Monthly Archives: August 2008

Reactions – Anna Balazs

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1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I think of myself more as a materials scientist who is intrigued by chemistry. My father inspired me to become a scientist; he was a biologist who clearly loved what he did and was full of enthusiasm about his work. It rubbed off on me.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be – and why?

I would be a journalist since I love to write, or a chocolate maker. Or better yet, a food critic who specializes in chocolate — then I could both sample great chocolate and write about it.

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

Human beings have four critical needs: health, food, shelter and entertainment. I think chemists can help with the first three, helping to develop affordable, effective drugs, more productive crops and sustainable housing. As to the last need, it is probably best left to others.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with – and why?

Having dinner with Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain would be wonderful because I am sure the evening would be filled with great stories and laughter.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab – and what was it?

This past year, my friend and collaborator Julia Yeomans wanted to try to create a scaled up version of microscopic swimmers. So we bought some plastic wind-up toys and put them in a tub of gelatinous fluid. Not a complete success — they didn’t move very far. But we forgot to clean the tub and the fluid grew some wonderful blue-green-purple specimens. So, an interesting experiment nonetheless.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

I would take “David Copperfield” by Dickens since it is my favorite novel; I love the characters and they would be good company. As to the CD, I would take a compilation of the Beatles music.

Anna Balazs is in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh, and works on theoretical modeling of polymeric materials and complex fluids.

NChem Research Highlights: Mars, mass spec and metals

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As the title suggests, a good range in this week’s Research Highlights.

What do you know about the martian atmosphere? If the answer is “not a lot”, you can find out about how the heterogeneous chemistry of radicals and cloud ice makes a difference.

There’s a new addition to the venerable science of fingerprints, as Graham Cooks at Purdue turns his DESI mass spec technique in a CSI direction. They can now detect different chemicals present on fingerprints, such as drugs or explosives.

You know how it is: you wait ages for a metal–metal bond under 1.8 Å, then two come along at once! That’s what’s happened with two groups independently making compounds with the shortest Cr–Cr quintuple bonds. You can read Katharine’s take on it over at big Nature news.

And finally…want to find your DNA soul mate? Now you can, thanks to a Boston company that will analyze the DNA behind your immune system and find the best match for you. And it only costs $1,995.95. Is there is anything chemistry (and a couple of grand) can’t do?!

Neil

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Reactions – Judy Kim

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1. What made you want to be a chemist?

When I entered college, I thought I was going to be an engineer. But then I took my first real chemistry class (5.11 at MIT), and I was simply amazed at the world of molecules. Challenging and wonderful (thanks to Silvia Ceyer) physical chemistry courses followed, and I discovered the world of chemistry research as an undergraduate in Mario Molina’s lab. Now here I am in the Chemistry Department at UC San Diego, with Mario Molina as my faculty colleague!

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be – and why?

I’d write biographies of ordinary people from all over the world. This job would combine many of my non-chemistry interests, such as experiencing other cultures, writing, and traveling.

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

One of the most important responsibilities of a chemist, or any scientist, is to actively shape the laws that guide society. Many of the problems that we are trying to solve (energy crisis, pollution, etc) can be lessened by relatively simple changes in the rules that govern our civilized lives.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with – and why?

Ernest Shackleton was an Antarctic explorer who endured 800 miles of the most treacherous waters in a small lifeboat and crossed severe terrain to save his crew stranded near Antarctica. His extraordinary leadership, skill, and perseverance are inspirational – what was this man like?

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab – and what was it?

As an assistant professor, I still work very closely with my students and go to the lab almost every day. Today I helped my undergraduate student obtain a resonance Raman spectrum of a carrot using our new microscope. It doesn’t matter how many times I have seen these data (including publishing a paper on it), I still get excited seeing the molecular fingerprint of a vegetable!

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

This is an easy one – I would bring East of Eden by John Steinbeck with me. To offset this tragic and intense tale, I’d turn to one of my favorite textbooks from college, The Stars by H. A. Rey, to identify the beautiful shapes in the nighttime sky. Music? Top 80’s hits (as defined by Richard Blade) are a must, as well as Johnny Cash and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

Judy Kim is in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The University of California, San Diego, and works on spectroscopic studies of biological systems. Her research areas include membrane protein folding, peptide-membrane interactions, and biological radical intermediates involved in electron transfer reactions.

ACS: Philadelphia 2008 – Love Train

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The ACS meeting is over, so I guess it’s time for me to climb aboard the love train and head for home. Oh, alright then, it’ll be a cramped flight to the UK, I was just trying to squeeze in a reference to the Philly sound before I left.

But before I go, here are a few bits and pieces from the meeting that made me think, smile, or both. A lot of them seem to involve Barry Sharpless.

Some quotes:

“A man in California just won the Nobel prize for mixing paint and wine.” – Headline in a Los Angeles newspaper following Barry Sharpless’s Nobel win.

“This lovely picture of Edinburgh is one that I took recently – from the internet.” – Dave Leigh

“You say this was done with a burette? I could do better with a graduated cylinder.” – Comment from William Crowell on a young John Roberts’ titration technique.

“Enzymes are swirly things, they’re spaghetti monsters.” – Barry Sharpless. Surely not a reference to the cult of the spaghetti monster?

Things I learnt at the meeting:

Some chemistry sets 77 years ago included recipes for gunpowder.

‘Detartrated’ is the longest single-word palindrome in the English language, according to Barry Sharpless. (To detartrate means to remove the tartrate from wine.)

The spell-check program on my laptop corrects ‘aldehydes’ to ‘baldheads’.

Other things that made me smile:

Barry Sharpless’s impression of an olefin.

That’s all for now, I’m heading for home sweet home.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

ACS Philadelphia 2008: Something to “Chu” on

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In one of my previous blog posts I mentioned a great presentation given by Steve Chu on Monday and I’ve finally found some time to say a little more.

In his talk he described the current plight of the planet and gave some fantastic insights into the problems we face. He highlighted predictions that have been made about various environmental markers that were frightening. The one that scared me the most was a prediction that Chu said amounts to “unplugging the refrigerator in the north and allowing everything to rot”. He was referring to a positive feedback mechanism that will kick in if the permafrost of the northern hemisphere melts, releasing enormous amounts of methane and carbon dioxide.

On a related cold-storage theme, he gave data that showed that the energy saved through the manufacture of contemporary high efficiency refrigerators is greater than that produced from renewable energy sources! That’s not to say we should be just making better refrigerators though. He spoke about several “transformative” technologies that are required to provide step changes in the way energy is created and distributed, arguing that incremental steps won’t solve our problems. The technologies he mentioned included energy storage in batteries, cheaper photovoltaics, a green revolution akin to the “transformative” Haber–Bosch process, and artificial photosynthesis (which took a large step forward recently). And as Katherine pointed out in an earlier post, chemists will play a central role in these developments.

The talk was a massive eye-opener; I knew we were in trouble but when you’re presented with hard facts by such an authoritative and passionate guy, you listen. But, equally he showed there is hope, and that it lies within scientific research.

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

ACS Philadelphia 2008: Escaping the conference

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I haven’t spent much time outside the confines of the conference – apart from the sun-drenched stroll between the convention centre and another venue, the Sheraton, about a mile away. So yesterday I thought, enough is enough. I went for a run over the Benjamin Franklin bridge with Neil Gussman, PR guy for the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and US army sergeant.

The run was amazing, the pedestrian bridge is much higher than the cars and the cars are much, much, much higher than the Delaware river. If you need to escape the city, you could do a lot worse than this towering piece of metal engineering.

Today I took another trip to CHF, to check out their new, and very impressive, gallery. It’s still under construction, but the floor-to-ceiling interactive periodic table installment (made in part by he of the Periodic Table Table fame, Theo Gray) is already in place. It is awesome. Videos run for each element, and the whole thing cascades from the huge 2-storey ceiling to the floor on a massive array of TV screens.

The new galleries are also hosting a travelling art exhibit, molecules that matter. This is a collection of artists’ representations of 10 selected molecules that have influenced society in the past 100 years. Apparently the choice of molecules upset some staunch organic chemists. I can’t see why. You should pop over and see if you’re getting cabin fever in the conference.

ACS Philadelphia 2008: When will cheap solar power become reality?

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The answer to the question posed above isn’t clear. I went to a session about plastic devices that could be used as solar cells instead of expensive silicon, hoping to hear a breakthrough was nigh. Sadly I was wrong. Advances in plastics that can capture light over a useful wavelength, that can separate the charge into electrons and holes, that can carry that charge and finally, do something useful with it, are being made. But slowly.

Talking in the session was Fred Wudl, who was first to develop fullerene/polymer systems as photovoltaic cells. It seems that the system he hit upon first up has been hard to beat, at least according to Mats Andersson, from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, who was also speaking in the session.

Percentage power conversion efficiencies remain low. The very best results are around 5%, and these tend to be from a single, meticulously prepared sample – a long way from a manufacturable, large scale printing process that is hoped for. To be really viable, a system that is 10% efficient is needed, or a slightly less efficient, but very cheap plastic material that can be made to cover a large area. But still, despite lots of tinkering with the polymers in the systems, the best that Andersson presented was 2.8% efficiency. Manpreet Kaur, from Virginia Polytechnic presented a system with an efficiency of 1%.

The systems rely on the electron-transporting properties of a polymer, and the hole (absence of electron) transporting properties of the fullerene groups. The main way to change these systems is altering the polymer groups.

The field is gaining strength, however. One company, Konarka, is claiming that it will have a flexible, efficient, solar cell plastic available by the end of the year. We shall have to wait and see.

The session certainly generated interest, but I can’t help thinking that the efficiencies are going to remain low for a while yet. Perhaps next year, if Konarka has delivered, academics will have joined them in finding a more efficient system.

ACS – Picture this

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I always like to check out a few sessions at ACS meetings that fall outside my usual beat. This time, I noticed a few interesting sounding sessions on ‘Visualizing chemistry’, so I went along to one this morning. It was fascinating stuff. A positive smorgasbord of imaging techniques awaited me, ranging from mass spectrometry (yes, you can use it to make pictures) to X-ray photoelectron spectromicroscopy. Oh, and there were lots of acronyms.

One thing I wasn’t aware of were how many techniques are available to work out the elemental distribution in a sample. For example, Richard Leapman gave a great talk about the use of STEM–EELS (Scanning transmission electron microscopy-electron energy loss spectroscopy) to generate three-dimensional images of cellular components. In this way, he has produced some great pictures of ribosomes that show exactly where the phosphorus can be found.

Completely different is the aforementioned X-ray photoelectron method. David Surman (he doesn’t have a personal web page, as he works in industry) described the latest imaging innovations in this technology, which produces elemental maps of surfaces. He described an example in which the method was used to study some medical-grade stainless steel samples (used for bone implants and so on), which were found to be prone to corrosion after laser ablation. He discovered that the laser-zapping led to a build-up of chromium at the edges of the ablated region. This build-up was the source of the corrosion problem.

But my favourite talk was from Martin Kessel, representing the High Resolution Electron Microscopy group at the National Cancer Institute, USA. They used 3D electron microscopy to image the ‘spikes’ that stud the surface of HIV. These spikes don’t form a regular pattern on the surface, which makes it difficult to get a reliable image using traditional electron microscopy. But by using a technique that generates an average image from thousands of pictures of individual spikes, a high-resolution structure has been produced. Crystal structures of parts of the proteins that make up the spikes have previously been obtained, and these dock beautifully into the microscope images, thus validating the crystal structures. Furthermore, the microscope has caught an image of the spike in complex with a CD4 receptor on a cell, revealing the changes in protein conformation that occur when HIV invades a luckless cell. It’s really great stuff, with fantastic pictures – Nature subscribers can read the paper itself at this link.

Great stuff, but sadly not terribly well attended, perhaps because the meeting room was tucked away in a obscure part of the building. It’s a real shame, because I’m sure that these talks would have been of great interest to many people.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Senior Editor, Nature)

ACS Philadelphia 2008: On the presidential campaign trail

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At the general poster session the other night I was delighted to see the two candidates campaigning for the job everyone is talking about. No, not McCain and Obama, but the two candidates for the president-elect of the ACS. As the biggest scientific society in the world, this is a big job.

As I approached one of the candidates, Josef Michl, I noticed he was chattering to Bob Grubbs (see earlier post). Michl was very keen on sustainability. And this is a broad recurring theme of this meeting. Chemists realise the opportunities they have to help the planet. Of course, chemistry is the underpinning science to the technologies that are being investigated to replace fossil fuels. I can only imagine that in future this theme is going to engulf these meetings even more.

The other presidential-elect candidate had a very firm handshake and free colour-changing pencils. Another Joseph, from Purdue, Joseph Francisco told me about his plans to unite retired chemists and young, keen postdocs to create an ACS-centred bank of expertise. His focus was much more on the business side of chemistry, and in particular small businesses.

Two very different candidates with very different agendas. It will be interesting to see who wins. At the moment I wouldn’t like to call it, but the trend towards sustainability gives me the feeling that Michl might just steal it.

ACS Philadelphia 2008: The Boss

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You travel a good few thousand miles and the last thing you want to see is your boss (no offence Stu). Thankfully, he’s back in the UK happy that I’m here doing all the running around associated with an ACS meeting, but I just can’t seem to get away from pictures of him.

I went to a talk by Sir Fraser Stoddart yesterday at which he received the 2008 ACS Arthur C. Cope award. His talk was a nice run through of some of the beautiful work he’s done (both aesthetically and chemically). Fraser likes to give credit to his old students by putting photos of them up on slides when he talks about the work they did. The Nature Chemistry chief editor, Stuart Cantrill, is a Stoddart protégé and thus the talk was littered with Cantrill references and pictures, to the point where he was acknowledged, alongside Stuart Rowan and Omar Yaghi, as a pioneer of the newly branded area of chemistry ‘mechanostereochemistry’ — high praise indeed.

Fraser even gave Nature Chemistry a mention. Reaching more people than I ever could in my whole week here, he named Stuart as someone who as the founding editor of Nature Chemistry could “considerably influence how chemistry develops in the future”.

And there was me thinking he was just someone who could considerably influence the time at which the Nature Chemistry editors get their next cup of tea! Get the kettle on Stu!

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate editor, Nature Chemistry)