u/Imaginary-Treat-3463

Hey everyone!

I have noticed that Grignard reactions often use either THF or Et2O, but why the reactivity changes so much?

I know THF is string Lewis base but is it really just about basicity ? Or is it more about solubility, aggregation state, and shifting the Schlenk equilibrium?

Curious how folks who do a lot of organometallic work think about this, and if anyone has a solid reference that dives into the details. Thanks !

Before working in a well known lab, I had anticipated that people would be highly collaborative. Single paper had 6 to 7 authors and seminars were full of people.

But my perception has evolved after I joined it myself. When you actually ask for help with a protocol or try to figure out, how another lab got something to work, everyone suddenly goes vague and uses lines like, "oh, we just optimized it" or "you will figure it out." It drives me crazy that half the critical details never make it into the methods section, yet we're somehow expected to magically reproduce their results. I am not even talking about people guarding unpublished IP here- just basic knowledge sharing and protocol transparency within actual collaborations. The wild part is that everyone constantly complaints about the reproducibility crisis in science, but then turns around and makes reproducing basic experiments as unnecessarily difficult as possible. Has anyone else hit this wall, or have I just been unlucky ?