I’m Doctor John Moses. I’m climbing Wales’ highest mountain. Going to head up there and
when we get to the top we’re going to make a molecule called cisplatinum.
It’s an inorganic complex and it’s used clinically to treat many forms of cancer very
successfully. Well my group and I thought we’d have an
adventure weekend and we thought let’s combine it with our passion for chemistry and the
outdoors and when we get to the top of Snowdon we thought let’s do something quirky and
make a molecule to show how easy chemistry is to do anywhere.
I have lots of family members who had cancer, been affected by cancer, my own mother passed
away from cancer and a lot of my research group’s family have been affected by cancer.
So we think it’s a worthy cause and it gives you some inspiration to do the science.
Okay not too bad, a bit wet though. Well, we chose cisplatinum because it’s
fairly simple to make because it’s rather a simple molecule and we can make it in water,
and as you can see from this weather that becomes a bonus. Whereas lots of other organic
molecules are sensitive to water so combining water and chemistry is not always good, it
can be good fun. It was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century but became involved
in cancer therapy in the late ‘70s. And it’s been very successful, it just shows
that something quite simple can have a huge effect on society, so that’s really why
we chose that molecule. And also because some of the organic natural product based molecules
are so complicated to make and we’d probably be here several weeks making them, so we can
get cisplatinum out in a couple of hours hopefully, maybe less.
We chose Snowdon because I’m Welsh, from North Wales. I’ve spent a lot of time up
here as a young man, a young boy even. And I love this countryside I wanted to take my
group up to somewhere which is very familiar to me, so it’s quite personal to me, as
is the chemistry, so we chose Snowdon as a great location.
We’re on top of Snowdon the highest point in Wales.
How does it feel? Great! A little bit cold, but great.
It’s pretty comfortable in here. We’re just setting up the experiment and
James and Sally, as you can see in the tent, are setting up the equipment ready, so they’re
organised so they can get straight into it and not fumble around. Chemistry in the clouds,
absolutely. I think it’s the highest chemical reaction done in Wales I’m guessing, I don’t
think this has ever been done before. At the moment we’re just dissolving the
starting material which is potassium tetrachloroplatinate. We’re making a molecule called cisplatinum.
It’s an inorganic compound and here’s a structure of it, well a molecular model
of it even. So there’s the platinum, the metal at the centre of the complex. And here
we have two chlorides and two ammonia ligands. So the chlorides are cis to each other, that
means they are the same side, and the ammonia, the two ammonia groups are also on the same
side hence ‘cis’ the same sides. And this is it, quite a simple molecule, square planar.
The first step is the addition of a saturated solution of potassium iodide.
Brilliant, just proud of my students you know that they can do chemistry in the most extreme
environments. Pretty uncomfortable, I’m not going to lie.
It’s pretty stony under here we should have brought a cushion with us.
Okay we’re dipping it in hot chocolate because this is the hottest thing we have up here,
we want to speed the reaction up a little bit.
Here we should see the ammonia is displacing two of the chloride ligands.
Lighten my load for the way down. Thanks very much, that’s very kind of you.
Thank you Sir. There you go, let’s see your famous face.
People have been quite generous, on the way up we’ve had a lot of donations off some
very nice people and a lot of nice people have donated on our website too, so got to
thank everybody. Yeah really, really good. Okay so this is the final compound here, this
is cisplatinum. And there’s quite a lot of it as well. Excellent yield.
What’s next? What’s next? Well I think we’re going
to do stage two. We’re going to have to do some more chemistry somewhere a bit more
extreme: maybe higher up or maybe lower down, let’s see.