Imagine thinking you'd killed yourself, and then breathing the intense sigh of relief when you realize you're bad at chemistry and you didn't manage to synthesize the compound correctly.
Plausible scenario from a comment in the science.org post linked in another thread:
> If the MIT student was doing some work with reactive stuff and mercury and got an unknown result well outside expectations out of the output they were expecting i can see them struggling through working out what it could be, coming to the conclusion Dimethylmercury was possibble as an accidental side product of what went wrong, and just pulling all the emergency handles to be safe. Given how nasty that stuff is that is exactly the kind of reaction to such a scenario you'd want someone to have.
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Note that it seems increasingly unlikely that it was actually synthesized.
Taken from https://emergency.mit.edu/
Imagine thinking you'd killed yourself, and then breathing the intense sigh of relief when you realize you're bad at chemistry and you didn't manage to synthesize the compound correctly.
The student could have just made it all up for some reason too.
Plausible scenario from a comment in the science.org post linked in another thread:
> If the MIT student was doing some work with reactive stuff and mercury and got an unknown result well outside expectations out of the output they were expecting i can see them struggling through working out what it could be, coming to the conclusion Dimethylmercury was possibble as an accidental side product of what went wrong, and just pulling all the emergency handles to be safe. Given how nasty that stuff is that is exactly the kind of reaction to such a scenario you'd want someone to have.