“Things I Won’t Work With”

I’m not a super chemistry nerd. In fact, I’m not great with chem. My last formal chemistry instruction was, umm, uhh, hmmm. Uh-oh. Was it really grade eleven or twelve? Probably eleven. I think that one scared me enough that I didn’t follow through to the OAC credit. The teacher telling me all about how he scarred his legs horrifically with acid while he was in a university lab made me think, “You know what? Spending the rest of my life on the ice playing contact hockey with guys that want to kill me or on the field with people trying to put field hockey balls through my skull seems way safer and more fun! Excuse me, I need to go petition* to take the OAC Phys-Ed credit right freakin’ now”. My lack of proper instruction in no way stops me from enjoying the awesome that is Things I Won’t Work With.

Things I Won’t Work With: Nitrotetrazole Oxides (red bits are what jumped out in my mind)

Tetrazole derivatives have featured several times here in “Things I Won’t Work With”, which might give you the impression that they’re invariably explosive. Not so – most of them are perfectly reasonable things. A tetrazole-for-carboxyl switch is one of the standard med-chem tricks, standard enough to have appeared in several marketed drugs. And that should be recommendation enough, since the FDA takes a dim view of exploding pharmaceuticals (nitroglycerine notwithstanding; that one was grandfathered in). No, tetrazoles are good citizens. Most of the time.

It’s when they get put in with the wrong sort of company that they turn delinquent. What with four nitrogens in the ring and only one carbon, they do have a family history of possible trouble – several sections of this blog category could just as accurately be called Things That Suddenly Want To Turn Back Into Elemental Nitrogen. And thermodynamically, there aren’t many gently sloping paths down to nitrogen gas, unfortunately. Both enthalpy and entropy tilt things pretty sharply. A molecule may be tamed because it just can’t find a way down the big slide, but if it can, well, it’s time to put on the armor, insert the earplugs, and get ready to watch the free energy equation do its thing right in front of your eyes. Your heavily shielded eyes, that is, if you have any sense at all.

There are a bunch of archived posts under that heading for fellow I’m-not-a-scientist-and-the-world-is-probably-better-for-it types. The readings might even help you feel a bit better about your current occupation! I guarantee your science knowledge will sharpen with each post, especially if you’re also like me in that you frequently seek out clarification for the bits you don’t understand. In my case, that’s a lot. My Is-A-Scientist friend is probably sick of my questions.

*in a stupid archaic thing back in ye olde high school days, the final gym credit was a guys class. I got to take said class and, of course, rocked it. Nothing like getting to play hockey, curling, and golf for credit. Good times, eh. Petitioning is overstating it. I went to my counselor, said I want that class, and he made it happen. I was playing on half the school teams anyway, so it’s not like my request surprised anyone : )