My daily life in the Wang Lab is recursive. The tasks to complete each day, the type and amount of progress to make feels heavily dependent on what I accomplished the day before. This observation may seem ubiquitous and reflective of work ethic – the more or less anyone works one day usually determines how much work there is the next day – but in chemistry, I think there’s a uniquely significant factor of luck as well. The success of my reactions, extractions, purifications, etc today will determine whether I can push ahead tomorrow or have to troubleshoot, even redo the steps. That success is often out of my control.
Here’s an example. One Monday a couple of weeks ago, Brett and I planned out several clear goals for the week: 1. purify two of my crude products from the previous week, 2. use one of the pure products in a methodology reaction, and 3. synthesize a new starting material. I got to work on the purifications that day, really gung-ho and ambitious about completing both and then finishing goals 2 and 3 on Tuesday and Wednesday, respectively. It was definitely feasible, but then chemistry happened. Both of my columns (for purification) failed miserably and unexpectedly; the first product degraded on the column, and the second ended up containing a side product that came through along with the main product. Accordingly, I tried to accomplish the same thing on Tuesday, this time with different purification techniques. Again my products were impure, and now the masses left over were dismal. I also started synthesizing the other product (goal 3) before the other goals were accomplished, kind of as a detour from those road blocks – an attempt to still make progress. Ultimately, what had begun as a week with daily goals and scheduled progress ended with several re-done reactions and new plans trying to correct for what went wrong.
In conclusion, my work in lab each day depends on how productive the day before was. That productiveness in turn depends on how much I try to accomplish, how willing chemistry is to cooperate, and how flexible (and optimistic) I am at dealing with road blocks, even dead ends. Progress in an organic synthesis lab is thus recursive, making it unpredictable but fortunately, always cumulative. Even a failed reaction is important to have experienced; that’s just one more way that I know not to do it. And, as Brett and I said simultaneously last week after deciding that a reaction would have to be redone once again, we all keep going with the mentality that “the [n]th time’s the charm.”
