Marketing molecular fear

"A woman can recite the most complicated recipe, but how many can name the ingredients in a headache tablet?  If you don't want drugs you know nothing about, take Bufferin...."

This short commercial by actress Joan Fontaine aired in the mid-1960s, an era when Tylenol (acetaminophen) was just gaining market share in the US as a painkiller for adults.  I'm fascinated with the way in which it foreshadows the modern trope of avoiding chemicals you can't pronounce, already marketing the molecular fear that now fuels the largely unregulated, 12 billion dollar a year vitamin and nutritional supplement market in the US.  Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had appeared in 1962, starting a shift towards seeing chemical as a synonym for poison.

Much like the material put out fifty years later by Jospeh Mercola, Dr. Oz and The Food Babe, this ad tacitly assumes people are incapable of understanding science and must rely on experts of some sort.  Who you should not trust.  And women, no matter how competent within their limited domestic sphere, are even less capable.

All natural! Removes burned on food! Magic chemical concoctions

I steamed a batch of dumplings for lunch yesterday, which never had time to cool before being wolfed down by the spring break crowd in my kitchen.  So I pulled another set from the freezer which someone in the scrum popped into the steamer.  In the confusion, no one checked to be sure there was still water in the steamer.  Fast forward eight minutes, the dumplings are stuck to the steamer and the smoke alarm is shrieking.

The dumplings were edible, but the bottom of the pan was pretty badly scorched.  My mathematician spouse wondered if I had some special chemical that would magically clean the pan.  I said I did and that I'd already applied it.  "What did you use?" he said, peering into the blackened pot. "Water."

Water is sometimes called the universal solvent, and though many things will dissolve in water, it's not clear that more things are soluble in water than in any other solvent (or how you would undertake such an inventory). And it's absolutely a chemical, though it is so ubiquitous we have a hard time thinking of it as such.  Even chemists.

The pot soaked overnight, and with the application of a bit of elbow grease (physics, not a chemical) and a finely ground mixture of low volatility chemicals (feldspar, limestone, sodium carbonates with a dash of soap - aka kitchen cleanser) is as shiny as ever.

Science at Play

The Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia's latest exhibit is called "Science at Play" — and even if you can't get to Philadelphia, you can browse some of the materials on Tumblr, including animated videos of experiences — good and bad — with chemistry kits.

When my kids were young, I encouraged them to play with science stuff.  I wanted them to be willing to get messy, to make mistakes, to think about stuff where it wasn't perfectly clear what was going on and to begin to understand that protective gear wasn't a ritual or a costume, but part of thinking through how to reduce risk.  That you could make your own equipment.

Though kits have gotten far more tame over the years — no more uranium ore or instructions for making ammonia in your hand — there are still commercial kits that let kids play not only responsibly, but productively, with chemistry.  The new MEL kits that Todd Bookman's piece on chemistry kits for The Pulse (listen here - full disclosure, I was interviewed for this segment) highlights are particularly cool in that they plug into another important skill for budding scientists:  how to share your work.  The kit comes with a lense that you can snap over a cell phone camera, giving you an up close look at what you are doing, and enabling you to share it via social media.

But as important as kits are, I think the ad hoc experiences of doing science are equally critical.  They hone the ability to read instructions (and reveal how much is not revealed in the methods sections of any science communique), encourage a sense of scale and quantitation (how much is 1 gram of something, as opposed to pour in this packet) and help novice scientists get comfortable with tinkering to build apparatus when they don't have exactly what they need. And when tackling a new research problem, do you ever have precisely what you need?

While you can make do with measuring cups and kitchen scales, I'm with the Chemical Heritage Foundation's Erin McLeary, who notes the appeal of having the real stuff in your hands.  These days you can easily and inexpensively acquire a few real beakers, graduated cylinders and other lab equipment -- along with gloves and other protective gear.

So if you're looking for an interesting and unique gift for a kid interested in science, try assembling a small kit and including the instructions and materials for a couple of experiments.  For starters, extracting DNA from dried peas or copper electroplating (yes, it uses something you shouldn't eat - don't and wash your hands) or even the infamous water electrolysis (sans smoldering splint and thereby less risk of singed eyebrows).  Offer to help supervise or be the videographer.

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To read more of what I've written about chemistry kits and doing chemistry outside the laboratory see:

"Homemade Chemists" in Nature Chemistry
"Felony Science" at Slate
"Handheld Chemistry" on the blog, about the making of ammonia in your hand

Building scientists #istandwithahmed #kierawilmot

So what's this kid doing in the high school auditorium after school?  He's drilled holes and put pipes into a cooler, there's some kind of heating device or trigger. Wires.  And it looks like a boat load of some sort of chemical in that bowl that he's dumping in there.  And then...and it shoots out some kind of gas.  Kids scream. The gas begins to cover the stage.

"What's happening?" wants to know the teacher who hears the commotion from the hallway.  "I'm testing a fog machine I built for the class play."

Yes, at first glance the situation looks potentially perilous.  But a quick question, followed by a bit of common sense and the teacher is reassured that all is well.

Now that everyone is sure that there is no bomb, what should happen to the kid?

A.  Pull the child into the principal's office and demand that he sign a statement admitting his guilt.

B.  Call the police, who will arrest him and charge him with building an explosive device.

C. Call the police, who will arrest him and charge him with building a "hoax bomb"

D. Nominate him for a theater award for special effects, for having designed and built an inexpensive fog machine to use for the school's upcoming production of Grease.

The kid is my kid and the school's response was D.  But imagine if my kid wasn't white and male.  If his name were Ahmed Mohamed or Kiera Wilmot?  There might have been handcuffs, felony charges, letters home to parents about "the incident".  If someone had called the police, would they have arrested him because he couldn't explain why he'd built one, when they could have rented a fog machine?  (The police thought it suspicious when Ahmed Mohamed couldn't tell them anything more than his device was a clock.) Why would you build a fog machine, or a clock?  He must have built it for a purpose, nefarious almost certainly.

Perhaps the purpose was to understand how these machines work?  There is an amazing amount of joy in showing that you understand something well enough to build a working apparatus. To tweak and fix.

As a parent, I want the school to exercise an abundance of caution.  But once you're sure it's just a clock — or a fog machine — perhaps it's time to slow down, and engage some common sense.  Is there anything else that suggests this kid would build anything danger?  Besides his name, or the color of her skin, or his religion.

Scientists and engineers are not hatched full grown from eggs in labs.  As kids, they tinker and think and build and design, with Legos and parts from Radio Shack and Home Depot.  They are in theater and on robotics and Science Olympiad teams.  We need to get as excited about what they do as we are about how the football team is doing.

A chemistry decoder

A basic guide to decoding organic compound names
© Andy Brunning/Compound Interest

The August 17th edition of C&EN — Chemical and Engineering News, the American Chemical Society's weekly newsmagazine — was devoted to the intersection of chemistry and the internet.  I have a piece in there on the ways in which the internet allows pseudoscience to spread and what chemists might do to counteract the spread.  I point to Andrew Noymer's work on the mathematical modeling of rumor spread, which suggests that rumors and autocatalytic reactions such as the classic Lotke-Volterra systems are not dissimilar.

Noymer's results suggest that damping down the spread of rumor requires both persistent debunking and increased resistance among the susceptible population.  Though at first glance it seems counterintuitive, just periodically debunking rumors leads to a steady state situation, where there is always a (not so small) part of the population who believe.  Debunking needs to be strong and regular, and even then, if you don't have a resistant population, you land in a steady state regime.  The best you can do is to reduce a rumor to something that periodically breaks out.  Like the "Mars will be as big as the Moon in the sky!" meme which you see circulating on social media every summer like clockwork.  (Spoiler alert: It wasn't. It won't be.  Ever.)

What does it take to make a population resistant to pseudoscience?  Some tactics are not unique to the pseudoscience issue:  teaching critical thinking (as Phil Plait points out and Joel Achenbach implies here). Slower fingers when it comes to hitting "share." But it also means giving the population some basic tools for reading science.  After the Royal Society of Chemistry released a large study of the public awareness of chemistry, I wrote that it might be helpful if instead of periodic tables, chemists handed out a cheat sheet for decoding chemical names.  I wished and voilà, the brilliant Andy Brunning of Compound Interest created this graphic.  Print it out and post it in your kitchen.  Link to it on Facebook.  Browse the rest of his collection.  Buy his forthcoming collection about the chemistry of food and give it to the family member who keeps sending you links to the Food Babe.

Most all, talk about what you do as chemist, debunk garbage science when you hear it, swiftly and without mocking, and grab as many opportunities as you can to help people learn to decode chemistry on their own.

Eating periodically: is there thallium in your wasabi?

Wasabi, Iwasaki Kanen 1828
via Wikimedia Commons 

Could your wasabi peas be poisoning you?  Short answer. Maybe.

Delish recently posted an article on thallium — a highly toxic metal — in kale, the quintessential healthy green.  The Internet relished the irony of finding toxic metals in the highly touted greens. The piece points to an article in Craftsmanship magazine, which attempts to make a link between consumption of kale and thallium levels.  This is not new news.  There are dozens of reports, going back two decades, in the scientific literature of thallium in cruciferous vegetables, such as kale and brussell sprouts — and wasabi.

Thallium is definitely a nasty element, and has an infamous history of use as a poison in fact and fiction, starting with Ngaio Marsh's Final Curtain.  Read Deborah Blum's hair-raisingly fascinating Poisoner's Handbook (or her short article at Wired about a recent murder case in Princeton).  But as with everything, dose makes the poison, and the amounts of thallium in plants vary widely depending on the concentrations in the soil.  In highly contaminated soils, plants can contain enough thallium to be hazardous.  But if such highly contaminated soils were widespread, we'd have seen the effects already. (See this paper for some background.) (Also, you can leverage this ability and use it to clear out the thallium from a contaminated area.)

So how does thallium get into the plants? There is some evidence that thallium ions travel the same pathways as potassium ions (which play key roles in plant metabolism), and so might find their way into plants (and animals) though similar processes.

Thallium is also in the same column as boron, and elements in the same column of the periodic table often have similar behaviors, because their electrons are arranged in similar patterns.  For example, strontium, which is underneath calcium, sneaks into the body by way of the same processes calcium does. Boron is found in plants (coffee is a good source, and plants in the same family as kale are also heavy absorbers of boron); it is believed to be critical to cell wall formation.

And if there is boron and thallium, indium - in the same column is another likely companion. And yes, indium has been detected in plants in the cabbage family.  

As always, eating a wide variety of things is good advice, and it's key to remember that "natural" is not the same as "safe."

Molecular Jek-yls and -hydes

Like Jekyll and Hyde, changing a functional group changes 
a molecule's behavior. Image from Library of Congress.

Chains of pure carbon and hydrogen, called hydrocarbons by chemists, are notoriously hard to get a chemical handle on.  One of the major driving forces in chemical reactions is "opposites attract" — in this case opposite charges.  Since carbon and hydrogen have essentially the same desire for electrons (negative charges), there is not much difference in charge around to drive a reaction. Swap out a hydrogen for something else that does have a relative charge —  chlorine, fluorine, oxygen, nitrogen — and suddenly you have something to react with.  Chemists call these riffs on a basic carbon framework "functional groups" - they are often the parts of a molecule's structure that drive its function.

Change up the functional group, and you change the molecule's behavior. Like Jekyl and Hyde.  Ethanol is something to drink on a Friday night, ethanal is found in the coffee you drink for the hangover the next morning (in an ironic twist, it's also produced as your body metabolized the ethanol.)

The first part of a chemical name tells the size of the carbon framework, the ending tells you about its function — or lack thereof.  Names that end in -yl or -ane mean a hydrocarbon chain without any fancy functionality.  Propane, a popular fuel, is a three carbon hydrocarbon chain.  Methyl mercaptan (added to odorless natural gas to make it smell, and make leaks quickly noticeable), has a one carbon long "chain" in it. Change -yl to -ol and you have made an alcohol, a chain with an -OH group on it (Ethanol is CH₃CH₂OH, sometimes written EtOH, a 2 carbon chain with an OH group on it.)

Knowing the functional groups means knowing something about the kinds of things a molecule can do.  Esters smell floral, carboxylic acids can remove a layer of skin, and are found in many lotions.

So to decode:

-ol means an alcohol (functional group = -OH) but not necessarily the kind of alcohol you drink 

-al means an aldehyde (-COH); these often smell sweetish 

-oxy means an ether (an oxygen sandwiched between two carbon chains) 

-oic acid or -ic acid means a carboxylic acid (pronounced "car-box-sill-ick") salicylic acid, often found in face washes 

-oate means an ester (a COO group sandwich between two chains); ethyl nonanoate smells like grape, the functional group is between a 2 carbon chain (ethyl) and nine carbon chain (nona) 

-one means a ketone, a CO group sandwiched in between two chains

Check out Andy Brunning's of Compound Interest's great graphic on functional groups and their names and Practically Science's map of molecules in food and their smells.

The Secret Language of Chemists: Why does butter make us think of four?

Butter and why it means "four" to chemists.
c. Michelle Shrank CC license

Every time I take a stick of butter out of the 'fridge I think of the number four.  No, it's not some odd form of synethesia, but a side effect of being a chemist.

Names of molecules and their structures are (sometimes) related to each other.  You can think of organic molecules (molecules that are principally built from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen) are constructed like Lego buildings.  There are blocks, each block has a name and you click them into place (that last isn't so simple in practice) to build a molecule. So knowing the secret language of chemistry gives you a window into the structure, which in turn is a clue how the molecule works and what it might be good for.

So why does butter make a chemist think of four?  The stem but — pronounced like "butte" the land formation  —  is used to indicate a four carbon building block.  It is a back-formation from butyric acid, responsible for the smell of rancid butter, which has four carbons in it.  (Butane, a flammable liquid used in lighters, is a four carbon chain.)

The rest of the secret code:

meth- 1 carbon
another back-formation, this time from methanol (wood alcohol) from the Greek root for wine (μέθυ ≡ methy)

eth- 2 carbons
from the Greek, ether, the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere; as seen in ethylene (the sweet smelling flammable gas produced by ripening fruit, particularly bananas.  It's technically a hormone!)

prop- 3 carbons
This one also comes from the Greek (surprise!) for proto and fat, as propionic acid was the first "fatty acid" (acid molecules that also behave like fats or oils); propane gas used in stoves and grills has three carbon atoms and 8 hydrogen atoms per molecule.

but- 4 carbons
From the rancid butter!

after four the prefixes are derived directly from the numbers in the chain
pent- 5
hex- 6
hept- 7
oct- 8
non-  9
dec-10
undec- 11
dodec- 12

So when you see references to the food additive BHA, which stands for butylated hydroxyanisole, one thing you can say about it is that it has a four-carbon unit in it somewhere.  Though, I admit, that's not much help in answering the important questions: What does it do, and how will affect me?

Chemists' Magic Decoder Ring

What if we gave out chemical name
decoders instead of periodic tables?
Vintage magic decoder ring.
Used under CC license. Source.

Earlier this week the Royal Society of Chemistry released a report on the public perceptions of chemistry.  It's a great set of data for those of us who write and talk about chemistry outside of the classroom environment. This infographic sums up the key findings, one of which is that people lack confidence in talking about chemistry.

Stuart Cantrill, chief editor of the journal Nature Chemistry (full disclosure, I contribute regularly to the editorial content of the journal), noted in the discussion which followed the presentation that chemistry uses a very "specific technical language...if you're not talking the same language as someone you are talking to, they can't engage with you...it's almost like a secret language that only chemists know." (Listen here starting at 25:45)

It made me wonder if we should hand out a cheat sheet on how to decode chemical names and functionality instead of the traditional and iconic periodic tables at events. It might make for less splashy t-shirts or shower curtains, but then again, Andy Brunning of Compound Interest makes amazing graphics on all sorts of chemical themes.

Next post:  the secret language of chemists and why butter makes me think of four!

Say that again? Why chemical names tangle on the tongue

Michael Pollan's Food Rules famously advises not eating anything with an ingredient a 3rd grader can't pronounce.  The rule is more about eating closer to the production point, about consuming things that are familiar to 3rd graders (like broccoli and eggs), than it is that chemicals that are hard to pronounce are inherently hazardous, though in some corners it's taken on just that sort of magical thinking.

Why are chemical names so weird looking? Take 2-Methyl-5-(6-methylhept-5-en-2-yl)cyclohexa-1,3-diene for example.  It certainly doesn't sound like anything you would want to eat, but it is just the formal name for the compound that is the main component of ginger oil, and responsible for much of ginger's characteristic bite.  Like crystallized ginger, ginger tea, or a good stir fry?  You've eat this compound in significant quantities.

Chemical names can look like alphabet soup, but they are a way for chemists to paint a compact picture of the structure, or at least to point out key structural features.  Why is it so important to know what a molecule looks like?  The structure of a chemical is what determines its behavior, how it will react, in the body and in the environment.  It's key to understanding how things work on the molecular level:  structure determines function.  Period.

Formal chemical names, called IUPAC names (for the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemists, the body that decides on everything from what new elements will be called to the standards for drawing molecules), are in fact a code from which the full structure of the molecule can be unraveled.  Most of the time chemists call chemicals by a common name, which also gives clues to the structure, though not so many that the molecule could be unambiguously drawn.

So back to 2-Methyl-5-(6-methylhept-5-en-2-yl)cyclohexa-1,3-diene, which looks like

The "methyl"s (METH-ill) in the name refer to a CH₃ group. What, you don't see any CH₃'s here?  This is a chemical line structure, where each intersection point (or end of a line) is a carbon atom, and the hydrogen atoms have almost all been left off.  A chemist sees this structure as 

with the methyls at either end.  The little red dots count off a seven membered chain, the "hept" in the name. The "cyclohexa" (sigh-clo-HEX-uh) points to a six membered ring, while "diene" (DIE-een) means it has two double bonds in it. The numbers tell you where to attach methyls and draw the double bonds.  The little "2-yl" (too-ill) means the seven membered chain is linked to the six membered ring at the second carbon in line.

So these tangled names to a chemist are codes, and once you can read the code, even a bit, you can begin to see a molecule taking shape in your mind when you read its name.

This pronounces as 2-METH-ill / 5, 6-METH-ill-hept 5 een 2 ill cyclo HEX uh 1 3 DIE-een.

There's probably a reason this is better known as zingiberene, which suggests its common origin (ginger or zingiber), but not much about its structure.

Formaldehyde: not just for dead things

Next spring I'm teaching a course on the physical chemistry of food while a colleague is teaching a course on the analytical chemistry of foodstuffs.  Among other science texts we'll be using John Coupland's Introduction to the Physical Chemistry of Food, but I'm also collecting short pieces to put some of the work into a historical and social context.

These aren't actual biological specimens preserved
in formaldehyde, but Halloween decorations.  

Though these days we tend to think of chemists as the untrustworthy creators of toxic, artificial everything, the systematic training of chemists was driven in part by the desire for the public to know what was in their food and water.  In 19th century Britain, hundreds of chemists made their living testing the purity of everything from butter to well water.  So when the Food Babe tells you there is something "yucky" in your food, the reason we know it is there is some chemist developed a careful protocol for its analysis, and other chemists tested the material.

Molecular structure
of formaldehyde

I've been thinking about formaldehyde, one of the simplest organic molecules (to a chemist, organic means made up mostly of carbon and hydrogen atoms, and has nothing to do with whether the molecule is synthetic or natural or...). Last year, formaldehyde, which is a preservative, was in the news because Johnson & Johnson had agreed to remove it from baby shampoo, though as Matt Hartings and Tara Haelle clearly pointed out in a piece at Slate, it was in such low concentrations that it posed no risk to babies (who, they point out, themselves contain substantial amounts of formaldehyde.)

Pepsi is reformulating Diet Pepsi to take out the artificial sweetener aspartame. The Food Babe is crowing that she and her army have forced Kraft to remove the so-called coal tar dyes (e.g. tartrazine/FD&C Yellow 5), to be replaced by natural colorings from spices.  What does all this have do do with formaldehyde?

From the Food Babe's 'campaign' literature.

To start with those natural colorings - at least one of them used in the UK version of mac and cheese, beta-carotene, isn't extracted from natural sources but synthesized from petroleum feedstocks (just like those coal-tar dyes).  One of the starting materials:  formaldehyde. The other natural colorings on the table — annatto, turmeric and paprika — are not quite what you might think either.  While you might imagine shaking in some spices from a quaint bottle, the spices themselves are not used as colorants, the colorants are extracted using organic (not that kind of organic, the chemist's kind of organic) solvents, such as ethyl acetate.  It's unclear to me why these colorants, particularly beta-carotene pass muster with the Food Babe.


Aspartame is sometimes vilified because it is metabolized into methanol and formaldehyde in the body.  Which it is.  You already contain a lot of formaldehyde, about 12 milligrams per liter of fluid in your cells.  One source is metabolism of the amino acids, particularly, serine and glycine (in naturally occurring proteins), from which your body scavenges methyl groups (CH₃) to pop on to various structures.  Aspartame is a very tiny protein, so the same pathways that produce methanol and formaldehyde from natural sources, dismantle aspartame to yield methanol and formaldehyde, though the amounts produced are tens of times lower than what comes from eating apples and fish.

Because formaldehyde occurs naturally in foods (about 5 mg per serving in some fruits, fish is also high, pectin containing fruits such as apples add significantly to the amount of formaldehyde ingested), our bodies have a mechanism for dealing with it, we process about 60 to 100 grams of formaldehyde a day and do so quickly.  Formaldehyde has a half-life of about 1 to 2 minutes in the body.

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Why are those spices colored?  What does it have to do with quantum mechanics, flamingos and canaries?  Read this post, the very first one written for the blog,  to find out.

References
EFSA report on endogenous versus exogenous sources of formaldehyde.
EFSA review of curcurmin, a component of turmeric, which had been suspected of being genotoxic.

A small sip of oxidane

My better half pulled a pitcher out of the refrigerator last night and poured a glass, thinking it was what we usually stock, lemonade. "Um, what is this?" The vibrant green color bordered on neon. "Either margarita or appletini. Given the color, I'd hazard appletini." The face he made was priceless.

As it turns out, the stuff tastes perfectly acceptable, once you get past the name and color. But names definitely matter. If offered a sip of oxidane, would you (should you) drink it?

All natural, locally sourced liquid nitrogen?

Robyn Sue Fisher wants you to know that she would never cook with chemicals not found in nature. Smitten, her ice cream shop in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, may at moments resemble a high school chemistry lab, but that’s because Fisher uses liquid nitrogen to freeze her product.

Nitrogen is “a natural element,” she notes. “It’s all around us.” [The original lead to this NPR blog post.]

I imagine not a few chemists reading this want Robyn Sue Fisher to know that liquid nitrogen is not found in nature on this planet. I suspect if she posted this photo of a cryogenic nitrogen plant in the ice cream shop, she'd have a hard time convincing her customers that liquid nitrogen was natural.

Her comments beg the question of what constitutes a chemical in the mind of a non-chemist.   If we take IUPAC's Gold Book as the arbiter of the technical definition,  a chemical is a material of "constant composition best characterized by the entities (molecules, formula units, atoms) it is composed of." Everyday language has drifted from the technical.  The Oxford English Dictionary offers this definition for the non-technical speaker: "a distinct compound or substance, especially one which has been artificially prepared or purified."

Most people would agree that in common usage chemical carries the connotation of both artificial and noxious, while chemists attach no such presumptions as to source or toxicity to the term.  Much as chemists wish it were not so, there is a growing language gap, and I think it unlikely we are going to regain the ground lost.  Molecule still comes across as more neutral in tone to a non-chemist.   So we are in a moment where we have people who are aghast at chemicals in their food, and others who are fascinated by molecular gastronomy (and likely some overlap in that population).

In principle, I do like the idea of locally sourced ingredients, maybe I should start my own shop and advertise that I use only locally sourced, artisanally produced liquid nitrogen?

I have to say I was also fascinated with how the NPR post morphed throughout the day in response to the comments on the blog.  By the end of the day the introduction read:

Robyn Sue Fisher's ice cream shop, Smitten, in San Francisco's Hayes Valley, may at moments resemble a high school chemistry lab, but that's because Fisher uses liquid nitrogen to freeze her product. 

Nitrogen is "a natural element," she notes. "It's all around us."

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Andrew Bissette has a good piece about chemophobia on Carmen Drahl's blog Grand CENtral today  (In Defense of Chemophobia) which, along with this post from 2011 by Sciencegeist touch on the language issue.

(H/T to Fran who sent me the link to the original NPR post) 

St. Ignatius' Beans: Strychnine and herbal remedies

Before chemists became adept at synthesizing and purifying single molecules, materia medica relied heavily on plant based materials.  The chemicals in plants are not uniformly innocuous, or safe at any dose, a point I tried to make in this article at Slate a couple of weeks ago.  A case in point:  St. Ignatius' beans.

Last fall, I was digging through a 1903 organic chemistry text (looking for examples of eponyms for this article), when a familiar name caught my eye. What was St. Ignatius doing in a chemistry textbook, an organic one at that?  Jesuits, I could understand (quinine is extracted from cinchona, also called Jesuits' bark), but Ignatius (the founder of the Jesuits) himself?

"Strychnine, C₂₁H₂₂O₂N₂, is found in St. Ignatius' bean..."  What is a violent poison doing in a bean named for Ignatius?  Despite the fact that I was up against an impending writing deadline and had a couple of dozen exams to grade, I had to know.

Faba Sancti Ignatii were first described by an Austrian Jesuit living in the Philippines in the 17th century, George Kamel, S.J. (his description was published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1699 - and yes, I looked up the Latin version).  Later authors speculated the plant was named for Ignatius because of its many medicinal virtues (which they do not list).  At the turn of the last century strychnine was part of the US Pharmacopoeia, prescribed as a stimulant — it was implicated in a early Olympic doping scandal — and for gastric upset; in the Phillipines it was often (more sensibly) the bean was worn on a string around the neck for protection against various diseases. These days it forms the basis for a homeopathic nostrum prescribed for grief and melancholia, particularly when associated with an abundance of tears.

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A version of this post appeared at Quantum Theology.

Chemophobia: The Boy with a Thorn in His Joints

I'm at ScienceOnline2013 where Carmen Drahl and Dr. Rubidium just finished running a terrific session on chemophobia: how can we bridge the gap between "better living through chemistry" and ads for "chemical-free sleep aids." The thrust of the session was not how to convince people chemistry and chemicals are good, but more about how to inject nuance into the public conversation. Chemicals have risks and benefits — and of course, are unavoidable. But we current view chemical as synonymous with toxic, hazardous, unnatural or just plain bad.

What are the roots of this cultural shift? Can understanding these help scientists and writers communicate more clearly and in the end help people not only understand what is in their "stuff" — chemicals, it's all chemicals — but give them tools to work with and make decisions about the materials that make up the world — chemicals. As @docfreeride (ethicist Janet Stemmwedel) noted at another session yesterday, we can agree on facts, and still make different decisions based on them.

Today's New York Times has a perfect example of the various ways chemophobia presents in the Magazine: The Boy with a Thorn in His Joints. The piece chronicles Susannah Meadow's search for an effective treatment for her son's rheumatoid arthritis. She agonizes about the decision to give him methotrexate (which in high doses is used in anticancer treatment) and turns to alternative treatments, in particular four-marvels powder. There are intense arguments with the pediatricians and with her husband over the issue. I was struck by two things in this piece. First, the language Meadows uses to limn the controversy, and second her ignorance, not so much of the chemistry that is in your face (methotrexate), but of the ways in which chemistry is couched in alternative cultural schemes(four-marvels powder).

It makes me wonder how chemophobia is linked to the language we use to talk about it. It can be nearly impossible for an non-chemist to figure out what methotrexate is (beyond "a chemical"). The very name sounds harsh. Four-marvels powder is easy to parse: a powder with four effects. Its name rings with hope.

I also wonder if we worry more about stuff we are familiar with, we've heard more talk on the street about their risks. So we obsess about vaccines, because we hear and read about the side-effects of vaccines, but how many people know anyone who has died of measles? (One of my sister's friends died of measles when I was a child, before there was a vaccine.) So we get in the Times' piece "I was desperate to find a way...without the drugs." pushed up against "[My husband] has always been more comfortable with pharmaceuticals, more trusting in general."

Of course, four-marvel powder is a pharmaceutical, it's just from a different pharmacopoeia — the traditional Chinese — than the one Meadows or her husband is familiar with. Meadows can read the package insert with information on the side-effects of methotrexate, she may be unaware of the routine advice given in Chinese medicine programs (and yes, there are formal academic programs in Chinese medicine, e.g. at Nanyang Technical University) about four-marvels powder (it should never be given to pregnant women, for example, which might make you hesitate before giving it long term to infants or young children).

The session at SciOnline2013 brainstormed about effective ways to help people develop a better sense of nuance around what is a chemical and what are the risks of this particular chemical? What strategies do you think would be most effective?