WWWTP? Palmolive Edition

I happened upon this bottle in the store yesterday, and found the marketing statement quite curious:

Now wait just a minute...what does that even mean? Does a human contain "no unnecessary cells," or a delicious meal "no unnecessary ingredients?" Perhaps this is the Strunkian ideal* of chemophobic marketing:

"A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts."   - Strunk and White, The Elements of Style

So, what 'necessary' chemicals does Palmolive Free & Clear contain?

Source: Colgate-Palmolive 

So we have foaming agents, detergents, thickeners, stabilizers, fragrances, dyes, and water - a.k.a. every ingredient present in most dish soaps! 

This feels like Kraft Mac & Cheese redux. Please understand that I'm not against informed consumer choice, and I certainly support labeling transparency** and product safety. But this marketing slogan is at best meaningless, and at worst drags popular punching bag "chemicals" through the mud. Again.

At least it can wash off with Palmolive Pure + Clear - Contains Necessary Chemicals.

*Except, of course, that the authors of this dish soap piece seem to have omitted a verb.
**Next up: Chemplex (TM) brand butyllithium: Contains 95% random C-Li bonds (and fragrance!)

Nitration Surprise

(File under "Learn something new every day")

Boom goes the peptide!

For some light bedtime reading, I chose Life Technologies' Molecular Probes handbook, a 1,000-page opus of how to make anything and everything biological light up in brilliant hues of Texas Red or Cascade Blue. Flipping to Chapter 1, I quickly glanced at the very first scheme in the entire catalog, and did a double-take: tyrosine nitration...by tetranitromethane!

TNM: First time's the charm!
Source: Molecular Probes Handbook

Not to tread on Derek - who has a good thing going with his "Things I Won't Work With" tales - but doesn't this look like it should be grandfathered in to his list?

"Rule of Six" violation? Check. Potentially explosive byproducts? Check Check. A brief glance at the MSDS shows some of the more exciting Hazard Codes ("H330 - Fatal if Inhaled"), and the Merck Index (#9305) ain't much better: TNM "attacks iron, copper, brass, and rubber" and "Has been proposed as [an] irritant war gas."

Fun!

But, lest I lapse into my own fit of hypocritical chemophobia, I should point out that this compound is apparently 'par for the course' for stalwart chemical biologists - it's been used since the 1920s to label proteins, and a 1966 JACS article dubs it "stable, specific, and gentle." Even PubMed brings up >600 references, so I suppose my initial gut-check was a bit unwarranted - TNM looks OK when used in dilute solutions. But, I'd still say you should think twice before considering it for routine bench work.