Highly respected organic chemist publishes a Perspective in JACS, chaos ensues.

Ronald Breslow — past president of the ACS and Priestley medallist in 1999 — is a “well-respected research lion”, in the words of SeeArOh at Just Like Cooking. Few would dispute his place in the chemistry firmament. With many achievements behind him, surely he has earned the right to close a Perspective article in JACS on the possible origin of homochirality in biological molecules with a chuckle — suggesting that humans would be better off not meeting the advanced dinosaurs, with amino acids of the opposite chirality, who may populate distant corners of the universe!

Apparently not. At least, not according to some of the dinosaur-focused bloggers/newshounds out there — such as Dinosaur Tracking or Discovery. In their defence, however, they were reacting to the press briefing that the ACS somewhat mystifyingly released. It was mystifying because it ignored the six pages of discussion about the origin of chirality of amino acids to focus on the last two ‘space dino’ sentences.

The combination of Breslow and space dinos proved tempting for some chemistry bloggers, with SeeArrOh covering the paper and its final words in the good-humoured tone in which they were surely intended. Paul Bracher, who blogs at ChemBark, has worked in the origin-of-life field, and actually discussed the scientific content of the paper — how refreshing! But Bracher certainly doesn’t mince his words giving his opinion of the ACS press office.

The final twist in the dinosaur’s tale came in the comments on Just Like Cooking and ChemBark: hasn’t Breslow written something quite similar in Tetrahedron Letters and the Israel Journal of Chemistry? The similarity is such that, at the time of writing, JACS has removed the paper from its website, citing copyright concerns.

[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is June’s article]

A chemist who wants to terminate malaria and a calculation to have at your fingertips.

“Malaria. I hate this parasite. I want to kill it.” Imagine these words spoken in a voice similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s and you’ll understand why they nearly made Karl Collins fall off his chair, as he explained in a post at A Retrosynthetic Life. Of course, it wasn’t Arnie speaking, but Peter Seeberger of the Max Planck Institute, who discussed his efficient and cheap route to making artemisinin. Seeberger’s development means that “artemisinin factories the size of large cardboard boxes can be made for £10,000”. Overall, the cost of producing this potent antimalarial could fall to “10% of what it is today” — this might go some way to explain why Seeberger’s next appointments were with the UN and the Gates Foundation. Collins explains more about Seeberger’s career in his blogpost and you can read the Angewandte Chemie paper that reports the continuous flow synthesis via https://doi.org/c55rks.

“By the time you finish this sentence, your fingernails will have grown one nanometre.” If you read that sentence with some scepticism, you’re not alone. Zen Faulkes, who blogs at Neurodojo, asked “Is that accurate?”. To start with, his students did some guesstimations, ‘Fermi problem’ style, that showed it might be true, but like any good scientist, Faulkes wanted data. So he measured the growth rate of his fingernails using callipers accurate to 0.01 mm. After five or six measurements on ten fingers he arrived at an average fingernail growth rate of 0.92 nm per second! But wait — Faulkes went a step further and discovered it took him about 3.77 seconds to read that sentence, so his fingernails would have grown a whopping 3.47 nm. Interested readers may like to tackle the problem posed in the comments: How many moles of β-keratin are deposited onto the nail per second?

[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is May’s article]

Sensational chemophobia and the problems with biofuels

‘Are you scared yet?’ This is the title of See Arr Oh’s post on Just Like Cooking but could equally serve as the unspoken subtitle of the news report he’s blogging about. First highlighted on ChemBark the investigative report from US TV channel Fox29 is about “unlocked chemistry labs and the ease with which a terrorist could steal hazardous materials”. So far, so serious. But, as ChemBark says, “the underlying point of securing labs is a valid one, but the presentation is way Way WAAAAAAY over the top”. See Arr Oh takes the presentation to task more than ChemBark, giving us some random quotes that illustrate the chemophobic sensationalism of the report, which breathlessly reveals the presence of 0.1 M HCl and ether. He counted “26 mentions of the word ‘chemical’ (or once every 14.4 seconds)” – mostly “preceded by a sensationalist adjective”. We can’t deny that lab security is an issue for serious discussion, but perhaps it deserves better reporting than it got from Fox29.

When Nobel Laureates talk, people listen — and when they write provocative editorials, people read closely. So when we spotted the editorial in Angewandte Chemie by Hartmut Michel (1988 Laureate) titled ‘The Nonsense of Biofuels‘, we sat up. And so did Ash Jogalekar at The Curious Wavefunction, where he took us through the photosynthesis expert’s arguments. First among these is the lack of efficiency of photosynthesis itself — a 4% upper limit — which is exacerbated by the energy needed to grow, harvest and transform the biomass into useful fuels. Finally, when it comes to fuelling transportation, only 20% of the energy produced by a combustion engine is used to propel the vehicle. Michel suggests that either photosynthesis needs to be improved, or photovoltaics and batteries pursued with more vigour — solar cells are around 15% efficient, and vehicles can usefully use 80% of the battery’s energy.

[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is April’s article]

The differences between planes and drugs, engineers and medicinal chemists … and Jimmy Stewart.

Have you ever wondered about the similarities and differences between drug design and aeroplane design? If not, don’t worry because Ashutosh Jogalekar at the Curious Wavefunction has blogged about a paper that does just that. Both of these design processes use modelling, but “compared with the aeronautical industry where modelling has been applied to airplane design for decades, why has it taken so long for modelling to catch on in the pharmaceutical industry?” Jogalekar takes us through the three reasons he sees: the complexity of biological systems compared with aeronautical ones; the natural inclination of engineers to learn programming and modelling is generally not shared by the mix of people who work in pharma; and the lack of a “comprehensive knowledge base for validating modelling techniques”. As a molecular modeller himself, Jogalekar finds the paper upbeat and hopes that “the pharmaceutical industry makes a concerted effort to test, refine, retain and discard modelling approaches to drug design at all levels”.

Derek Lowe blogged his own thoughts on the paper, noting that, in biological systems, “there are so many nonlinear effects, so many crazy little things that can add up to so much more than you’d ever think”. The “Andy Grove fallacy” — which is what Lowe calls the propensity of engineers and other outsiders to underestimate the complexity of drug discovery — is a favourite topic on In The Pipeline, so a lot of comments came from both sides of the fence — from engineers and biologists.

And finally … after pursuing exciting research on artificial photosynthesis, he left college and became a banker. A modern-day tale of the priorities of under-funded young scientists? No! It’s a scene from the Jimmy Stewart movie You Can’t Take it with You, released in 1938, which Nick Uhlig shared the clip on the Chemistry Blog.

[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is February’s article]

[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is January’s article]

Looking closely at pepper spray and an explosive mouthful.

People may think that blogs — even those about chemistry — only cover what the blogger had for breakfast and the occasional picture of cute kittens. Hopefully this column has dispelled some of those thoughts in the past few years, but if anyone still needs persuading, Deborah Blum’s post About Pepper Spray should do the trick. Written shortly after a “shocking incident involving peacefully protesting students at the University of California-Davis”, Blum took her readers through the chemistry behind the innocuously named weapon. For those familiar with the Scoville scale, pepper spray is about 1,000 times hotter than jalapeños and up to 25 times hotter than habaneros. But if you think that the effect is similar to the stinging eyes you may have experiences after not being careful in the kitchen, Blum warns “we’re not talking about cookery but a potent blast of chemistry”. Capsaicins, the compounds that confer heat on both chillies and pepper spray, “inflame the airways, causing swelling and restriction” making it particularly dangerous “to people with asthma and other respiratory conditions”. So dangerous, in fact, that it has been linked to around 75 deaths.

Blum’s post about such a newsworthy topic gathered so much attention it’s been re-posted in many venues, including Scientific American where it was the most popular item on the site for days. She even appeared on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC to discuss pepper spray (the segment can be found via this link).

On a less controversial, although slightly more explosive, topic, Derek Lowe treated us to another thing he won’t work with, hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane. Hiding behind that mouthful are six nitrogen atoms, each bonded to one of six nitro groups. If you dare to even imagine making it, Lowe suggests that you “picture a bunch of guys wheeling around drums of fuming nitric acid while singing the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore”.