” I’d call for all the chemists who’ve ever worked with a hexanitro compound to raise their hands, but that might be assuming too much about the limb-to-chemist ratio.”

Organic chemist Derek Lowe has another edition of "Things I Won't Work With." 

This post includes a description of how the organic chemist goes about deciphering compound names, which makes it worth a look if you like language.  He also gets in a reference to Verdi opera, incidentally.

I hope he writes a book called "Things I Won't Work With" someday… I would pre-order it NOW.