3/26/2012 - Synthesis of Arsphenamine

     At this point in time, in 1909, medicine was very limited on what cured versus what merely treating a disease, and there were many breakthroughs in this field all of the time.  A year prior to this date a man named Paul Ehrlich invented the chemotherapy method in fighting cancer through using toxic compounds.  With his knowledge of toxic material he was experimenting on what other diseases could be helped through this method and he synthesized a molecule called Arsphenamine, or also known as Salvarsan, used to treat syphilis.  It was found through synthesizing hundreds of organic arsenical compounds and testing each one.  This was also the first organic antisyphilic, meaning that before this compound was produced, syphilis was only treated with inorganic compounds such as Mercury.

3/20/2012 - Synthesis of Iodotrimethyl Platinum (IV)

     An english chemist of the name William J. Pope worked in researching stereochemistry, but one of his major achievements, in 1909, came with the synthesis of IodoTrimethyl Platinum, or (CH₃)₃PtI. This synthesis was carried out through the mixing of Potassium chloroplatinate, K₂PtCl₆, along with a Grignard methyl complex, CH₃MgI. This compound holding it's historical significance through the fact that it became the first σ-organotransition-metal compound meaning that the organic group is connected through a sigma bond to the transition metal.

3/18/2012 - Synthesis of Diphenylsilicone

     At the turn of the century in 1901, there is a chemist named L. Kipping working strongly with different silicone chemistry.  This year he synthesizes a molecule he calls to be diphenylsilicone despite stating of a much higher molecularity.

3/17/2012 - Barbier and the Grignard Reactions

    And once again I apologize for my prolonged absence from the blog as with my injury it induces pain that lasts for a good period of time, and then it lets off for a couple days, only to drive right back into the pain.  Some of these times, I really can't find it in me to do a blog post even though I have so much free time condemned to me.
    As the organometallic history progressed, in 1899, a man by the name of P. Barbier investigated reactions involving an alkyl halide being used as an addition reaction onto strongly electrophilic points.  These reactions were usually involving using reactants such as: an alkyl halide, Zinc, and followed by an aqueous work up.  He began studies focused on finding other metals that could have similar use in these kinds of reactions.  He concluded that adding Magnesium instead of Zinc consequented in a more efficient addition.  His student Grignard followed up by effectively describing the reaction in more detail resulting in the reaction being named after him and also with winning the Nobel Prize.

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3/13/2012 - Synthesis of Nickel tetracarbonyl

    About a decade after Mendeleev made his predictions of Eka-Si(C₂H₅)₄, in 1890, a scientist by the name of Ludwig Mond became the first to synthesize Nickel tetracarbonyl, Ni(CO)₄.  This was performed by passing carbon monoxide over Nickel metal to make a light yellow liquid.  This technology was then harnessed to refine nickel when Mond founded the company Imperial Chemical Industries.

Nickel Tetracarbonyl

3/12/2012 - Synthesis and Predicted Properties of Tetraethylgermanium

     Sorry for my week long absence, I was quite busy with my girlfriend visiting me during her spring break, and combined with my injury, I didn't feel up to writing in my blogs.  I did, however, start playing around with a Wordpress blog that I just created.  I am loving their integration with LaTeX in the blog capabilities, and right now I am wishing that I had gone with Wordpress instead of Blogger.  The blog I started is just a blog where I intend to record down what I have been learning in my studies in order to help me in my memory of the subjects.
     As for the continuation of the organometallic history, in 1971 Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev set off to organize the periodic table in according to their physical properties (both atomic weight and valence).  In this certain test where he knew the properties for Si(C₂H₅)₄ and Sn(C₂H₅)₄, and knew that there was an element below Silicon and above Tin, he could predict the properties of the organometallic of Ekasilicon Eka-Si(C₂H₅)₄ (later named Ge(C₂H₅)₄). The properties predicted were the density and the boiling point, and the predictions were only 0.03 points below the actual density and 3.5 degrees C below the actual boiling point.

Tetraethylgermanium

The Grounding Problem of Human Consumption

    The highest issue regarding how humans consume goods (take that as electronics, food, etc.) is that the wasted goods don't follow a pattern that exists in most biological and chemical systems: That being a cycle.  Life has harnessed the use of chemical cycles ever since there was life in the idea that a cycle exists as an efficient form, to reuse or remake from what has already been produced and used.  The point of a cycle is to expend the minimum amount of energy, and in the chemical world, this energy exists with chemical bonds.  For a chemical system, for example being that of the ATP cycle (adenosine triphosphate) our body breaks this down into ADP harnessing the energy of the phosphate-phosphate bond to power other chemical processis.  Now after the ADP is produced, the cell does not just toss this out of the cell into a landfill, but rather remakes ATP by adding another phosphate through the actions of oxidative phosphorylation (or by other biochemical systems) producing a cyclic existence of ADP and ATP.  If the cell were to throw out the ADP, the process would be extremely inefficient where it would have to use much for energy to produce more chemical bonds to synthesize a whole molecule of ATP.
     For starters this issue can be resolved greatly by our recycling system, but still manufactures still tend to use non recyclable plastics in many packagings.  Just last week I purchased a bag of candy, and it had a large non-recyclable packaging, but even more astonishing, I opened up the package to find that every miniature candy was unnecessarily individually packaged, in again, non-recyclable plastics.  This consumerism is always so evident during boxing day shopping, or anything of the sort, when people purchase just because it's on sale, where they have conquered the price, but really, have no need for the product.  I volunteer with a pre-teen youth group, and in hearing when they brag about what their parents buy them, I wonder how long it will take until those parents just toss those items to make room for more.  To overcome this hurdle, one must donate those toys to the less fortunate, something that many of the more fortunate parents don't do because they dont realize the importance.  A chemical analogy to this would be a cell in an ATP rich environment, where it would more rather use the ATP in the environment than to remake ATP out of the used up ADP.  This cell would adapt, and may have less mitochondrial systems to  make its own ATP, just as the parents create this non-cyclic system of consuming because they can take in products from the outside environment so easily.
     This idea also exists in our clothing.  Back when it was harder to get new clothes, people used to mend and edit their clothes themselves instead of throwing something away at the sign of degradation, keeping the clothing in a cycle.  And currently the quality of today's clothing is appalling, manufacturers produce these clothes in the philosophy that the consumers will buy more if they go through their products faster.  And if the consumers do get angry at the quality, the manufacturers wont necessarily have to deal with it.  If this was back in the day when consumers purchased local made clothing, if the consumer found something wrong, they could take it up with the tailor himself, resulting in the tailor wishing to produce a well made product.
     One of the biggest solution of this would be for governments to help out local companies so that it would be possible to compete with Chinese products sold in stores like Walmart and other enormous, money eating stores. My parents used to own a display fixtures company produced out of wood, and this company went down for this very reason.  Our customers ended up buying cheaply made fixtures from Chinese manufacturers, instead of purchasing our quality products.  I can still go into stores today, and see items we had made about ten years ago, where the cheaper Chinese products would get tossed very quickly.
    Discovery after discovery in the chemical world reveals endless amounts of cycles evident in our universe.  It is only common sense to infer that within a cyclic system, the laws of thermodynamics are most favorable.  Once this realisation sets in, one will see anything that doesn't adhere to this system and understand that a non-cyclic system is doomed for failure in the long run.  And for the cell in the ATP rich environment, once there is no more ATP supplied to it, it won't know what to do to produce any ATP for itself.

3/1/2012 - Synthesis of the First Metal Carbonyl Complex

     In 1868 a French man by Marcel-Paul Schützenberger (a mathematician who also studied medicine) began a new form of organic complexes by creating the first metal carbonyl complex.  These complexes gain importance through the catalytic reactions of Carbon monoxide, which is a piece in the creation of many molecules of biological importance.  The bonding of the CO with the metal is also of some relevance due to the unique character (not shown in the picture below) where the orbitals of the metal bond with the pi-orbitals of the C≡O.  The complex, Dicarbonyldichloroplatinum [Pt(CO)₂Cl₂] was formed through him passing carbon monoxide and chlorine over powdered Platinum (also known as Platinum black).