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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Why were they working with an unauthorised potent neurotoxin? MIT didn't "permit" this, although you could ask how student supervision allows it to arise.

Is there some interesting aspect which danger aside might motivate this or was it just a dick move? Were they possibly motivated for bad reasons, seeking to commit harm?

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Dimethylmercury is (or was, at least historically) used as a reference material for nuclear magnetic resonance (a common analytical method used in chemistry):

https://sites.northwestern.edu/ohalloran/199hg-nmr-standards...

This MIT incident was in a chemistry building that has been in use since 1970, so it could have been accidental release of an old, unused container or sample tube of the material.

The wording of the announcements, sounds like a student synthesized it. Can't imagine why, hopefully it wasn't a fatal mistake.

  > "Can't imagine why"

"There's no point banning it, it's easy to make – let me show you. Hold my beer."

Thanks! 40+ years ago I worked in a marine biology lab as a dishpig for seawater analysis and we had fun times when the annual clear out found a gallon jug of benzene at the point of panic about benzene being replaced by toluene.

If the lab is going to check for trace benzene in the water, ideally you would have some pure material for reference purposes.

Put that in perspective against industrial quantities where a hardhat operator opens the hatch on a very full compartment of a chemical tanker, looking at their mirror image reflecting up from the surface of a few hundred tonnes of cargo a few feet below.

Which is then carefully sampled and delivered to a lab where they check for trace water in the benzene.

The synthesis attempt was not for this. It's unclear what they were attempting and it's impossible that they didn't know the stakes. Their lab develops fundamental organic methods.

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