Question: Do you belive that you can reinvent chemistry?

Sebastian Cosgrove answered on 13 Mar 2019:

I do! If you look at my profile you will see how old the methods for doing chemistry in labs are. What we mainly use today (stirring things in flasks and round bottomed flasks) is what was invented hundreds of years ago. You wouldn’t use a candle as your primary light source now, so why do chemists still use 200 year old methods? What we need to do is understand how these new methods work, and really see how we can apply them properly. This way, more and more people will start to use them and chemistry will be ‘re-invented’!
My research focuses on flow chemistry, which is pumping around tubes instead of using flasks. The good thing about flow chemistry is you get much better control over your reaction conditions, and because of this it often uses a lot less energy and goes a lot quicker. It also means we can integrate a lot of automation as well, because computers can better control pumps than they can flasks – with this automation we can think about a host of new technologies and methods we can use as computers can work a lot quicker than us! Like I said in the chat earlier though, it will take a lot of time because infrastructure is so hard to change! It is changing though, slowly but surely!