4 posts tagged “chemistry”

Xkcd is usually pretty good -- but this is genius.

Orbitals

Happy Friday!

This weekend I came across the story of Larissa Schuster, who was convicted of killing her husband of 20 years (they were going through a divorce) by knocking him out (with a stun gun, chloroform and the aid of a lab assistant), and dumping him into a 55-gallon drum and pouring hydrochloric acid on him.  The husband’s half-dissolved (err… the top half) remains were found a few days later in a storage facility she had rented.

My first thought was: I can’t believe that someone could do that do another person.

My second thought was:  With all the poisons and neurotoxins around an average laboratory, all you could come up with was a 55-gallon drum and HCl?  Seriously?

My third thought was:  Maybe I should have thought twice before eating that cupcake one of the minions brought me this morning…

*explanation: when I first worked for DuPont, their corporate slogan was "Better Living Through Chemistry" -- which made me think of the title of this post.  Really, I don't endorse killing through chemistry.  Or any other means.  Except maybe kindness...

(Wow – work’s been way too busy – so much it’s impeding my blog-life, which is pretty much unacceptable)

Anyway, I’m sure you all felt it.  That air of anticipation that comes around the beginning of October.  People opining on who they think the real contenders are – and of course who are unworthy pretenders.

Academy Award nominations? No.
Upcoming Presidential primaries? Nah.

Of course, it’s the big speculation on who wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry!  In my biz, there are really only two that matter – Chemistry and Physiology/Medicine.  Physics has become so arcane, I can’t usually figure out what it was for.  Literature and Economics?  Please.  And the Peace Prize?  Not even awarded in Stockholm for goodness sake.

When the winner is announced, all of us (and by “us” I mean research types whether academic or industrial) go through pretty much the same questions.

(Questions to which the answer is almost invariably “no”)
Is it me?
Is it a friend of mine?
Is it someone that I worked for?

(Questions to which the answer may occasionally be “yes”)
Is it someone I’ve met?  
Is it someone who someone I know worked for?
Is it someone that is famous enough to have stories (usually bad ones) told about them behind their back?

• My first brush with Nobel-fame came in 1987 when I was working as a chemist at DuPont (Better Living Through Chemistry) and my boss (a young woman with a newly minted PhD) came in and exclaimed, “Cram won the Nobel!”  I was like, “Great!  Who’s Cram?”  She seemed a little annoyed that I didn’t remember that she had been a grad student for Donald Cram at UCLA.  Pedigree matters to a lot of scientists

• In 1991, I met Kurt Wuthrich, who would later share the 2002 Nobel.  It was pretty clear that he thought that he should have won the Prize already and why was the Committee taking so long to realize it.  After he left, we walked around for weeks mimicking his Swiss accent saying, “Dere are always deese problemz with dee speckstrum…” (Translation: there are always these problems with the spectra… meaning typical artifacts).  I met him again at a meeting in 1995.  He didn’t remember me, so I made more fun of him when he left.

Linus Pauling

• I think my favorite though was getting a chance to shake hands with Linus Pauling when he made a swing through UNC when I was early in my grad career.  As the person that I think of as the founder of protein biochemistry, he won the Nobel prize in 1954 for his description of chemical bonds (if you are a musician, maybe it would be akin to getting to say hi to Beethoven).  Anyway, I’ve always thought he was a gobzillion times smarter than Watson or Crick, who've gotten to be a lot more famous.  Pauling also won the Peace Prize in 1962 for his advocacy to halt nuclear testing.  It was a great thrill to meet him.

Alas, all the questions had “no” answers this year – a guy by the name of Gerhard Ertl won the Prize in Chemistry for work on chemistry at solid surfaces.  Something I’ve never known anything about.

Ah well, there’s always next year.

Acura

Okay -- so I spend a decent part of each work day looking at, evaluating, thinking about, drawing and discussing molecules.  It's not only my job to decide what makes one "better" than another at what we'd like them to do, but I actually really enjoy it.  Science to me is all about managing uncertainty and everyday my colleagues and I make hypotheses (i.e. guesses) about why something works, or all to often doesn't work, the way you expect it to.  It's challenging, frustrating and fun all at the same time.

Veggie_table

So from my BS in Chemistry, to my PhD in Chemistry, I've always absorbed comments like, "Oh, I hated chemistry in school!" and you try not to notice the rolled eyes when you tell someone that you're a chemist.  (I haven't actually made anything for a long time, but you still get the looks.)

Terps_sports

Anyway, so three times in the last two days I came across non-work things that incorporated a chemistry theme in their ads or product.  The first was for an Acura maintenance program that uses elements from the periodic table to spell out their name.  Pretty cool.  The next was in a catalog that someone had at work and they offered a "periodic table" of vegetables.  Pretty clever.  The last was something else that made me proud to be an ACC alum, which was an arrangement of the sports at the University of Maryland in which each program was given a box like an element.  Nicely done!

Now, I doubt that chem-themed ads aren't going to replace spokesmodels or anything, but I was pleasantly suprised to see such a concentration of them... concentration, get it?  Oh nevermind....