| Even as a chemist today you get to recognize the smells of chemicals even if barely exposed. It's typically only the most toxic that you’d use such equipment to not be exposed at all (but then we tend to avoid those anyways). You start to recognize the smell of ethers like diethyl ether or tetrahydrofuran (which I love the smell of). Sulfides are obvious (smell terrible). I made a mistake a couple times smelling things I shouldn’t. Once was diazomethane gas - a potent akylating agent and explosive. I instinctively put the roundbottom flask to my nose to smell, but realized after how dumb it was. No idea if i heavily alkylated my nasal passage epithelial cells or not, but no side effects. The other time was a brominated aryl compound similar to tear gas. That was amazingly painful and felt like getting wasabi up my nose despite there being almost nothing left in the flask. One time which wasn't intention was smelling CbzCl (benzyl chloroformate, a reagent used to add a protecting group to nitrogens). I didn't intentionall smell it, but measured it outside the fume hood in a syringe. It smells pretty awful, but what I realize is that the molecule must bind to your nasal passages (proteins have lots of nitrogens) because I could smell it for the next 24 hours. After smelling it that long, the smell now makes me nauseous pretty quickly. |
Mistake!
Only a few years later in chem class did a teacher show how to use your hand to waft fumes from an open beaker or flask so that you can catch a tiny whiff.