– Derek Lowe‘s blog entries in the “”https://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/">Things I Won’t Work With" category

– the explosion at the National Institution of Higher Learning in Chemistry at Mulhouse (which killed chemistry professor Dominique Burget)

– Karen Wetterhahn’s tragic death in 1997

Chemistry just seems more dangerous than other scientific disciplines…

In the June 1st issue of Nature, Mark Peplow and Emma Marris investigated whether or not chemistry deserves its “reckless reputation.” They talked with a number of safety officers from several universities, many of whom think that the dangers of chemistry are a bit exaggerated:

“A lot of it is reminiscence to ‘the good old days’ of chemistry,” says Alan Kendall, safety officer at the University of Oxford, UK.

“There’s a public perception that is years behind the reality,” agrees Richard Firn, a biologist who chairs the laboratory safety committee at the University of York, UK. “Things have changed a lot in the past 10 to 15 years” … “People’s risk perception is skewed by the drama of an explosion” …

But Mark and Emma acknowledged that it was “surprisingly difficult to get national statistics on scientific accidents … [the UK Health and Safety Executive], for example, groups all its accident figures for schools, colleges and universities into a single number, making it difficult to discern safety trends or to tell if one type of lab is more risky than another.”

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

This month’s issue of Wired magazine has two stories that have to do with chemistry – there’s an article on the chemistry of cream cheese, which contains the following (choice) quote:

[John] Lucey is an associate professor of food science at the university and runs the cream cheese program. Born in Ireland, he came to Wisconsin for a professorship after making his name in yogurt research in Europe. [emphasis added]

For those of you who are interested in learning more about the field, you might want to check out a recent review article by Johnson & Lucey entitled “”https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=16537950&query_hl=2&itool=pubmed_docsum">Major technological advances and trends in cheese."

There’s also a story on the challenges of DIY chemistry in the post-9/11 world – it even has a few experiments to get you started (including how to make a stink bomb from wooden safety matches and household ammonia…) Though I’m not entirely sure the EPA would recommend this (after performing the “Lavalicious” experiment): “Transfer the chromium oxide to the widemouthed jar, seal, and discard.”

This part of the article is a bit alarming/depressing:

More than half of the suggested experiments in a multimedia package for schools called “You Be the Chemist,” created in 2004 by the Chemical Educational Foundation, are to be performed by the teacher alone, leaving students to blow up balloons (with safety goggles in place) or answer questions like “How many pretzels can you eat in a minute?" … “We want to give kids lessons that tie in to their real-world experiences without having them deal with a lot of strange chemicals in bottles that have big long names.”

This might explain why the number of B.Sc. chemists has been steadily decreasing since the mid-90s…

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

One of my favorite scenes in Woody Allen’s 1973 film Sleeper involves two doctors (for those of you who haven’t seen this film, most of the movie takes place in the year 2173):

Dr. Melik: [puzzling over list of items sold at Miles’ old health-food store] … wheat germ, organic honey and … tiger’s milk.

Dr. Aragon: Oh, yes. Those are the charmed substances that some years ago were thought to contain life-preserving properties.

Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or … hot fudge?

Dr. Aragon: [chuckling] Those were thought to be unhealthy … precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.

Dr. Melik: Incredible!

I thought of this scene when I first heard about the possible beneficial properties of red wine (back in 1992, when Siemann & Creasy proposed that resveratrol might be responsible for the cardioprotective effects of red wine). Although I drink quite a bit of red wine, I hadn’t really thought much about resveratrol until I read a new review article by Baur & Sinclair that’s on the Nature Reviews Drug Discovery Advance Online Publication page.

Since that original report back in 1992, the number of papers exploring resveratrol’s biological activity has skyrocketed: according to Baur & Sinclair resveratrol has been shown to “prevent or slow the progression of a wide variety of illnesses, including ”https://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/275/5297/218">cancer, cardiovascular disease and ischaemic injuries, as well as enhance stress resistance and extend the lifespans of various organisms from yeast to vertebrates."

Not a big fan of red wine? No problem – there are many other natural sources of resveratrol, including grape juice, blueberries, and pistachios (although the concentration of resveratrol is much higher in red wine…)

We still need to learn more about the physiologically-relevant mechanism(s) of action, and the authors suggest that “blocking the metabolism of resveratrol, developing analogues with improved bioavailability, or finding new, more potent compounds that mimic its effects” will be important, as resveratrol is not cheap: “administering a daily dose to a human weighing 75 kg with 100 mg per kg (body weight) of resveratrol would require 2.7 kg of resveratrol a year, at a current cost of about US$6,800.”

This blog entry has made me thirsty for some wine tonight – I think I’ll stop off at the wine store on the way home and pick up a nice Syrah or maybe a bottle of French wine – anything red is fine, as long as it’s not a Merlot…

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

Nature Chemical Biology is now one year old, and the editors have put together a special anniversary issue to celebrate: in addition to the usual selection of exciting primary research, this issue has a meeting report by Jennifer Kohler on the recent American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology meeting (which had a great series of talks in the “Chemical Genetics and Drug Discovery” section) and a review article by Jason Chin on synthetic biology. (If you’re interested in synthetic biology, you might want to check out the Nature Newsblog for Oliver Morton’s thoughts on the Second International Conference on Synthetic Biology.)

This special issue has a new section called “Elements,” which “”https://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/v2/n6/full/nchembio0606-283.html">will feature interviews with key people in the chemical biology community and offer insights into places or events that are of general interest to chemists and biologists." In this issue, Joanne Kotz talks with Harvard Professor Jeremy Knowles.

Lastly, the editorial team at Nature Chemical Biology has put together a selection of papers from their first 12 issues, all of which are free for the month of June.

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature).

If you’re an organic chemist, you’ve probably already seen this blog entry, but for those of you who don’t read Tenderbutton regularly, you should check it out. Dylan Stiles is a graduate student in the Trost group at Stanford, and a few weeks ago, ‘Ask Tenderbutton’ was conceived: you can send in your chemistry question/problem and Dylan will try to answer it/give you some advice. In addition, you’ll also get plenty of suggestions from his regular readers – ‘Debenzylating in Despair’ has already received 20 comments from Dylan’s readers. The best part: Dylan’s asked people to write their questions in the cheesy ‘Dear Ann Landers’ style (hence the letter from ‘Debenzylating in Despair’…)

I think this is a fantastic idea – there are lots of universities where you can’t swing by another lab and talk with someone who developed the catalyst you’re using or someone who might be able to give you some quick advice that can save you a few weeks of trial and error. This is especially true for chemists who are in laboratories at medical schools – the chemistry department might be across town… And since there are all sorts of little tricks that mean the difference between 20 and 90% yield, blogs might be the best way to quickly tap into a broad range of experts…

For some reason Dylan’s entry reminded me of the InnoCentive project that was started a few years ago – I hadn’t checked that site for a few years (and didn’t know if the project was still running), but there are still a number of ‘Challenges’ in the chemistry and biology categories. With the long weekend coming up, maybe it’s worth sitting down and taking a crack at some of those problems: for many of the challenges, the prize money is between 10,000 and 50,000 dollars (and I’d love a 61’’ HDTV…)

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)

While flipping through yesterday’s issue of Nature, I came across the special report on toxicology/toxicologists in the Naturejobs section… After struggling to get that infernal Britney Spears song out of my head, I read through the article, which really made toxicology sound like an interesting career…

Ricki Lewis wrote that a “career in toxicology might take a scientist to a contaminated well, a crime scene, a courtroom, an analytical chemistry lab or a political hearing” and “it isn’t uncommon for a seasoned scientist to have spent time in academia, industry and government, and finish with private consulting.” Considering how successful shows like CSI and Numb3rs are, I’m a bit surprised that no one’s produced a prime-time TV drama starring toxicologists (I can see it now – EPA: Risk Assessment Unit…)

There’s also a nice News & Views article by Robert Crabtree on a recent Science paper from the Goldman and Brookhart laboratories – in the presence of an iridium catalyst and a Schrock metathesis catalyst, the authors reported that a tandem alkane dehydrogenation/olefin metathesis reaction could be used to elongate inert hydrocarbon chains (technically, it’s a tandem alkane dehydrogenation/olefin metathesis/alkane hydrogenation reaction, but that’s a bit of a mouthful…)

The authors hope that this system could be used “”https://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0000F6F4-B7D4-143E-B7D483414B7F0000">turn coal, leftover oil refinery products or even plants into diesel fuel and other functional hydrocarbons." But Professor Brookhart acknowledged that “”https://www.unc.edu/news/archives/apr06/brookhart041106.htm">considerable improvements in the catalyst systems are required before they become practical."

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)