Ok. I’m polymerising ethene, and typically use between 10 and 0.2 mg of catalyst. The problems are:

• It takes an more than an hour to set up a reaction, including sorting out the glassware, setting up the computer, measuring up the catalyst, making up solutions and getting things stirring.


• It takes an hour to run a reaction.


• If a reaction goes nuts, I need to sit with it to drop ice into a waterbath to stop it blowing up. Which is boring.


• 0.2 mg of catalyst is fuck all of fuck all, so it’s easy to kill it off inadvertently.


• If a reaction produces nothing, you’re never quite sure if that’s because the catalyst isn’t really a catalyst, or because you’ve broken something – used a wet cannula, or left something provocative on the reactor that didn’t come off when you cleaned it. This is boring, because it’s very hard to accept a negative result.


• It takes an hour or two to clean up after a run. More if you’ve got frickin’ low molecular weight PE adhered to your glassware.

Summary: I can only really do one reaction a day if I want to be able to do anything else. If a reaction yields nothing (like today), it’s tempting to re-run it, especially if you think that the catalyst really should have been active. If it yields nothing again, then you’ve wasted a day, which is just lovely.

I’m bored of doing poly runs. Very very bored.