Synthetic Chemists

I was super bummed in my first year of school when a professor of mine said “while you may practice wet chemistry here, most, if not all of you will never perform wet chemistry in your careers”. This was just after we extracted salicin from willow bark and oxidized it to form salicylic acid (aspirin precursor). I was hooked, I was back in school after having dropped out originally to go to glassblowing school, I almost instantly fell in love with chemistry.

Well, if only he could see me now, probably the only one from that class doing wet chemistry. Although he would still probably correct me saying I found a very niche job.

Now if only we could really conduct bio assays in the USA professionally, then we could push the efficacy of minor cannabinoids and use terpenes/terpenoids as building blocks. For now, that remains a mostly clandestine practice in the USA. We just get to do the whole “our patients report that using this product may make their nausea better”, while pushing out products that aren’t verified beyond their physical content to actually do anything (even though we know they do)

Maybe if we had filed patents and started an NDI on the molecules years ago…hmmm…

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Yeah I went from doing total synthesis, photochemistry, and organotransition metal chemistry to working formulations at a CBD company. They ended up cutting my pay significantly so I left last month. Now I am trying to synthesize these minor cannabinoids whenever I get a chance to bum space in someone’s lab.

I don’t think I’ll stay in chemistry my whole career and I also don’t want to get a PhD so I’ll probably switch fields entirely.

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I’m doing Khan academy right now to brush up on my chem. Would you recommend the masters organic chem link you posted after I get done with Khan or is there another intermediate I should look at before diving into that link?

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Were working on figuring out how we can use PH to make crystal resistant cbd.

Theres something going on with some of these Clay’s, like I’ve noticed just T5 and silica when I CRC will prevent me from being able to crash thc a

My shit crumbles when this happens.

Its weird.

I wonder if we can figure out what’s going on with the CRC and apply it to distillation somehow using the same powders

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You know my lab is always open to you sir.

The analytical lab in SD has everything but a NMR too

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I cannot recommend highly enough the UC Irvine YouTube videos. They have every lecture from pretty much every organic class they teach. The undergrad stuff is great and the graduate stuff finishes the story.

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You can use khan academy whenever you want. It maybe a good idea to watch the intro chem stuff if the beginning of the organic series doesn’t make sense.

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I’m starting with the basic chem stuff to refresh my memory.

I’ve taken chem before it was just sophomore year in HS so it was literally like 13 years ago.

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The intermediate organic chemistry stuff really closes the gap between undergrad and grad. It also depends on what type of background you have. I took the organic series, a graduate heterocycles course, and a graduate synthetic course as an undergrad. I showed up to grad school miles ahead of the other students and coasted in phys org and organometallics.

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UC Irvine also has their whole gen chem series of lectures on there also. I feel like they are the best communicating chemists I have found in single department.

Also Rice University has an open source project with free texts.

Here’s Gen. Chem.

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I would love to have access to NMR. The structural elucidation of most major and minor cannabinoids we currently know of has already been done in the past 50 years or so, but it would be rewarding even just for education.

Most companies don’t seem to have inhouse analysis, it is a complete game changer to create samples in the refinement and extraction labs, walk over and conduct HPLC/GC, and then have an answer in 20 minutes. Not to mention the savings in lab fees.

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Shoot next place I work with I might just spend my personal cash on an HPLC so I can be productive.

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It’s not exactly a breeze to get ISO accreditation for state operation, but its actually quite lucrative to own your own analytical equipment. One of my business partners started a small R&D service and it’s been profitable for us just to have a partnership and bring in clientele.

You can get started with a small manual injection GCFID and test cannabinoids, terpenes. and residual solvents for around $20k if you’re good at sourcing equipment.

Edit: I should add that while FID is a cheaper detector, it will decarboxylate acids and you will have to account for this.

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To be more on topic,

An interesting little expirament in synthesis would be to create CP55940, an analogue Pfizer Central Research identified back in the 1980s.

The last thing we need floating around the marketplace is more cannabinoid analogues, but it would be neat expirament in synthesis. Which brings me to an off topic subject. We as cannabis processors need an ethical vow to not release analogues, or instruct those that would, into the marketplace. Isomers and isolations, if done correctly, is a different story. But let’s learn our lesson from the era of JWH018.

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I’ve been slowly developing software development skills over the past few years as I feel a switch is imminent

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If you like doing software it’s a good idea, but if you don’t like coding you’ll be miserable. Sitting in front of a computer for 40 hrs a week can be awful, especially if you don’t like trouble shooting scripts

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I agree. My first and second legal companies I worked for had HPLC and what an advantage it is to have one. Haha first company bought one from Beijing and I uncrated it, set it up, and developed a little potency method. Trying to convince my current company to get one or a GC is a bit futile. There is a segment of folks in this space that have a difficult time recognizing the value it brings because it doesn’t produce a product you can sell so to speak. A bit short sighted if you ask me :grinning:

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I got GC fid running with a new machine for $14,500 including analytical glassware and a decent number of standards

and it’s only a little extra for the chemicals to prevent decarb on the column so you can test for acidic cannabinoids with the same setup. Can do residual solvents on the same unit as well

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Ive been working on a portfolio of work and it has been slow going but the satisfaction I get making an application and deploying it is immense. I admit its really the most stimulation I get now. I stay up late coding and learning new technologies . There is something liberating in that I can create something from nothing with just wifi and my macbook. Chemistry is awesome, but without a lab or expensive equipment or reagents I am dead in the water.

Edit: future4200.com can be pretty stimulating too :grinning:

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I hear you, glad you love it. Have you checked out cheminformatics? It’s the next big thing in computational chemistry, bet you could do some interesting things with it on your home computer and get a sweet gig with the experience that you get from it too
@anon81723932

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