Football Pain? Solve it with Solvent

A friend pointed me towards ESPN's recent interview with former Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman Tony Casillas. When asked about the recent hullabaloo regarding deer antler spray, Casillas reportedly answered: "That's nothing. We used to use this stuff called DMSO..."

DMSO? Dimethyl sulfoxide? Like, the polar aprotic solvent we all know and love from the Swern oxidation?

The very same.*

I hadn't realized that the compound had such a long history in medicine. Suppose I should have remembered hearing Breslow once talk about DMSO as his inspiration for the development of SAHA (vorinostat). Still, after the heated warnings I've always received from tox folks while handling DMSO stock solutions (Double gloves! Wipe up spills ASAP!), I'm hesitant to try it myself.

*A note of caution: I'm not endorsing rubbing DMSO on your balky knee or tennis elbow. You should always ask a medical professional before trying something like that. Please don't say "I read this on a blog..."

Educational #Chemophobia

Usually, I use my blog as a stump to protest the branding of my chosen field as "toxic," or somehow poisonously malevolent. It's not often that I have to fight against someone who misunderstands the value of chemical education in everyday life. But, c'est la vie.

In today's Washington Post Answer Sheet, Mr. David Bernstein, a nonprofit executive from Maryland, writes in to protest an apparent state mandate that "forces" his teenage son to take chemistry. I understand that local politics get messy, and I don't presume to know the full story for his particular municipality. But why must chemistry always serve as the punching bag for what's wrong in early education?

One of Mr. Bernstein's major arguments involves future potential careers for his son: since he won't grow up to be a scientist, why take chemistry?

Suppose we argued against other required subjects (as I did earlier on Twitter):

"Why must my son take Geography? Google Maps and Garmin will always be there, right?"

"History? Not when there's Wikipedia!"

"He shouldn't take math. He'll never be an accountant, and everyone has calculators"

Chemistry boring? Sometimes, but
it's also really important.

Those arguments sound pretty far-fetched. Also, most students don't really commit to a career in Junior High, and many change their minds by college, anyway. So why not a broad education?

Second, Mr. Bernstein argues against mainstream chemistry education as "all memorization." Well, I'll agree - there's a lot to take in that first go-around. But while elemental numbering, valence electrons, and balancing equations sound rote and boring up front, the trends are the critical information. What makes atoms bigger or smaller? Why are ionic (charged) and covalent (shared) bonds so different? What does acidic or basic really mean? Once mastered, these types of rational thinking - using data to read trends - show up in all sorts of other pursuits, from buying stocks to choosing a healthy diet.

Third, Mr. Bernstein believes that his son will "suffer through" chemistry, and that he will recall little information from the course. Mr. Bernstein argues that the opportunity cost of a "painful" chemistry year will prohibit his son from taking "...subjects where he can grow and put to use one day."

I contend that a background in chemistry prepares you for all sorts of life situations. Doctors measure blood chemistry (pH, LDL / HDL ratios, chemokines, liver enzymes) to diagnose patients. Construction workers and architects rely on material properties (phase-transition temperatures, modulus, compression) to inform their building decisions. Surface area, entropy, and several organic reactions underlie cooking. Chemistry shows you why you can't clean up oil spills with water, and why a pile of salt won't dissolve in WD-40. And wouldn't it be nice to understand what all those ingredients on food labels actually are?

Boring, painful? Maybe. But useless? Definitely not.

One more thing: there are ~90* naturally-occurring elements, and a total of 118 spots (not all filled!) in the Periodic Table. I didn't have to Google it, because I took middle-school chemistry.

*Update - I originally had 92, but a curious reader corrected me - Tc and Pm are radioactive, and thus unstable in nature. So, 90. Then Stu Cantrill wrote in that several more are found in pitchblende, so I raised it to 98. Several tweets and comments have suggested numbers ranging from 84 to 98. Thus, the dreaded tilde. Good to have so many chemists about!

**Update 2 - Here's Ash at Curious Wavefunction, and Derek at Pipeline. Also see Janet over at SciAm's "Doing Good Science."

"Post-America Depression"

An admittedly belated congratulations to Profs. Gurdon and Yamanaka, winners of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Though multiple media outlets covered the announcement, this time around I was primarily informed by blogs and coverage by the New York Times.

A commenter on Twitter alerted me that the Times, perhaps facing bad press in light of this huge multinational story, had removed certain lines from their article, sans correction. The quote, from Prof. Yamanaka, spoke of his tongue-in-cheek disorder "P.A.D.: Post-America Depression" (Yamanaka had worked at the Gladstone Institute in CA for three years, then returned to Japan). 

While originally cast as a witty aside, a bit of 'Google-fu' indicates he might have actually been feeling physical symptoms of depression upon returning to Japan's research culture in 1996.

Prof. Shinya Yamanaka, 2012 Nobelist
Credits: Chris Goodfellow, Gladstone | nobel.se

iCeMS Crosstalk Transcript - "[Yamanaka] couldn't wake up in the morning, and even thought of quitting research and going back to the clinical practice"

NY Times Bay Area Blog (2009) - "I almost died as a scientist"

NIH Record (2010) - "Non-existent were funds to hire. Yamanaka was virtually alone in the lab, cleaning cages"

Kyoto Prize lecture (2010) - "What was even more trying was that there were few people around me who understood what I was doing. I was working hard on the research of mouse ES cells at a university medical department, when my senior researchers suggested that I should try something different that would be of some value to medical science, even though they too found my research interesting. Then I began to feel down, eventually reaching the point where I began to think that I should give up my career as a researcher and return to a job as a surgeon where, even if I were clumsy, I could still be of some help"

Am I the only one who finds this intriguing, and even instructive for younger scientists? Here's an internationally-recognized researcher, winning a huge scientific prize, and he's baring his soul about nearly giving up his future success due to an unsupportive, intellectually unstimulating environment! 

In the Times' scrubbed quote, I see flashbacks: Einstein, sitting bored in his patent office. Feynman's near burnout at Cornell. Kary Mullis managing a bakery. Nobelists may be recognized for their acumen, but it's the emotional connections we workaday scientists imprint on to "muddle through" tough lab hurdles. By removing Yamanaka's quote, one removes that tiny bit of tarnish on the shiny gold prize medal - the human connection - making him less "real" for researchers everywhere.