organic chemistry lab courses in Pakistan

I've heard that some chemistry students in Pakistan have found it necessary
to forgo completing organic chemistry lab because of inadequate ventilation
(no fume hoods, just fans in the windows, with lots of contaminated air
piped back in), which was making them sick.

I was under the impression that one of the purposes of the development of
microscale organic chemistry lab courses was to vastly reduce the amount
of chemical contaminants in the laboratory air supply. I don't know, however,
whether the organic labs in Pakistan use the microscale approach.

So, here are two features, one (bad ventilation) that tends to make things
worse, the other (microscale quantities) that tends to make things better.
Assuming that one can't have good ventilation and microscale techniques at
the same time, which is better:
(1) bad ventilation and microscale quantities
(2) good ventilation and the old fashioned large quantities

Ignorantly,
Allan Adler
[Only registered users see links. ]

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Allan Adler <[Only registered users see links. ].mit.edu> wrote in message news:<[Only registered users see links. ].mit.edu>...


An additional information . Pakistani teaching labs use
semi-microscale approach. We were asked to separate solid mixtures
using 19th century techiniques, using a suitable solvent like benzene,
hexane or ethylacetate in large evaporating dishes to separate a polar
and a nonpolar constituent. The solution was kept infront of widows to
hasten evaporation, which took about about 15-20 minutes. In these 20
minutes the whole lab smelled of benzene or ethylacetate. There were
15 such experiments. It was a really a nightmare . Unfortunately you
can not "forgo" those courses. In one of the experiment we were given
alpha-naphthylamine ( perhaps banned in USA and UK) to analyse and
perform qualitative tests for nitrogen in it!! I found that
alpha-naphthylamine was taken from Merck bottle (it was manufactured
in Germany). Why does Germany still manufacture it? The only
precaution in English was "Avoid skin contact", the rest was in
German!
Even Indian laboratory texts have experiments involving alpha- and
beta- naphthylamines.