I am continuing this in a new post rather than keeping mucking with the old one.

Currently I am working on reproducing the description of Exp098 from Jean-Claude Bradley’s UsefulChem Wiki within our blog based notebook to identify differences in practise. The reproduction can be found at;

http://chemtools.chem.soton.ac.uk/projects/blog/blogs.php/blog_id/15/

then click on ‘Usefulchem_exp098’ under the ‘Sandpit Group’ heading on the right hand side and explore from there

18/09/07 15:00 UTC I have added the next two steps of the experiment, the addition of methanol followed by the addition of NaOH to neutralise the solution. In doing this I have possible done something slightly the wrong way around as a reading of the original Exp098 suggests that this step was not originally planned but added later. I still need to add all the NMRs in a sensible fashion. This is it has to be said somewhat tedious but it does keep the relationships between things clear.

I have probably divided this up far more than is necessary in retrospect and the division makes it difficult to read. This probably is a distinction between the way we think about molecular biology and synthetic chemistry. Chemistry does often involve small steps with characterisation along the way on the various materials generated. Each of these steps only require a sentence or more to describe. Most of our molecular biology requires some form of table to detail the inputs and there is usually very little analysis along the way. The differences therefore seem to be: more things in, less in situ analysis.

It might well be more informative to actually do a synthetic chemistry experiment and record that in our system. Because I am doing this replication in bits of spare time I have a bit too much time to think about it as I go along.