Okay guys, wanted to relay this from /r/sst about the mass spec on kevin's var. A redditor sent the mass spec to somebody with more chem experience and this is what they had to say.
" Hi Bob
This is really poor, I hope you didn't pay for this. It has been run on some pretty good apparatus but by someone who doesn't really know what they're doing.
HPLC-MS is a dual analysis where the HPLC separate various components which are then put through a MS to determine identity of all the components. On the first page of your analysis it says 'direct injection' this simply means the sample in solution is injected directly into the MS so there is no HPLC separation of components first. MS itself gives a signal for a molecule when it is ionised - this is absolutely not quantitative, so one molecule can easily be far more prone to ionisation than another - the MS can actually be tuned to optimise ionisation for one species over another. So to base the purity % on the MS data alone in this way is totally inappropriate. When I say 'far more prone to ionisation' i mean potentially several thousand times.
To explain each other page. Page 2 is the total count of all ions formed during the direct injection - it is clear from this that the sample was only injected between 0.4-0.8 minutes so these peaks are meaningless, really just an indication of how much sample was present over the 2 minute collection. Page 3 is the mass spectrum obtained from a single scan at 0.572minutes. Page 4 is a comparison of the mass for the sample peak for oxandrolone against the theoretical mass spectrum which would be obtained for its molecular formula - this helps confirm the likely presence of oxandrolone but gives no purity info. Page 5 is a completely misguided calculation of the purity which is totally illogical and has no basis whatsoever.
Page 3 shows the mass spectrum and this does confirm the likely presence of oxandrolone. However, all of the other peaks would require assignment to determine if they were other species or 'adducts'. But as I have said before, some of the tiny peaks may be major contaminants which don't ionise as strongly as oxandrolone - and further there could be any number of additional things which do not ionise at all.
Page 5 calculation shows the 'total ion count' (all ions in sample as on page 2), and the 'extracted ion count' for the masses of 307 and 613. Firstly the fact that the 307 does not follow the same peak shape as the total ion count makes me suspect there was external contamination in the tubing which was flushed through at the beginning of the experiment - this obviously makes any purity determination even less reliable. On page 3 mass 613 is assigned as 2M+1, this is simple an 'adduct' in the MS caused by specifics of ionisation and it is by no means a species present in your actual sample. However the values used for the purity calculation (0.879, 2.2, 11.4) are the abundances of the 307/613 ions and the total ion count - to use these for purity calculation in so far from correct it's hard to believe. Firstly it is completely wrong to compare ions in this way, secondly 307/613 are basically the same thing and finally why have the peaks at 290,359,491,778,939 been ignored.
So to summarise this experiment doesn't prove anything other than oxandrolone might be in the sample. I say might because all it really shows is a peak at 307, this could be due to anything which has the same mass. This isn't even as unlikely as it sounds, I once analysed a pesticide and something about it didn't look quite right - looking into it further showed it was in fact a different pesticide which just by coincidence had the same molecular weight. So if the source of oxandrolone is unreliable further MS work would need to be done to confirm the structure. In addition, I go back to my original point about other substances which could be in this sample which would not show up at all in MS - both chromium and lead are used in the synthesis and if these are not properly removed (as they would be under GMP) then it could be dangerous."
We aren't sure who the tester is but looking at some of the mass specs recently posted in this thread, the summary and intro pages look exactly like belfasts' and others with only the sample info changed. Waiting on the guy who sent the test to come back, but it looks like this could have been done by angus? Don't want to make accusations and maybe those sheets are widely used templates or something, but there it is guys.
