Max Gergel’s Memoirs
For once, I’m going to farm out a “Things I Won’t Work With” post to someone else. For those who missed it in the comments, here’s the link to the PDF of Max Gergel’s extraordinary memoir “Excuse Me...
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How Not To Do It: Hydrogen Gas Mixtures
Culturing bacteria is usually a pretty quiet affair. Bacteria aren’t too noisy, and the equipment used to keep them happy isn’t too dangerous. But there are exceptions. If you’re going to culture...
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Storage of Industrial Chemicals, Gone Rather Wrong
What do you have when a fire starts at a large chemical packing company, handling all sorts of oils, paints, coatings, and various industrial chemicals? Where they have hundreds of thousand-liter...
View ArticleWhen Reagents Attack!
Well, since I was just talking about a reagent that can potentially take off without warning, I wanted to solicit vivid experiences from the crowd. What’s a compound that you’ve made that did something...
View ArticleTen Tons of Sodium And Just One Lake
Via on Twitter (and that via C&E News), I bring you the definitive what-are-we-going-to-do-with-all-this-sodium video. The end of World War II brought all kinds of material disposal problems – you...
View ArticleAccident Report, or One Damn Thing After Another
I have this from a lab-accidents-I-have-known discussion over on Reddit. It is, of course, unverified, but it’s depressingly plausible. As a chemist, this one is guaranteed to make you bury your head...
View ArticleHow Not to Do It: Chromium Trioxide
Note: this was a post on my old blog site, and never made the migration over to the current “In the Pipeline”. I was reminded of it this morning, and thought I’d bring it more out into the light. There...
View ArticleHow Not to Do It: NMR Magnets
Here’s an NMR imaging blog with details of a recent problem in an Indian facility. Two people ended up stuck to the machine, pinned by an oxygen cylinder (!) that one of them brought into the room....
View ArticleHow Not to Handle Your Clinical Data
We turn now to Orexigen, one of the small companies trying to make headway in the obesity market. Earlier this year, a patent application from them published, claiming that their drug (Contrave, a...
View ArticleNitric Acid And Your Lab Coat
Ah, the good old nitric acid/sulfuric acid nitration conditions. A classic reaction if ever there was one. But you don’t want to let it spray all over your lab coat – you really don’t. I have a shirt...
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How Not to Do It: Transporting Nitric Acid
Via Reddit’s r/chemistry, we have this alarming footage of what is apparently about two tons of fuming nitric acid that has burst out of a tanker truck. This article on the Russian news site RT.com...
View ArticleChemical Storage, Good and Not So Good
Back to science! I will admit that my Twitter feed is going to be rather more politicized than usual for some time to come, but this is not a political site, and thank God for that. I have to say, it...
View ArticleHow Not to Do It: Dosing Volunteers
Well, here I post about the ethical problems of using normal volunteers in Phase I studies, and this story comes along. It’s not exactly an investigational drug trial – two students (in “Sports...
View ArticleHow Not to Do It: TATP
You may well have heard about an incident at the University of Bristol, where a student inadvertently prepared some triacetone triperoxide (TATP). That’s a substance that I definitely won’t work with,...
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How Not to Do It: Breaking up Ammonium Nitrate
I’ve come across several odd facts and stories from an old (1927) book called The Romance of Chemistry, given to me in person by Mark Nelson of Frontier Scientific.* Among these is an alarming incident...
View ArticleAn Idiotic Exhibit
I suppose this will be sort of a chemical engineering, scale-up, process chemistry post. . .and most certainly will be filed here under the “How Not to Do It” category. The Bellingcat group (Dan...
View ArticleGot It All Ready For You, Mr. FDA Inspector
Many folks outside of this industry don’t realize that the FDA sends inspectors to drug manufacturing facilities in other countries. That might sound a bit odd, but agreeing to such inspections is in...
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