A most unlikely question

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Saw Apollo 18 at the cineplex last night. It is filmed in a rough documentary style with “recovered” footage. My recommendation? It’s worth seeing on a big screen. Probably not a good date flick, though.  But that depends on your date.

While at a brew pub in Denver Friday night, I was summoned to a table of 20-something ladies who were obviously celebrating a girls-night-out before a wedding.  The bride-to-be, decorated with a pink faux veil, gestured for me to come answer a question. I walked over and bent down to hear her. It was then that she looked me in the eye and asked a question that most fellows rarely ever hear: “Can I pat your booty?” she said.  I looked at the table of a dozen well coiffed lovelies watching me for some sign of a reaction.  The guest of honor had a list of items in her hand that she needed to check off.  Seeing this, and noting the urgency with which she needed to complete the task, I grinned and “relented”.  At least she asked first. So I stood up, turned around and bent over a few degrees in supplication, and received the pat. With my brief role completed, I turned back around and bid them a farewell. Moments later I found my dinner party and sat down with them, satisfied that I had just participated in an important cultural rite of passage.  Hours later the wife unit assured me that this happened only because I appeared harmless. So it goes.

Eat Venter’s Dust

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I gave a talk in a morning I&EC session last thursday at the Denver ACS National meeting. During an interlude provided by a no-show speaker, a member of the audience began to quiz down a hapless speaker who earlier presented on the filtration of plasmids. The gentleman’s concern was this- We are continuing to develop conventional processing technology while fellows like Craig Venter are devising step-change techniques for genomic analysis and synthesis. People like Venter have their names mentioned in the same sentence with “synthetic biology”.  Why do we bother with the more primitive methods of research when the real action is with folks like Venter?

The inquisitive fellow was asking a rhetorical question to all of us. But the point he skipped over was the matter of intellectual property. He kept asking why don’t “we” just switch the paradigm right now and use such technology? Why continue with highly manual R&D?  The problem with his question was in the assumption that Venter’s technology was something that “WE” have access to. Venter’s technology does not automatically translate into a community tool. It is more like an item of commerce. In reality, this will likely represent a major uptick in productivity to the financial benefit of the intellectual property owners and licensees and their stockholders.

How the scientific workforce will fare is a different matter. Increased productivity usually means reduced labor per unit of output. I suspect that Venter’s technology represents a higher entry barrier to those who want to be in the market.  It may be that the outcome will be a broader range of diagnostic and treatment services available to a shrinking pool of insured people able to afford it.

Is this as good as it gets?

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I’ve had this notion (a conceit, really) that as someone from industry, I should reach out to my colleagues in academia in order to bring some awareness of how chemistry is conducted out in the world.  After many, many conversations, an accumulating pile of work in ACS activities, and a few visits to schools, what I’ve found is not what I expected. I expected a bit more curiosity about how commerce works and perhaps what life is like in a chemical plant. I really thought that my academic associates might be intrigued by the wonders of the global chemical manufacturing complex and product process development.

What I’m finding is more along the lines of polite disinterest. I’ve sensed this all along, but I’d been trying to sustain the hope that if only I could use the right words, I might elicit some interest in how manufacturing works; that I could strike some kind of spark.  But what I’ve found is just how insular the magisterium of academia really is. The walls of the fortress are very thick. We have our curricula firmly in place on the three pillars of chemstry- theory, synthesis, and analysis. In truth, textbooks often set the structure of courses.  A four year ACS certified curriculum cannot spare any room for alternative models like applied science. I certainly cannot begrudge folks for structuring around that reality.

It could easily be argued that the other magisteria of industry and government are the same way.  Well, except for one niggling detail. Academia supplies educated people to the other great domains comprising society.  We seem to be left with the standard academic image of what a chemical scientist should look like going deeply into the next 50 years. Professors are scholars and they produce what they best understand- more scholars in their own image.  This is only natural. I’ve done a bit of it myself.

Here is my sweeping claim (imagine the air overhead roiled with waving hands)-  on a numbers basis, most chemists aren’t that interested in synthesis as they come out of a BA/BS program. That is my conclusion based on interviewing fresh graduates. I’ve interviewed BA/BS chemists who have had undergraduate research experience in nanomaterials and AFM, but could not draw a reaction showing the formation of ethyl acetate.  As a former organic prof, I find that particularly alarming. This is one of the main keepsakes from a year of sophomore organic chemistry.  The good news is that the errant graduate can usually be coached into remembering the chemistry.

To a large extent, industry is concerned with making stuff.  So perhaps it is only natural that most academic chemists (in my sample set) aren’t that keen on anything greater than a superficial view of the manufacturing world. I understand this and acknowledge reality. But it is a shame that institutional inertia is so large in magnitude in this and all endeavors.  Chemical industry really needs young innovators who are willing to start up manufacturing in North America. We could screen such folks and steer them to MIT, but that is lame. Why let MIT have all the fun and the royalties?  We need startups with cutting edge technology, but we also need companies who are able to make fine chemical items of commerce. Have you tried to find a brominator in the USA lately?

The gap between academia and industry is mainly cultural. But it is a big gap, it may not be surmountable, and I’m not sure that the parties want to mix. I’ll keep trying.

ACS Denver Last Day

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I’ve spent much of my time at the Denver meeting talking to vendors in the exposition.  There were some very good pieces of equipment at the show. One company had a GC the size of a sub sandwhich.  Pretty cool. It’s for on-site work and actually comes in Army green and camo. I wish I could remember the name.

The Agilent ICP/MS is truly amazing.  Sub part per trillion capability.  The system uses something called the “helium collision mode” to exclude polyatomic cations from the mass analyzer.  You know those pesky argon chloride cations from sample plasma, right?  The argon polyatomic cations can mimic heavier elements by virtue of their combined atomic mass.  The instrument has an octapole chamber with helium in it that serves to impede the larger polyatomic cations. Clever monkeys.

 

Confessions of a Country Boy

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After much thought I have decided to come clean on the matter of the supposed inherent goodness of growing up rural. I was born to Iowa corn and hog farmers in the late 1950’s.  This business of supposing that growing up on a farm magically confers a kind of wholesomeness is based on some faulty assumptions:  1) Farms are wholesome environments untread upon by people corrupted by the incessant Bacchanalian orgy of wanton excess found in the city. This is plainly wrong. Farms and farmers are just isolated. Modern conveniences get to farms later because of the isolation. Farmers are exposed to pathogens and insecticides in the course of their work. They often get mangled in unspeakable ways by their equipment. Farmers would party like brain-damaged test monkeys with everyone else if it wasn’t such a long ride into town.

Misperception 2) Growing up on a farm brings one into better harmony with nature.  This is wrong as well.  Farming is about the conquest of nature. Farmers know alot about nature, but take it from me, people who plow the ground, churn in soil amendments, and neutron bomb the insect population are not nature lovers. They are nature conquerors.  Farming is about return on investment. Just watch Ag PhD if you don’t believe me. Hey, I watch this show- it’s pretty interesting.

Misperception 3) Growing up on a farm is peaceful and soothes the soul. Well, it seems outwardly peaceful. This is true. And that can soothe the soul. But consider that the prolonged lack of intellectual stimulation has a dulling and isolating effect that prevents people from finding a whole spread of achievement that is possible in the modern world.

Misperception 4) rural life is good because people know each other. You know the guy who owns the CO-OP and the family who sells the home grown eggs. Folks pull together when times are tough.  Well, maybe. The Gaussian distribution of saints and knuckleheads applies everywhere. In a rural community you just know the saints and knuckleheads who farm. Farms have produced Ed Gein and Dwight Eisenhower. Less pathologically, people in rural communities are just as frequently unhappy with their lives as those in the city.  It’s faulty thinking to conclude that the farming or rural life imbues some special merit to a person.  As always, your life story is about what you put into it. I would offer that rural life is less than good because people know each other.

The notion that a politician with a rural history, or one displaying an outward appearance, is invested with a more nuanced sensibility than some city slicker is also faulty thinking.  You can manipulate people with the “aw shucks, ma’am” act as effectively as with the tools of a cosmopolitan confidence man.  In fact, the country boy approach may be more persuasive.

Denver ACS Meeting

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Just back from Day 1 at the Denver ACS meeting.  Spent the afternoon at the INORG session celebrating the 50th anniversary of the journal Inorganic Chemistry.  As usual, Harry Gray stole the show with his talk- today it was on oxo complexes. What I like about Gray is that he shows the younger members that being socially constipated is not manditory for success in chemistry.  Maybe it’s his delivery, but after a Gray talk I leave feeling like I have gotten a glimpse of the future.

Attendance is down a bit due to hurricane Irene.  Looks like the Atlantic coast dodged the bullet. Earth quakes, hurricanes … what next? Cane toads?

Bleaches and in-process checks of the enlightenment

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In his 1736 publication Smegmatalogia, or the Art of Making Potashes and Soap, and Bleaching of Linens, James Dunbar describes a process for the preparation of potash.  The intended user of the process was the common Scottish farmer. Dunbar was anxious to imbue the common Scot with the ability to “bleach” his own linens.  It is important to realize that the meaning of the word bleach in the early 18th century is different from contemporary use.  The modern use comprises notions of decolorization through oxidation of color bodies to produce a white appearance.  The 18th century concept involves the apparent cleansing and subsequent lightening of a fabric.

The book begins by detailing the preparation of a solution or extract from ashes called Lee.  To obtain this solution, the “Country-Man” would carefully collect Scottish vegetables such as the wood of oak, ash, beech, “thorns”, juniper trees, and “whins”. Suitable herbs included fern, breckens (or brackens), wormwood, thistles, stinking weed, and hemlock. 

Dunbar is careful to instruct that the vegetation should be burned in the shelter of a house but in such a way as to avoid burning down the house. The purpose of burning the vegatation in a shelter is to avoid having rainwater come into contact with the ashes.  My interpretation of this is that runoff carries away soluble potash.

The ashes are placed in a container and covered with water. The ashes are soaked in water until such time that the Lee “carries an egg on its surface”.  What Dunbar is telling us is that the extraction of the ashes needs to go until the worker obtains in the solution a particular specific gravity- this is a specification. There is some minimum specific gravity of the Lee that will float an egg.  And the higher the specific gravity, the more volume of the egg rises from surface of the Lee. The specification herein is required for the next operation.  In order to carry out a successful saponification of tallow, the Lee solution must be sufficiently concentrated. 

Dunbar then describes steps where the Lee is combined with the ashes of ash, beech, or fern followed by boiling the water off to afford “thickens of pottage“.  The residue is shaped into balls which are then calcined in a fire to afford a substance that may be stored in a dry container for the purpose of making soap. 

The discovery of chlorine in 1774 by Scheele and the subsequent of discovery of chlorine bleaching by Berthollet gave us our modern conceptual notion of bleach and bleaching. The develoment of bleaching powder was made by Scottish chemist Charles Tennant who took a patent in 1799.  Tennant’s associate, Charles MacIntosh, is thought to be a contributor to this invention.  Bleaching liquors and powders soon became an important raw material for the bleaching of paper and fabric.

The procedure described by Dunbar is a chemical process.  It tells the user when the extraction is complete, qualitatively at least, by a folksy means of specific gravity determination. This is really very clever- it uses a common object to do the test and the result is readily apparent.  Bleaching in the early 18th century involved the use of soaps and of urine treatment and bleaching fields- a far cry from what we now think of as bleaching.

Astronomers talking about matter again

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I’m always a little skeptical when I hear astronomers talking about specific compositions of matter out in the universe.  The recent gushing press release from Reuters about a diamond planet orbiting a neutron star just adds to my burden of disbelief. 

I truly hope there is more evidence than that revealed in the press release. That is, the assignment of the diamond allotrope of carbon based on density (3.53 g/cm3).  The report seems to express amazement that the planet is “so dense”.  A specific gravity of 3.53 is not that high. Many other compositions are possible.  Perhaps Reuters should look at high density objects closer to home.