Bad Week

It has been a lousy week.

First, purification of a reaction mixture by flash column chromatography took almost 12 hours. Well, it’s called “flash” chromatography not for no good reason. The process is supposed to be fast, like in a flash, not 12 hours. The previous time it took about a couple of hours. Somehow, this time round the compounds started eluting from the column only at a very high polarity solvent system.

Then just when I see some light at the end of the tunnel, I ran out of solvents. I had to decide to use the remaining solvents at ultra high polarity but risk flushing out the compounds together and put my day’s efforts to waste, or continue with the current solvent system and risk losing my compounds. It’s a matter of which is the lesser of the evils. Life seems to enjoy giving us situations like this.

Failed experiments. NMR showed no traces of the desired product for one set of experiments. I have repeated this experiment many times using different reaction conditions and still nothing works. As much as they say research is 99% failure most of the time, I am still, but a human being, and failures after failures are not very motivating.

For no good reason, I tripped and fell, on a path that I take everyday going to lunch. Tore my pants, had a bad bruise on my thigh and bleeding from an open wound on my knee. Sigh, I don’t like knee injuries. They take forever to heal and they leave bad scars…