The author replies to Luberoff

Dr. Luberoff's letter serves as a challenge to those of us in academia to continue to make the laboratory experiments relevant to our students. Personally, I will try to keep this in mind; however, I see several major challenges to the implementation of Luberoff's proposal. The first is finding a reaction whose rate is appropriate at accessible temperatures to give reasonable variations in yield during a single lab period. The esterification reaction we used is not appropriate in this regard. The second is controlling the variables with sufficient precision and accuracy. For example, small changes in temperature can lead to large changes in rate; I would not want this to be overly challenging from a technical perspective to the students. Additionally, it is a challenge to design and implement an analytical scheme that would allow determination of yield, conversion, and purity by several hundred students. Finally, there is an emotional-educational problem. It is potentially frustrating for students who will have poor yields because of where they happen to fall on the response curve described by Luberoff. We have designed our esterification with several additional surprise esters that also have easily recognizable odors.

With these caveats, the goals described by Luberoff are well worth the effort that would be required to implement this experimental design. The organic chemistry laboratory would be a good place in the curriculum to introduce it. I look forward to seeing someone rise to this challenge put before us.