X-Files' Freezing Catalyst: Digging Deeper

A random Friday afternoon link at Chemjobber's place clued me into Mitch's post, about a random NMR encountered in an old episode of '90s sci-fi classic The X-Files. By some odd coincidence I, too, was watching the episode sometime in early April, though I didn't get my notes and pictures together in time. Alas.

(Before we get too hung up on the episode's premise - that in 1996 computational chemists at MIT were performing in silico calculations on a "catalyst" intended for rapid body freezing - let's also remember that this episode shows us protagonist Lisa, a wunderkind doctor / chemist / radiologist, strutting out of her lab sans questioning after her patient spontaneously combusts!)

Now, to the structure of "Compound X" - I took a close-up of the computer terminal Lisa's working on, right around 17:00. Yes, folks, that's 1,2-dichloro-1,1,2,2-tetrahelio-ethane. Carbon-helium bonds can't exist, shout the skeptics? Well, 1993 marked production of the first He@C60 clathrate (story here), and friend of the blog Henry Rzepa had a theoretical paper in 2010 discussing charge-shift C-He bonding. True, isolable heliocarbons are still at large, for anyone seeking a high-risk, high-reward tenure project [ducks].

Molecular modeling has always looked best on Macs. There, I said it.
Fox Broadcasting Corp.

In his post, Mitch calls attention to the NMR, though I found the second analytical spectrum more entertaining, since it has an actual reference printed across the top. Turns out the producers did their homework for this one - this spectrum is an example of spectral linear combination to quantify small amounts of metabolites in blood plasma - good call!

Real science! In a sci-fi show! Who knew?
Fox Broadcasting Corp.

Back to the (flimsy) plot: certain details are over-the-top cheesy, like the "hand scanner" Jason uses to access his facility - it looks like it was built from an old dot-matrix calculator screen screwed into a subway post:

State-of-the-art security for the "MIT Biomedical Research Facility"
Alternate caption: I spent a weekend building this prop, and they used it for 4 seconds of footage.
Fox Broadcasting Corp.

The writers have also presaged the warm-liquid-goo-phase meme from Austin Powers, as the antidote to the freezing catalyst seems to be epinephrine, DMSO, electroshock...and complete-body immersion in a human-sized deep fryer:

Warm liquid goo phase - Complete!
Fox Broadcasting Corp.

Spoiler alert - the concluding scene, a conflagration in the "MIT computer mainframe," would likely have set the Schrock and Buchwald groups back quite a number of years.


Finally, I'll leave you with a silly futuristic quote: "The technology to engineer [Compound X] is still 5, 10 years away..." Sorry, Dr. Lisa - it's been 23 years since this episode aired, and to my knowledge, we're still not making per-heliated small molecules. Maybe check back in another three decades.

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If you enjoyed this post, try some of the others in the Chemistry Movie Carnival from 2013.

Helium: Heavy Demand, Light Supply

From NPR News this morning, an intriguing news tidbit regarding the ongoing helium shortage:

"There's a global shortage of refined helium, and it could get worse if the [U.S.] government doesn't stay in the business of selling helium. To understand how we got here, we need to go back to nearly a century ago to World War I. Germany started building huge inflatable aircraft, and to keep up, the U.S. started stockpiling helium. That federal helium reserve is located outside Amarillo, Texas. [snip]

Hope you can hold off on that overnight 13C
Source: Bruker

. . .there are now 10 billion cubic feet of the gas stored in this federal reservoir — enough to fill about 50,000 Goodyear blimps. And it's all kept under a wide-open prairie dotted with coyotes and jack rabbits."

Hang on, let me catch up here. Federal Helium Program? Strategic reserve? I mean, I've heard about the shortage (SciAm, Science, Marketplace), but I didn't realize the situation had grown so dire. (On a micro-econ level, I had noticed that the Airgas truck doesn't stop by to refill the NMRs quite so often, and hourly billing rates are climbing...)

Most of the articles indicate private refineries and exploration firms will bear the supply brunt if Congress doesn't act. 

Perhaps #chemjobs' future isn't in fracking after all - ever thought about 'helium hunting?' Failing that, maybe you could "catch a falling star" and then list it on eBay.