
OK, since I’m a medicinal chemist, I have an excellent excuse to avoid the nitro functional group. It’s metabolic trouble, and although there are indeed drugs with nitros on them, they’re exceptions. Some of them, in fact, are antibacterials that rely on that metabolic activation to work, in the same way that there are nitrate… Read More
As an organic chemist, I am willing to deal with the occasional bang or kapow in the lab, as long as things don’t get too out of hand. You’re supposed to know enough to be on guard against the sorts of compounds most likely to do that and be ready for them in case they… Read More
Everyone knows hydrogen peroxide, HOOH. And if you know it, you also know that it’s well-behaved in dilute solution, and progressively less so as it gets concentrated. The 30% solution will go to work immediately bleaching you out if you are so careless as to spill some on you, and the 70% solution, which I… Read More
You may not have felt the need for a better synthesis of metal azides. Personally, my metal azide requirements are minimal, and very easily satisfied. I can get all I need by looking at a structure drawn on a whiteboard from about twenty feet away, thanks, and have no desire to actually prepare any of… Read More
OK, now I’m confused. I can’t help but have doubts about this sentence: “Despite their high nitrogen content, the geminal triazides are easy to handle, even when preparative-scale syntheses are performed.” It’s from a new paper in Ang. Chem., and that just might take these things right out of the “Things I Won… Read More
Azides have featured several times in the Things I Won’t Work With series, starting with simple little things like, say, fluorine azide and going up to all kinds of ridiculous, gibbering, nitrogen-stuffed detonation bait. But for simplicity, it’s hard to beat a good old metal azide compound, although if you’re foolhardy enough to… Read More
Cadmium is bad news. Lead and mercury get all the press, but cadmium is just as foul, even if far fewer people encounter it. Never in my career have I had any occasion to use any, and I like it that way. There was an organocadmium reaction in my textbook when I took sophomore organic… Read More
Over the years, I’ve probably had more hits on my “Sand Won’t Save You This Time” post than on any other single one on the site. That details the fun you can have with chloride trifluoride, and believe me, it continues (along with its neighbor, bromine trifluoride) to be on the “Things I Won’t Work… Read More
When we last checked in with the Klapötke lab at Munich, it was to highlight their accomplishments in the field of nitrotetrazole oxides. Never forget, the biggest accomplishment in such work is not blowing out the lab windows. We’re talking high-nitrogen compounds here (a specialty of Klapötke’s group), and the question is not whethe… Read More
