[eyegor]

This article really reinforces my choice to drop ochem in college. It's funny how deciphering assembly code seems downright mundane compared to this jargon. Like, I get how given the process you could recreate things, or you could devise possible reactions based on electron shells and bonding tendencies, but how do researchers even figure out how to make these reactions happen? Especially when they require -100C, or +5atm of pressure.

[Reelin]

> but how do researchers even figure out how to make these reactions happen?

Disclaimer: I'm terrible at organic chemistry.

As with software engineering, you develop a general sense (I didn't) of what might work and what probably won't. You aren't coming at it blind and reinventing the wheel every time. You learn to recognize patterns in chemical structures and reason about how they will interact under various conditions based on that. You do electron pushing in your head without giving it much thought, similar to a programmer reasoning about object lifetimes or dataflow in an application.

As to -100 C or +5 atm, that's the easy part. You alter environmental conditions when what you're working with is too reactive, or not reactive enough, or you have some other general problem. It's roughly analogous to determining the minimum amount of RAM the machine hosting your production database requires.

[perlgeek]

> but how do researchers even figure out how to make these reactions happen? Especially when they require -100C, or +5atm of pressure.

That part, at least in theory, is easy to understand.

Chemical reactions are typically of the form:

ingredients + energy -> products + byproducts

If the energy is on the left-hand side, making the environment warm makes the reaction go faster. If energy comes out (so it's on the right-hand side), making it cooler is better. You also need to control the temperature to be in a range where both the ingredients and products can survive.

As for the pressure, if the products and by-products have more total volume than the ingredients, low pressure is good. If it's the other way round, high pressure encourages the reaction.

The more complicated part is that if multiple reactions can happen with the same ingredients, or if the products can do further, unwanted reactions. Then you have to balance out the parameters to encourage just the reaction you want, and to discourage all the others.

[Glosster]

Thanks for taking the time to explain at a basic level, this was very interesting!

[Gigablah]

Speaking of elaborate processes, NileRed’s recent video about the laborious process of making aerogel is a fascinating watch:

https://youtu.be/Y0HfmYBlF8g

[hetspookjee]

His channel is a recommender in general. I always refer to his lactose free video when people ask me how it's made and what it is. Excellent channel!

[xg15]

Not a biologist or chemist, but the articles I've read that invoke biochemistry or molecular biology always reminded me of the intricate mechanical automata that were constructed before electricity could be used for computation.

Back then, you had a certain number of mechanical properties in mind as well as well-known "parts" (gears, linkages, etc) that you could predict the properties of very well - and the task was then to assemble them into larger mechanisms that did what you wanted them to do.

Seems to me, the intuition here could be similar - except the number of dimensions in which parts can interact is larger, the "clockworks" are orders of magnitude more complex - and your tools are much more coarse, so mostly, even if you know what you need to build, the building itself can only be done indirectly.

[totony]

Organic chemistry is basically doing constraint solving. E.g. you know a lot of different reactions (e.g. replace Cl by OH, add double bond), but some reactions cannot be done depending on the structure of the intermediates.

I have a bachelor in chemistry and ochem was one of the most painful classes based on the amount of things you must know by heart for synthesis

[longcommonname]

I switched to ChemE after ochem. The memorization sucked and much preferred the math in courses like pchem and thermo.

[applecrazy]

Isn’t there analytical chemistry software?

[girvo]

There is. Some of it is quite powerful, too, but it has some (quite serious) limits: process chemists definitely aren't in danger of losing their jobs just yet!

[Reelin]

Yes, but good luck interpreting the output if you aren't an accomplished synthetic organic chemist.

[fuzzfactor]

Analysts can benefit tremendously from better knowledge of research, synthesis or process work, and vice versa.

But great professionalism can also be developed without as much cross-functionality between subdisciplines.

Like many things, detailed efforts unique to the subprofession can be the most essential.

[fuzzfactor]

You must utilize the software beyond the vendors' design goals before you can be as effective as you could before there was software.

[heavenlyblue]

Reading assembly code is mundane.