Molecules: You'd better learn to live with them.
Hydrazine, H2N-NH2 is the nitrogen analogue of hydrogen peroxide:
It's useful in the Gabriel synthesis of amines via phthalimide (or saccharin, oddly, but I'm not sure if hydrazinolysis works as well here).
In contrast to peroxide, hydrazine is a potent reducing agent and finds use in rocket fuel! Just last week, they used a hydrazine on the space shuttle.
It's also quite toxic - the famous chemist Emil Fisher used it and suffered from its toxicity, apparently. A classic use of a hydrazine is the use of 2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine to derivatize carbonyl compounds (to which it adds avidly). Much of the panic about alar was over its hydrazine moiety (and the possibility of hydrazine release upon decomposition).
Comments
Don't forget its use in Maxam-Gilbert reactions. Two decades ago I spent most of my bench time running these reactions to sequence genes from negative strand RNA virus.
Posted by: DNA pixie | August 24, 2007 9:27 AM
You can get some pretty good thrust out of the old H2O2 as well. T-stoff was a concentrated H2O2 solution. You can use it with a catalyst to generate stream and O2, or you can mix it with something for it to oxidize. The Me 163, for example, used T-stoff with C-stoff (methanol and today's molecule).
Posted by: MattXIV | August 24, 2007 12:54 PM