*Sigh*
I get a terribly stressful feeling when I see all the unexplored promising routes and compounds just lying there in my piles of paper, and on this site. Often 90% of the work is done already, a procedure must just be tested with an analog, or with different reaction times, temperatures and/or solvents to optimize the yield and assure purity.
The progress here at the Hive is painfully slow sometimes, people have been discussing the peracetic acid oxidation and LiI epoxide rearrangements for five years, and finally Semtexium did the peracetic last year with excellent results, just as expected. The LiI experiment will probably work just as good. But someone must do it! Even if I worked full time in a well-funded lab, only testing novel procedures, I would never have the time to keep up with the new suggestions to do things, and to optimize the results of a particular reaction to all the interesting precursors we want. If someone wants to make methamphetamine from P2P, they won't just use the appropriate procedure for MDMA and just substitute the MDP2P for P2P - and being the perfectionist I am, I feel it must be tried in practice for us to determine the yield for the particular compound, not just that this-and-that reaction usually gives 60-80% yield with nitroalkenes, I demand to know the exact yields for our five most often used nitroalkenes, as well as footnotes for the compounds when necessary. For example, in my Pseudonitrosite FAQ, there is one general procedure, a table of yields and physical properties, and finally a footnote talking about the neccessary special handling of the asarone derivate. Of course everything should be referenced, and the references checked for pointers to other articles that might help to perfect the reaction.
As I'm the librarian collecting all the good work of the people here and suggesting the most promising avenues to pursue in the future, and I spend my own spare time doing all that reference research, I'm not capable of doing all the labwork myself too. If I would personally try all the reaction varations of our new ideas instead of the theoretical research, then there would a big reduction in novel stuff found for everybody to enjoy. And if I would divide my time between the two, there wouldn't be especially much produced out of any department, as each would only get my attention during half my spare time, and even if I concentrate on only the theoretical side, I still have too little time to produce as much as I want.
Just look at my declining performance at my site (Over 100 new additions in October, 75 in November, 30 in december, and now in January only 11, of which five is just PDF/ZIP files, nothing I have written myself and put any work into!!). And I have not made any practical contributions either, other than taking pictures of ammonium nitrate crystals. If it continues like this, people will be bored with my site as not much new is happening, methods becomes obsolete as I haven't updated the documents with the latest breakthroughs, and I no longer have a purpose here...
I want help with practical tests and theoretical research, I have no possibility to verify everything interesing that is found here, neither practically or theoretically, and just abandon good ideas like we do now is terrible intellectual waste...
