12 Things I Love About Chemistry

Okay, I’m late to the party, but here are my contributions. This might be a fitting (and easy) way for me to get in the game.

1. Submitting pure target compound to an assay for testing
2. Purifying crude material by trituration and avoiding a tedious chromatography
3. Finding an inexpensive, reliable vendor for a critical intermediate as an alternative to Aldrich
4. That moment when a crystallization begins to bloom
5. Elucidating the structure of an impurity that gives you insight to optimizing reaction conditions
6. Using a synthetic step from the literature that’s really old (i.e., older than me)
7. When pure product crashes out of a reaction mixture
8. Spot-to-spot conversion by TLC
9. When a colleague is excited about an experimental result
10. That “A-ha” moment in data analysis
11. Tension-free project meetings
12. Learning early on that being serious about science wasn’t the same as being solemn