Candid Chemistry - 2014 Edition

Occasionally, readers will send me funny pictures that somehow capture the chemistry cultural zeitgeist. Here's some from the last few months:

At MIT, you can apparently chain your bike to a caffeine molecule!

Seen at UC-Berkeley: the ultimate chemical Doom tribute
(...to this guy)

Still frame from LeVar Burton's charity read of Go the #*&@ to Sleep
Does anyone recognize the (fake) elemental symbol poster? Geordi would never approve.

Attn, Chemjobber: from Austria, a promotional poster extolling the virtues of chemical employment!
(and a hip song to go with it!)

Heartfelt thanks to everyone who sent one in. Keep 'em coming!

(seearroh_AT_gmail)

Strange Brews

While leafing through the latest magnum opus by Prof. Phil Baran and his Super Group (Nature, 2012, 492, p.95), I came across this playful graphic* near the bottom of page 4:

Source: Nature 2012 | Baran group, Scripps

Yes, that's right: Phil's "toolkit" chemistry for site-selective radical additions works in buffer, cell lysate, or oolong tea. Sounds like we need a few more entries in B.R.S.M.'s "Conditions You'll Never Try" post!

Mmm, delicious solvent...
Source: forbes.com

Perhaps a story I tossed out in his Comments section bears repeating: I once attended a conference where Profs. Paul Wender and Kazunori Koide spoke on alternate days. Wender went first, and mentioned in passing that one of his group's specialties (I think it was Rh [2+2+2], but correct me if you know otherwise...) could be performed in beer. Not to be outdone, Dr. Koide called his group the following morning, and arranged a hasty trial of his transition-metal detecting fluorescent sensor in Starbucks coffee.

Escalation followed. By the end of the conference, everyone had rung up their labs to try ever more exotic solvents, ranging from wine to paint thinner, then finally to whiskey. As explained in Adam Rogers' fantastic 2011 piece "Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus," this aged, distilled melange of organic compounds should foil up all but the most robust reactions; I'm fairly certain the reaction - another metal-catalyzed cyclization - still performed around 40%. Not too shabby.

*Just noticed that Bethany Halford beat me to it, at least as far as the tea!

Chicken Chemophobia

A recent New York Times Op-Ed spot made the rounds late last night on Twitter. Full of inflammatory language, it seemed wholly bent on scaring the heck out of anyone reading it. The title - "Arsenic in Our Chicken?" - didn't exactly calm me down.

Is this in my chicken? Only very, very little
Credit: slashfood.org

Well, I'm a scientist, so let's look at this rationally. First things first: here are links to the two papers referenced in the study, one from Environmental Science and Technology (ACS), and one from Science of the Total Environment (Elsevier). (Editor's Note - Whenever a columnist feels pressed to validate his opinion with the words 'published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal,' I turn on the skepticism). 


In both papers, analytical chemists take a peek at feather meal, a poultry industry byproduct, for compounds you might expect from factory farms: antibiotics, stimulants, and antihistamines. A surprise dark horse was encountered in arsenic, which apparently caught everyone so off guard that they required a full second paper to adequately discuss it. 


Glancing quickly at both journals' major tables, it's clear we're talking small amounts here: parts per billion (ppb), which for EST means ng / g, and for STE ug / kg. To put this in perspective, let's imagine we had a swimming pool, which we filled with 1000 L (~270 gallons) of water, which will weigh 1000 kg (density of water = 1 g / mL @ room temp). Now, what's a ppb for this scale? One milligram of material, or about what you'd add if a snowflake fell into your pool.

Better start eating....
Source: Home of Science Wonders

Overall, the article smacks of rampant chemophobia and fear-mongering. While the individual compounds, in acute (high) doses might be cause for concern, the detected values aren't near that much. The LD50 (oral, mouse) for arsenic, the value at which half of tested lab animals die, is 145 mg / kg; the maximum arsenic detected in feather meal = 4 mg / kg! This leap of logic contains an even more far-fetched premise: you'd have to eat two pounds of feathers just to take in that much!


Remember: infinitesimally tiny amounts of several "bad" substances float by you every day, but you don't often see people dropping dead.


Maybe that's the reason that this NYT reporter buries his lede - a quote from his source, Dr. K. Nachmann, an author on both papers: "We haven't found anything that is an immediate health concern." 


And look, now I've gone and buried it, too.


(Update, 12:09 4/5 - Commenters on Twitter point out that a topic I did not address - detection of banned antibiotics - could be cause for concern. I agree with that point)