An episode while working on baeocystin and norbaeocystin

Here is the only thing I have written about #psilocybin, #baeocystin and #norbaeocystin while in #graduate #school at Ann Arbor, #Michigan in the #1960s. This is from my latest #book, "#My #Life & #Rollercoaster #Career" #published in #2018. I thought my colleagues and friends might want to read it:

"I must relate one little episode close to the end of my #doctoral #research which caused me a big concern. After spending many months #growing #fungal #tissue and building up enough of the #mycelium, freeze-dried, for #extracting the psilocybin #analogs, I almost had to start the process all over. There were at least three or four of these analogs, with #baeocystin in the highest concentration, followed by #norbaeocystin and then others. These compounds were isolated by separating them with #column #chromatography (a separation and analytical technique that separates the compounds by using an adsorbent column in a glass tube which holds on to them at different degrees of firmness when they are pushed down the column by a solvent and emerging one at a time at the bottom). It was at the final stages of my doctoral research. The solutions collected now contained only one major chemical each, which is concentrated by evaporation under vacuum from maybe 100 cc (milliliter) down to a couple of cc. At this stage, the solution would be concentrated enough for the #crystal to form, especially when refrigerated. I had no problem with the baeocystin solution, because I had it in a 10 cc beaker that was not that difficult to handle. And I had at least 2 cc of it. But with norbaeocystin, I got the solution down to less than 1 cc (1 teaspoon contains 5 cc) and while I was trying to transfer it into another beaker, I knocked it down, and the whole liquid spilled on the lab bench. Fortunately, it was such a small amount it did not spill over the bench top. And as I always kept my bench clean, there was no contamination by other chemicals that I needed to clean up either. Consequently, I was able to recover most of it by soaking the liquid up with filter paper, washing (i.e., extracting) it off the filter paper with a solvent 3 or 4 times and then re-evaporating off the solvent. Eventually, I did get 2 mg of the compound and was able to determine its chemical structure with that amount. That was quite a scare. Just imagine spending months to grow enough fungal tissue to go through the extraction and isolation process all over again!