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Robbie82
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Registered: 13-9-2016
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palladium catalysts
Hi there!
A bit late, but I would like to give my tip abot palladium catalysts, as discussed above in the discussion.
I think that good solutions can be found here: http://www.faggi.it/eng/palladium-catalysts.html .
Do you khow this company? What is your opinion about?
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DieForelle
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I admit I started skimming about 1/2 way through but maybe no one else mentioned this: the cost of reagents might be skyrocketing in the US because of
shrinking economies of scale. I guess there will always be a baseline of academic research, but in the industry and pharma commercial segments, I bet
there's been a shrinkage of the amt. of research conducted in the US. Just from what I can tell living in Northern Delaware, even in the last 10
years there's been quite a few closures of facilities that do that kind of work. It makes me glad I got out of it when I did...I could see which way
the winds were blowing. A lab where I did pharma research is closed; a friend of a friend who did paint/pigment chemistry had his job moved to
somewhere in the midwest about 6 years ago and then completely outsourced overseas more recently.
Also nobody pays list price. A few years I wanted a certain rare detergent-like molecule for some research I was doing. A friend was getting his PhD
in biochem at Berkeley and I jokingly asked him if he could get it for me. He said no way, his PI would kill him if he found out. But I had him
check their internal pricelist, it was roughly 60% of what the price on the Sigma website was.
[Edited on 17-9-2016 by DieForelle]
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Scalebar
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Quote: Originally posted by RareEarth  | I believe the reason is entirely due to purity.
There is a big difference between 99.8-99.9% purity, and 99.999% purity, and so on. This difference is irrelevant for amateur chemists, but when
you're in research labs, that small bit of purity can make a huge difference. |
It's as much the characterisation of impurities as the purity itself that counts - and costs.
If you're looking at something like the role of AMP in a particular enzyme reaction the slightest trace of ADP can completely screw your results and
lead to several years work being a case of barking up the wrong tree and a students whole PhD being put at risk.
I do order a lot from Sigma but I also order from around a dozen other companies, we shop around for our chemicals. Some of the costs do stagger me
though - I get a bit uppity when I have to spend a few hundred quid on what looks like a totally empty phial but that's nanograms for you.
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Dr.Bob
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It is odd to me how some chemicals can be 10 times the going rate at Aldrich, and other chemicals are cheaper there than any other source. If you can
access emolecule.com or any of the other sites for comparing chemical prices, that data can be helpful, but sometimes companies hide their profits in
fees and "shipping", "handling", or "hazmat" fees, as if they never knew that shipping chemicals was pricey or that acids need to be packed special.
But Aldrich did have overall better customer service and quality in the past, not as sure now, since I order fewer things from them.
I will agree that the chemical research industry in the US is shrinking fast, and is likely a fraction of what it was 10 or 20 years ago. My
previous employer started outsourcing things about 20 years ago, then really ramped it up in 2006, and we started worrying. In 2008 they cut over
half of the R & D staff, then cut the rest over the last 6 years here, now the site is empty. That used to be over 1000 scientists, at least 200
were research chemists, more in "D", not sure how many. Completely coincidentally (according to management), they started an R & D center in
China about 2006, which has produced little other than mostly fabricated data and industrial espionage since then, IMHO. But no, I am not bitter...
Unfortunately, this has been the trend since 2008, and almost half of the chsmists that I know from R & D are now either unemployed/retired (most
around 50, so hard to get a new job), working for much lower paying jobs, or moving to keep up with a job.
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Texium
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Well... that's great to hear as someone aspiring to become a research chemist.
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Dr.Bob
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Not trying to be a downer, but it comes easy as an old grumpy person. But if you believe the stories about the shortage of STEM workers, you are
living in the past, right now. In 1970-1980's the research area was great, then around 1990, the market for scientist was bad again for several
years, but it boomed in 2000-2004, as pharma companies tried to grow to take advantage of new biology, genetics, and more. The problem now is that
many companies have decided that R & D is a waste, easier to make money via price hikes, fraud, banking and finance, litigation, marketing, and
other ways that don't take 10+ years to produce a payback. Most CEO's have fled to non-extradition countries by then or have been sacked once their
short term gains stop working.
I suspect that in 10 years it will cycle back, as China becomes more expensive, baby boomers retire, and Trump moves all the jobs back to the US
(NOTE: Sarcasm present for those who can't see humor online). But if I were looking for a career now, I would tend towards engineering (even
chemical engineers are doing well right now), pharmacy school (a PharmD is a great alternative to PhD in organic and the pay is much better), computer
science, and business school. Speaking foreign languages is also good, Spanish, Chinese are much more useful than the French and German I learned
(since all the "good" chemistry was published in those languages back in the old days...).
But the pharma industry is not likely to ever be as big as before in R & D, at least not until the system figured out how to reward that more than
price hikes and bribes to regulators. But there is no way to know what will happen in 10 or 20 years. When I started, chemists were treated well,
hired for a lot of money, had secure jobs, and were not all consider Breaking Bad want-a-bees. There is no easy way to know what jobs will be there
in 10 or 20 years, but if you know science, math and engineering, it should all be useful then, just never know what the supply and demand will be.
Right now graduate schools are creating 3000 PhD's in Chemistry a year but there are only 1000 jobs for them. You do the math. But most get jobs
in related areas, or find that they like something different. The knowledge that you learn is always there and often useful, but that does not mean
that you will find a career in chemistry.
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Texium
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Thank you for the advice. Regardless of what happens with the job market in the future though, I have my mind set on having a bachelor's and master's
in chemistry four years from now. After that I'll probably go for an organic PhD, possibly at a German university. By then maybe it will have "cycled
back," or maybe not, but it's what I'm passionate about learning, so that's what I'm going to do. I've never had any desire to be an engineer, not
even chemical.
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Schleimsäure
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These prices, showing up on the respective sites are usually not the prices most customers really pay. Universities, laboratories have individual
contracts with Sigma, VWR, Acros, Merck etc., they usually buy bigger amounts and pay much less than what is shown on the internet pages when not
logged in.
I found the "real price" is about a third to a fourth of what is displayed.
I bought from guys who have access to these individual contracts, it was always way less than the prices showing up on the online sites, e.g. from a
guy from Technical University of Dresden, Germany, Chemistry Department, 2,5 l of reagent grade VWR Diethly Ether was about 20 EUR (some 24 USD) or
one liter of 99,9% Benzene VWR 18 EUR.
[img]http://www.fotos-hochladen.net[/img]
Even when they order smaller quantities, they pay much less.
[Edited on 23-9-2016 by Schleimsäure]
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