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Aldrich has a blog and on that blog they peddle their deepest wishes, like being able to competently compete on the level of, say, Strem. 
Well, the compound on the right is the new “yellow” Aldrich tetrakis – which is clearly not fucking yellow. The compound on the right left, still in its bottle, is the same motherfucking compound from Strem.
It’s good because 1. Strem uses advanced technology to seal their bottle, called sealing wax. 2. They tape the package to a cold pack and 3. They cover their shit in real organic Argon.
Of course, you can make your own.
I never wanted to be a chemist. I wanted to be a physicist – particularly an astrophysicist. If I hadn’t been so goddamn pigheaded as an undergraduate and majored in chemistry to spite my bitch high school teacher, I’d well be a fucking physicist right now. What is there to be disappointed about in astrophysics? Could it possibly be as bad as chemistry? Could you come in on Monday with a great idea, have it dashed by mid-afternoon, resurrected a bit modified by the time you leave, have half the preliminaries done by Wednesday only to discover your hypothesis was wrong – head home dejected, return Thursday, realize after coffee that you’ve discovered something wonderful (even if it wasn’t what you initially had hoped for) started planning your intro for your Nature paper on Friday morning, only to realize it has been published three years ago?
You know, when most people describe their boss as bipolar, maybe they should consider the fucking field they’re in. Every week I get excited about science and every week I get let down by it. Sometimes, the beatings from the research lows are so bad I feel satisfied with myself after a successful BOC protection. My inexplicable good mood, the result of a happy NMR spectra of something other than broad peaks, water and chloroform, is going to get stuck in the belly with a shank in the next few moments. That shank may be as trivial as being unable to take the fucking BOC group back off. The embrangled emotions of a chemist are a tempest, which manifest as the bipolar self-absorbed prima donna we normally act out. And I’m quite certain that the halogenated gasses and small mildly psychoactive alkaloids we serendipitously ingest take their toll over the years.
So, on days when I’m frustrated with my life as a chemist I grab a book by Kip Throne, the man that inspired me to be a physicist and pretend that I’m failing somewhere else – somewhere that doesn’t involve pumps belching pyridine at me when I turn them on.
UPDATE: Uch, slipped my mind. We’ve hit 10,200 legit comments. What a milestone, eh?
I haven’t done a drug Sunday in a while, but I feel as though I should, given the heinousness of my previous post. You see, I have some sort of anxiety disorder or something which appears to run in my family. I usually work this out with running but haven’t been able to do that for a while and, consequently, the anxiety gets the better of me. NOW, a consequence of said anxiety is insomnia – which is essentially the most annoying side effect. (Most of my family are insomniacs. At any given point, I could wake up and find some member of my family awake in the house, watching TV or playing on the internets or, in the case of the grandparents, smoking cigarettes reading newspapers…)
Whatever. The short of the long of it is sometimes I can’t sleep and so I turn to chemistry to help me. Ambien, consequently, plays an infrequent roll in my life. As I have said before, I’m totally sXe (hahah) and have little experience with recreational drugs. However, since I received my first prescription for Ambien in college, I have collected a few unusual stories:
- I woke up with bruises on my knees and several forts constructed out of couch cushions in my living room.
- I woke up face down in a pint of melted and congealed ice cream in my living room wearing nothing but a cashmere frock coat.
- I woke up to discover that the walls of my room had been covered in aluminum foil.
That’s just to name a few… needless to say, I usually take the drug only when I have little other discourse and there is someone else at home. My wife, Mrs. Finchsigmate, is usually my trip sitter – though she’s generally asleep by the time I realize it’s either going to be an Ambien night or no sleeping at all.
ANYWAY, not that’s out of the way, let’s discuss Zolpidem, the chemical also known as Ambien.
Synthesis of Zolpidem can be accomplished in a fairly steppy but simple synthesis starting with the commercially available Methylacetophenone:
The mechanism of action of Zolpidem works by potentiating γ-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) by binding to benzodiazepine receptors, though the drug bares no structural resemblance to benzodiazepines (well… not very much). The patent on the drug was held by Sanofi-Aventis and is now available in generic form. A new formulation called Ambien CR supposedly extends the very short 2 hour half life, allowing patients to “sleep through the night” by retarding the rate of drug release from the capsule in the digestive system.
Ambien sales before generic were 2.1 billion per annum, the Ambien CR formlulation as of 2008 rakes in almost 900 million per annum – so Sanofi isn’t starving having lost their cash cow.
But, by far, the most notorious thing about Zolpidem is the associated sleep walking and amnesia. My anecdotes above are drops int he pond of larger reports that the drug has been associated with unusual behaviors that place the victim in precarious and even deadly situations. Why this drug is even allowed on the market at all is beyond me but it’s certainly effective.
Zolpidem is a drug of abuse and trip reports have been extensively loged at Erowid. From my own personal experience, hallucinations are rare but can be fantastic (in the sense that they give the illusion of rather incredible things occurring – such as seeing the television you’re watching, while waiting for the drug to kick in, fly into the air and bounce off the ceiling like a balloon.)
The recent and laughable account by Xinbo Wang, Bo Zhang and David Zhigang Wang in JACS that sodium hydride is an oxidant has been challenged by an online cabal of chemists over at TotallySynthetic. It was further questioned at CBC and has been the scorn of folk in the office.
I almost feel compelled to do the reaction, but from the comments section it seems pretty clear: in the absence of oxygen, sodium hydride does not an oxidant make.
It’s a pretty tough reality and a stinging rebuke that people can essentially do basement chemistry and have your shit debunked before it even makes it into print. This is the nature of the blogosphere, the inernets and the future.
Of course, there was no scandal here… it was a bit sensational. Peer review triumphed again, even if it happened only after the publication (or has it not been published yet? See… this online shit is confuckingfusing).
UPDATE: Missed it. Do this in a glove box and it doesn’t work. Open it up to air and you get 80% yield. All apologies to those involved..
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