The Ruthinian 1 - Ruthin School

The Ruthinian 6
heated debate from the floor and the students gave a creditable account of themselves against some strong
opposition.
Former student Jonnie Jones has undergone training prior to entering Sandhurst following a super
performance in the BAR tests. He has joined the REME (TA) 119 Recovery Battalion based at Prestayn
and undertook his phase 1 training at Donnington learning to be a soldier before Sandhurst. He passed the
demanding tests with distinction and has moved on to the next phase; many of his contemporaries on the
course did not complete this phase.
Year 12 chemists Martin Wu, Jessie Cheng, Fanfan Meng , Ingrid Romero de Jager , Bethany
Hunt and Antoine Zhang were among 100 pupils from North Wales and the North West of England
who accepted the invitation to synthesise aspirin at the School of Chemistry in Bangor University.
They took part in ChemPharma. The multi-step synthesis was particularly challenging since they
only had a couple of hours to get the job done and also check the purity of their product against
commercially available samples. The experiment set was similar to one of the experiments conducted by
first year undergraduates. Although it was not a competitive event the Ruthin School team shone through
with their competent approach and were the only school to finish all of the tasks. The day was concluded
with a lecture about the career opportunities available to chemistry graduates and students were surprised
to see that most vocations were outside the chemical industry!
The same group attended a workshop in the lab and a presentation from Dr Gareth Jenkins, director of
projects at AMRI, the American pharmaceuticals giant, about the role chemists play in getting drugs to
market. On the second day Dr Robert Nash of Phytoquest gave a presentation on the discovery of new
medicines from plants and micro-organisms. The aim of the event was to give students an understanding of
how the pharmaceuticals are made and also an insight into the amount of analysis and testing work that
goes on before a drug can be made available to the public.