I work full time at the bench and I’m pretty sure last week was the first time I used organic solvent for anything in 2020 (apart from stripping paint in my basement). Weird year.

Based on a quick address search, if Merck Process was a person, they would have an H-index of about 101. That’s better than MacMillan (92) and Jacobsen (74), although probably not better than what MacMillan and Jacobsen will have by the time they hit age 129.

Tonight I finished the silliest and most ambitious of my pandemic projects: a basement bouldering wall. Unfortunately you can’t see the panels on the ceiling in this photo!

Things I learned: 1. newborns really hate hammering, but the startle reflex is quite cute 2. I should have bought an impact driver years ago. Life is too short for driving screws with a drill. 3. Dimensional lumber is a lie. 4. 3/4” Plywood is really heavy.

I don’t think any other pharmaceutical company has won more than one (although Dow has won more than all of us put together!)

Any one tuning into the ACS Green Chemistry and Engineering conference online this afternoon should check my session Safety: A Pillar of Green Chemistry. You can still register for FREE at gcande.org/register

Remember that paper on sensitization by coupling agents? You can hear a talk from graduate student and first author Kate McKnelly about her personal experience of this at 1:05 pm today! And ask her questions! (The paper is pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.10…)

We also have fantastic talks from process chemists Ken Fraunhoffer (BMS) and Yong-Li Zhong (Merck) about scaling-up dangerous chemistry for specific programs. Ever wonder how you safely make a diazenium diolate or use peroxide to cleave auxiliaries on kilo scale?

Finally, David Constable (ACS Green Chemistry Institute) and Craig Merlic (UCLA) will both speak more generally about safer synthetic chemistry and Tom Vickery (Merck) will explain our reaction review policy for safely going from the lab to kilo scale and way beyond. Join us!

Note: most of these are available on-demand, so if you miss them because I’m tweeting too late (likely), then you can catch them tomorrow. Or whenever!

When the pubs re-open, it doesn't mean the virus has gone away. It just means they have room for you in intensive care.

Here’s an opinion piece I wrote for Chemistry World on the recent Baran group synthesis of taxol (spoiler: I am a fan)

Lab-based friends, please don’t label your wash bottles with sharpie. After moving to a new lab, I have just washed my organic phase with what I now suspect was not deionized water, but rather household bleach. Sadly it didn’t even get rid of the yellow color.

Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary of the first nuclear test. If you’re interested in a great non-fiction book, The Making of the The Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is one of the best things I read this year. Great stories and descriptions of all the scientists behind it!

If you want to attend a FREE virtual conference with four great speakers, consider registering for the Princeton ACS Fall Organic Symposium. This is open to anyone, anywhere, although our platform limits us to 1000 registrants! Sign up now — details below!

Pin milling is where you put the API in a ziplock bag and then bash it with a rolling pin, right?

‘It never fails to make me feel like an alchemist – or a magician’ – Chris Nawrat reflects on the development of radical chemistry chemistryworld.com/opinion/--norz…

Great to see our new mural celebrating the Process R&D legacy of innovation outside our seminar room in Rahway. Nice job by Kevin Maloney and Chris Nawrat who helped design it! #MerckChemistry

Kelsey is awesome and kicking ass on his #MerckChemistry internship! #FollowFriday one day early 😂

If it gets too hot in my garage, will my screws racemize? It’d be a pain to have to resolve them back to enantiopurity, but I really need the (P) isomers. After reading a couple of helicene papers, my view of the world has changed.