Perhaps the biggest difficulty with ACS meetings is the size. There’s a vast amount of good chemistry on show here, and it can be extremely difficult to choose where to go. I’ll tell you a little about what I’ve seen in the last couple of days in a later post, but first I thought I’d talk a little about my strategy for selecting sessions. I think it works quite well – but I’d be interested to hear about other strategies in the comments.

The ACS helpfully provides a planner that allows you to create a schedule of talks you want to attend. You select the talks, and it will alert you if there are conflicts. What it doesn’t (and to be fair probably can’t do) is tell you that you’ll never be able to go to talk X and then move on to talk Y (scheduled to start immediately after the end of X) because they are approximately a 0.5 miles apart – that’s as the crow flies — and in different hotels. So you have to be a little more selective. Add to that the fact that whichever talk you select, a later conversation with friends will invariably start with ‘Did you see the talk by Prof. Bigshot? It was amazing/terrible/I can’t believe he said….’. To cut a long story short, you will have missed that talk, because you were 0.5 miles away in a…you get the picture.

So, I’ve started using a slightly more random approach to selecting which talks to attend. I pick a talk that I’ve seen before and enjoyed — there is always a chance that there will be some updates on progress — then I’ll stick with that session. So I use the scheduler to select around 3 talks a day but get to see plenty that I wouldn’t necessarily have selected otherwise.

And, come the next big multi-session meeting, I will hopefully have some new choices to ‘rewind’ and act as the seed for my discovery of some new chemistry.

Steve

Stephen Davey (Senior Editor, Nature Chemistry)

A session that will stand out in my memory from this year’s ACS spring meeting was the presidential symposium on “Hollywood chemistry”. I attended both the early press conference which is well worth viewing, and the full event later in the day.

This event was perfectly themed for the location of the meeting, and also ties in nicely with the many International Year of Chemistry public outreach events. If you don’t work in or study science, then TV shows and movies might be the only place that you are exposed to science, so how realistic is it? And how do they achieve this?

The ACS gathered together Moira Walley-Beckett, writer-producer for the TV show Breaking Bad; Kath Lingenfelter writer-producer for House MD; Jaime Paglia writer-producer of Eureka. Also present were science advisors: Kevin Gazier, Donna Nelson, and Sidney Perkowitz. Finally Mark Griep who uses movie clips in his teaching and is author of the book Reaction: Chemistry in the movies which was reviewed in Nature Chemistry here (subscription required).

The common theme in all the TV shows mentioned is that without science, there would be no story but the shows discussed do span a broad range from factual shows through medical procedural drama to science fiction. Even in science fiction, Perkowitz notes, there may be one big suspension of disbelief, but beyond that, the science is as accurate as is possible within the confines of writing an interesting story. Paglia points out that the big difference is that “this is science fiction and not magic” – illustrating this with the difference between Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak and the cloaking device used by Klingon warships in Star Trek – one just works, and the other diverts electromagnetic radiation around the ship.

Breaking Bad is a show that I haven’t yet watched, but plan to having been at this meeting. The misguided hero is a high school chemistry teacher, who turns his skills to illegal drug manufacture in order to provide for his family when he is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. While we might disapprove of what he chooses to do, it’s hard not to like a character that throughout the series uses his chemistry knowledge to get himself out of one fix or another. I wonder, however, what the British Home office would make of the character though and would like to remind them that this is fiction. I also note that the science in Breaking Bad is taken so seriously that the show’s writers have, in the past, been advised by the Drug Enforcement Administration. Not surprisingly, when the show does describe illicit drug synthesis there are some key steps left out.

Beyond their descriptions of the shows, and revealing just how much they do rely on their science advisors, a wealth of fascinating stories and anecdotes were on offer. It’s tough to do them justice in a blog post – but I’ll leave you with this one – Kath Lingenfelter gave up her ambition to be a medic because she “just didn’t get organic chemistry” – she won’t be the only person out there to feel like that, but she is now involved in some of the most widely watched science related TV….

Steve.

Stephen Davey (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

My first highlight of the meeting was Eric Anslyn’s talk ’ Mimicking the mammalian chemical senses using supramolecular chemistry’. Here I learned that, like me, Anslyn is a Coca-Cola man…by which I mean that he doesn’t like the taste of the diet version – I presume this applies to other soda brands as well. It’s not just him though, his chemistry can tell the difference too.

Anslyn and co-workers use arrays of supramolecular receptors to discriminate between analytes. The idea is that while no one member of the array binds selectively to a particular analyte, each analyte will bind to each receptor slightly differently and it is the overall pattern that discriminates. This is similar to the way in which we taste, as flavours are not like a lock and key with a single receptor for a single flavour, but a combination of the sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami.

So it all comes down to pattern recognition, and Anslyn and co-workers have used similar systems to identify terpene molecules in “cheap” perfume (presumably the research grant doesn’t run to Chanel No.5!), detecting the type of artificial sweetener used in a cup of tea, and most recently to detecting the grape variety used in a wine.

It’s no Oz Clarke yet, but this latest research allowed them to develop a pattern recognition that could test red wine and identify the grape by the pattern of recognition in an array of peptides, you can read more about it here (subscription required). Interestingly, of the wines tested there was one outlier – a Zinfandel which in the pattern recognition fell more in the region of a Pinot noir. The punchline?…the winery called Anslyn the other day to explain that that particular wine did contain a lot of Pinot in the blend!

Steve

Stephen Davey (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

PS. It’s my birthday, so I’m planning to identify some wine varietals of my own later.

So the theme of my meeting continues.

Yesterday, I spent much of the day in the Robert Burns Woodward (RBW) memorial symposium. The talks were from those who have previously worked with RBW with a particular emphasis on how his philosophy has affected their own research. It’s tough to imagine what modern organic chemistry would be without him.

One talk in particular stood out and – from the number of attendees – not just for me either: Jeffrey Seeman’s ‘Was plagiarism involved in the development of the Woodward-Hoffmann rules?’. It’s not hard to imagine why…as Seeman pointed out, this is probably the first time the word plagiarism has appeared in the title of a talk at the ACS!

A little background for the uninitiated. The Woodward-Hoffmann rules explain the stereoselectivity of electrocyclisation reactions. The name of the rules is derived from the two chemists who first explained the observed reactivity patterns in the literature. Hoffmann received a share of the 1981 Nobel prize in Chemistry (Woodward would likely have received a second Nobel prize but had died two years previously). But, in 2004 Elias Corey – also by that time a Nobel laureate – claimed that he had provided RBW with the initial idea.

The presentation was fascinating – Seeman has analyzed personal letters and notebooks from Woodward, Hoffmann and Corey, and spoken at some length with Roald Hoffmann. I simply cannot provide the full details here so anyone interested should look out for Seeman’s (future) publication of this analysis – he says he’d like it to be an article but it will probably be a book – either way it should make excellent reading.

The main conclusion, however, was that we can’t know for sure what happened. Only two people really know, and one of them is no longer with us. Seeman says that he feels Corey is recalling the events exactly as he remembers them. Hoffmann for his part had asked Woodward at the time if Corey was involved and the answer was a very clear ‘No’. From a man known for meticulously assigning credit in his other work, it seems unlikely that he acted differently here.

The more important point to take away from this session though is to be very careful when assigning credit. It’s certainly an very emotional issue – even for three people who will remain as heroes of chemistry whatever the truth in this particular case.

Steve

Stephen Davey (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Spoof music videos offer the chance for ageing chemistry geeks such as myself to relive both their chemical and musical past. This video in particular was the cause of much hilarity within the Nature Chemistry team. This video is great – although one of the early lyrics ‘in the lab, working alone’ is a cause for concern – so let’s hope that it is there for artistic reasons rather than anything else. But can such videos serve any useful purpose?

Well, this would be a fairly boring blog post if the answer was “No”, so I was delighted this weekend to hear from Neil Garg at UCLA about a small video project set as part of the sophomore organic chemistry course. For a small extra credit, Garg asked his class to make music videos highlighting aspects of the course.

No less than 140 out of 240 enrolled students took part and made a total of 61 videos – I’ll be interested to hear from Neil when the exam results are in! Although the videos are worth very little in the final score, it’s hard to believe that the students failed to learn something useful in the way of organic chemistry from making them.

Steve

Stephen Davey (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)