Preventing errors on an industrial scale

‘Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong’ is a classic aphorism. It applies just as well to chemistry as it does to other, less scientific endeavours. Your laptop computer will run out of battery life during an important job interview, or you’ll reach in the lab refrigerator and find out that the n-butyllithium you carefully titrated last week has been used up by your good-for-nothing labmate. Worse yet, it is almost guaranteed that, no matter how careful you are, you too will end up making errors in the laboratory.

I don’t think I’ve made very many serious errors in the lab, but I do remember the time in graduate school that I was performing a crucial lithiated alkynylation to an aldehyde, and I failed to put in the alkyne. That was particularly grim, not least because of the many hours I had spent making the aldehyde. That I had decided to run this reaction in the middle of the night surely had nothing to do with my error. I also remember that I discovered this mistake about three seconds after I closed my eyes in bed, and that I tried to make up for it by rushing back to the lab to start the laborious aldehyde synthesis in the early morning hours all over again.

When you’re manufacturing chemicals on the hundreds of kilogram scale, you don’t run crucial reactions in response to panicked mistakes. Instead, you work within a system that is designed to prevent basic errors. We’ve all made stoichiometry miscalculations in our laboratory notebooks, but I bet you’d make fewer of them if you had someone else independently check your working. I’d bet even more errors would be caught if your labmate’s signature had to be on your lab notebook page before you ran your reaction.