So many options, only one life..

StonedOpossum is right - if you can do that, then get into a lab and see how you like it. I never got to do that.. they just dont offer studentships/internships for undergrads where I live, and I basically had to cross my fingers and hoped that I liked organic chemistry all through my undergraduate degree. Thankfully I do, but I really had no idea what it was like until I actually started in the lab.

Here's the typical 'desk' of a synthetic chemist... I took a photo because I was really proud - I had just cleaned my fumehood after a few months. It was actually white on the bottom with a slurry of magnesium sulfate, silica and miscellaneous chemical spills, and about two hundred needles/syringes. I got told off about the needles part, so had to tidy up.


...and if you choose synthetic chemistry you will be standing at one of these all day. It's actually very physically demanding at times, but it never gets boring. You discover/make something new almost every day, and are constantly learning. You also handle cool shit, especially if you do organic chemistry. I am using rocket fuel, making psychoactives, and generally playing with badass shit all day. I don't see myself getting bored any time soon.

The downside - job market is not really great. You hear spooky stories about people finishing their PhD and going on unemployment a little too often. If I had to make a financial decision for myself, I think that would factor in quite heavily. But if I can earn enough money to get by, I would be happy to continue in this field... it's a lot of fun.

As for the guy talking about marine science - I actually took a paper randomly, and got a little taste for what it is like. Was the only field trip that I got through my entire undergrad, we went to a beach that was mysteriously awash with dead shellfish, did surveys and that kind of thing. Seems like a cool career, but I'm too afraid of the sun to see myself in that field. There is a thread here that might interest you:
http://forum.grasscity.com/science-nature/932902-ask-marine-biologist-anything.html

 

Hah well there were plenty of columns in there before I cleaned up. I like to hang them on the back rack to dry out, and then kinda forget them and they stay there til someone desperately needs one. Some say that's being lazy, but I call it being productive and focusing on more important matters It's pretty cool that you've been let loose in a lab already. I thought you were in a peptides lab, what are you columning?

Haha, I don't have a PhD yet so I don't think I'll be much use to you. I read quite a few blogs and the subject of employment comes up a bit, but I've always kind of held on to the idea that I wont have to face employment for another few years. Happy to chime in where I can. I am very much interested in drug development, although my current research is a classical natural product synthesis project, and lends a lot more to hardcore organic chemistry rather than drug discovery.

 

Well everyone in my lab including myself has a natural product total synthesis project - ie. building a complex molecule that has been isolated in milligram quantities before and has some interesting properties (usually medicinal). For example mine exhibits anti-cancer properties, but has only ever existed as a 4mg smear of oil in the research lab where it was isolated from a batch of seeds. I hope you don't mind but I'm not going to mention the specifics, to preserve my anonymity. Not only that but it (and everyone else in my group's molecule) possesses an unprecedented structural motif, and that's where the chemistry becomes interesting. Organic chemistry projects don't always have to be like that though, some guys in our building are making polymers for antifouling paints, there's a guy working on a really cool pesticide molecule and what's even sweeter is that the government are funding his project, in the interests of conservation. Some people have what I consider to be boring projects, where they pump out analogues of a certain thing which is not challenging synthetically, and they ship off about 30 different analogues and wait patiently for bioassay results.. not my cup of tea really, but that's a true medicinal chemistry project and parallels what goes on in the R&D of pharma companies.

If you want to know what I do, I'll be happy to give you a summary. I haven't been in the lab for ages and I miss it, so the opportunity to blab about chemistry is something I can't possibly pass up. How to do natural product synthesis? Get a little creative.. I guess. One of the most famous total synthesis chemists, K. C. Nicolaou refers to it as "the art of total synthesis", and it rings true when you read some of the higher-tier publications. Really, its just a doing a complex puzzle blindfolded, with pieces that you don't have yet, and may not necessarily ever find.

In the interests of making your project good, you tend to choose the most elegant pathway first (based on your retrosynthetic plan), but rarely will you be so lucky as to travel far down the first proposed synthetic pathway before meeting a brick wall. That's all part of the fun, though. Organic chemistry can be an exciting rollercoaster or a miserable landslide... depending on how your NMRs are looking that week. I learned pretty fast that you should really abandon hope when you set out on a synthetic route, and look upon it as more a way to find out what doesn't work. That's really what fills your thesis, at the end of the day. But it can be really upsetting sometimes when you're so close to a goal and a simple reaction that should be working is just stirring around in the round bottom flask for a week, seemingly mocking you as it stirs away at ridiculous temperatures still doing nothing.

There's always a honeymoon period when you start the actual synthesis, because you're pouring out 200mg of 100% pure starting material from a Sigma bottle, and more often than not, doing pretty simple reactions. Pretty soon, though, you're down to 20mg of relatively precious stuff that you've made over however many steps, and you're trying something completely experimental. At the end of every reaction is a purification, which is basically always carried out with flash chromatography on silica gel. It's tedious at the best of times. When the world really wants to fuck with you, you'll discover that your product doesn't like silica, and decides to degrade while you're purifying it.. or degrades spontaneously in air or in the fridge. I had that fun all last year, working with some unstable hydrazines. So then you're trying to purify stuff without letting it touch too much silica, doping your silica with triethylamine which smells like someone just slapped you in the face with a decaying fish, and keeping everything cold when you are trying to vac off solvent... which means you're gonna be using ether, and as much as I love ether, nothing quite describes the headache you get after inhaling the stuff all day long.

At the end of a purification, if you get through it, is the moment when you run down to the basement with your purified mystery compound in an NMR tube... and the anticipation of loading up the spectra. If you've gotten past the simple reactions, this moment will be full of dread as you know that as soon as the spectra is on your screen you're gonna see something that can't possibly be what you want. Then spending the rest of the day trying to figure out what went wrong.. it's never simple, sometimes plain mystifying, and rarely a success story.

But, after a year or two of this on a daily basis, maybe by statistical chance alone, or perseverance... you make your natural product. Less ideally, you arrive at the conclusion that your product simply can't be made. The ideal scenario is you will have incorporated novel, or perhaps even completely new chemistry, which you will be able to publish a paper on. Synthesizing your natural product is also a fairly sure-fire way to get a publication too, and it's always nice to show off elegant synthesis in a "look, we've made it!" paper.

One thing about chemists, they're all alcoholics. So the great thing about doing chemistry is that even minor successes like getting a reaction to work that has failed for a month will result in some form of intoxication. There is nothing quite like seeing a bunch of adults jumping up and down and hi-5ing over a spectrum printout. I can only imagine what someone walking by would think of it. But yes, it is a passionate yet punishing discipline, I would recommend it only as far as to say you have to really want to do it to involve yourself. I don't believe it is a bountiful career in terms of making money, or even making headlines (damn biologists get all the attention), but there is nothing else like it, and I don't want to be doing anything else.