Cholesterol

I lot of people hate Organic Chemistry – and this may be grounds for defining me as a nerd – but I think it’s actually kind of cool.  Like in lab this week we took olive oil, which is an unsaturated fat, and mixed it with cyclohexene and palladium to turn it into a saturated fat!  That’s like the kind of thing that scientists do in real life, not sophomore biology students in a lab.  One week we built this crazy contraption of various glass tubes to distill a mixture of cyclohexane and toluene.  One week we separated the components of an Excedrin tablet; when we were done we had aspirin, acetaminophen, and caffeine in three separate test tubes!  Anyway, yesterday I had my second Orgo test and it wasn’t even that terrible, which is surprising considering I spent the night before constructing cholesterol from my molecular model kit instead of memorizing addition reactions of alkenes.

Cholesterol!

In other news, biology is awesome, which I will expound upon in a future post.