That's true, but in and of itself, it's less toxic to humans than ethanol is. It degrades in the environment quite readily, as well.

If we were looking for a chemical to deploy at scale to clean up PFAS in existing environments, we could do much worse.

It’s a carrier. It introduces whatever is in it to your bloodstream.

Have heard that many times, but in grad school it was determined orthogonally to any funded/published project, with n>3 subjects of various skin phenotypes, that many super-potent small molecule compounds were not active topically in DMSO even at 100-10000x doses regardless of polarity... Read between the lines of course. Would not trust safety to that observation with any non-fun chemicals but still.

Unrelatedly, microwave assisted reactions in DMSO solvent wete found to have some totally gross failure modes that were a pain to clean up and got banned in the lab

During my masters i used DMSO as a carrier for various lab experiments. The general consensus was to avoid skin contact with it.

There are pharmaceutical preparations that use it to carry across the skin.

Was thought for a while to have anti-inflammatory effects itself.

Ethanol works as an absorption enhancer too.

This.

I once had a long-running (weeks) experiment that used DMSO as a solvent. Early on it was realized that the DMSO was degrading all non-glass rubbers and plastics in the chemical "circuit", which began to sag like an old TinkerToy structure. Had to rebuild/rerun with parts that were resistant to DMSO.

What else would happen to it?

I dunno.. that's why I'm asking.

From my understanding, when a solution like DMSO with PFAS enters our blood stream it gets highly dilute. Solvation binding of solvent (DMSO) and the solute (PFAS) now has to compete with binding from all sorts of other proteins, fats, carbohydrates, etc.

In this incredibly dilute state, the previous mixture of molecules now spreads out and gets taken up by different tissues. The tissues that take up the compounds depends in the molecular properties of the compound in question, so something like PFAS which are highly lipophilic (iirc) meaning fat soluble, they will be taken up by cells pretty readily as they can easily cross the lipid bilayer membrane but will be stored in adipose tissue and continue impacting those cells and possibly be slowly released over time to impact the organism systemically. This of course will depend on initial dose concentration, duration of exposure, adioposity of the organism, along with a multitude of other factors.

The study of how compounds circulate in this way is a subfield of pharmacology known as Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, and Excretion (ADME)

To be fair to the op - in chemistry well behaved means - it is more stable than nitroglycerin, less reactive than fluorine and less toxic than dimethylmercury.

Aka - won't kill you outright if you are just properly careful.

Sounds like how Australians supposedly call a box jellyfish sting “uncomfortable”

I think they meant well behaved in the sense that it isn't highly reactive - e.g. doesn't explode in contact with air. Not so much what it does to humans.

We're talking about fluorine chemistry here, so things get kind of extreme.

"Extreme" is when you have elemental fluorine. Vs. nice, stable fluorine compounds & salts. This situation involves only the latter.

Well that's the problem, right? The more stable the substance you're trying to degrade, the more intense the conditions or chemicals you need. Teflon is inert as a rock, so if you for some reason needed to dissolve it in acid then you have to reach deep into the realm of impracticality and pull out demonic reagents like chlorine trifluoride or trihydridoboron.