Question: Have you ever got any out of the ordinary reactions in your experiments?

Matthew Camilleri answered on 13 Nov 2014:

It must be noted that the best things in life are mistakes. When I was working in Norwich me and a couple of other students were working on this reaction that we could not get to work. After a number of unsuccessful experiments we were trying to evaporate the solvent when I tripped a flask full of water over my reaction, at which point these tiny crystals, like small snow flakes were forming at the bottom of the flask.

That was the start of how we managed to gut our drug delivery device idea from, and after that we just decided to keep on working on these compounds. Crystals are really important in chemistry, since they give you a lot of information on size, and how they can interact with other molecules in their vicinity.