Archive for the 'Advertisements' Category

Hello friends.  Remember me?  It’s your ol’ buddy, Paul Bracher.

You’re probably asking yourself, “What brings this guy back from the dead?”  Well, when a postdoc in our lab showed me what arrived in the mail, not only did I roll over in my grave, I decided to resurrect everybody’s favorite chemistry game: “What’s Wrong with this Picture?”

The following 52-page brochure arrived courtesy of Oxford University Press with the following cover.  That’s right…COVER:

Oh. My. God.  The real question is: What’s right with this picture?  Not much.  There are messed up bond angles, aryl Texas carbons, acyl Texas carbons, Rhode-Island carbons, bizzare peroxides, Texas oxygens, Texas nitrogens, and the list goes on.   

What the hell is wrong with these people and why the hell is the ACS logo on this piece of garbage?  The O.U.P. editors should be drawn and quartered, and their heads should be displayed on pikes outside of ACS headquarters in Washington.

As if the front cover didn’t offer enough entertainment, the back cover has the following unintentionally humorous statement:

xford (sic) University Press, Inc. publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.

Hooray for excellence.  Anyway, this weekend I’ll probably post on the upcoming Nobel Prize announcement (Oct. 10th).  After that, I might go back into hibernation.  We’ll see. 

One last piece of housekeeping before we move on to the Official ChemBark ACS Fall ‘07 Preview Post:

Two people have contacted me about the possibility of advertising on ChemBark. As you know by now, I really don’t like the idea of having ads on this site. I don’t want to be perceived as having conflicts of interest when writing, holding down a second job, or personally profiting off a site that the rest of you contribute to as well. Still, it seems kind of silly to turn down money when it could go to something worthwhile, much like Kyle has done over at The Chem Blog. So, if any of you care, feel free to weigh in on the idea of ChemBark’s running ads. There are two options:

Option #1 — No ads of any sort on ChemBark.

Option #2 — Ads on ChemBark, with all proceeds (after I report the money as income and pay taxes on it) going to the Reeve Foundation.

Why the Reeve Foundation? Well, it’s a charity that is run well and has a mission that I ardently support. Also, I don’t want to get into arguments about what charity should get the money. If you don’t like the Foundation, vote option #1.

Option #2 involves a little trust on your part. First, you’d trust me not to smear advertising feces all over the place and ruin your reading experience. Second, in order to keep this operation completely legit, ad revenue would go into my pockets as income, I would pay taxes on it, and then you’d trust me to cut a check to the Reeve Foundation. I’d scan the checks and post them here. It’s simply too hard to set up a tax-free charitable operation and worry about all of that legal junk and paperwork.

If option #2 wins, I’ll eventually come up with some sort of advertisement policy. All ads would clearly be labeled as such. No popups. No ugly text lists. I’d start by waiting for advertisers to contact us as they are now. If a vendor or some author wanted to put a 100×100 box on the sidebar for a month, that’d be cool. Buying ads on specific posts would be an option too. We might even have an option for cheap classified ads if people wanted to sell old technical books or run personals in search of hot chemical romance.

That said, if the level of support falls too short of unanimous and enthusiastic, it ain’t happening.

In setting up the background for this post, I’m going to have to come clean about my penchant for haberdashery. Although I only wear a suit roughly three times year, I own over thirty neckties, five pocket squares (only plebeians call them handkerchiefs), and even a bow tie. I felt compelled to buy one to make my wardrobe complete—there are few fashion statements more clear than wearing a bow tie.  You’re basically saying either:

1) I am better than you and want you to know it, or
2) I am a big dork

Anyway, to match my preferred color of dress shirt, French blue, I bought a solid green bow tie from Beau Ties, Ltd. To my delight, the company has been sending me junk mail ever since.  I was recently flipping through their Spring catalog and came across the new Solids Collection:

Magnificent, aren’t they?  The online version is here. I’ve never seen chemistry used so heavily in a marketing campaign. Carbon Black? Gold Oxide?! CADMIUM yellow?!  I had no idea cadmium was yellow. (It turns out that it isn’t—the soft metal is actually silvery gray—cadmium yellow refers to its sulfur salt.)  There are even ties in the series named after organic dye molecules:

Alizarin Crimson:

and Carmine (which derives its color from carminic acid):

Pretty spiffy.  I’d say that chemistry has finally become cool, but this is an ad for bow ties, so I’ll shut up now.

Ready for another round of what’s wrong with this picture?  Good.  Take a look at this ad for ACS Publications that ran in the last edition of C&EN (Feb. 19, p. 33, click for full image):

I’m not particularly upset that Dr. Julian isn’t wearing gloves, and I’m not going to whine about the bright sources of light in the background that make this an awful photograph.  This time, my beef is with the caption:

In 1948, Percy Julian developed a new way to synthesize hydrocortisone, which is still used to treat rheumatoid arthritis; 45 articles published by Julian are in the ACS Legacy Archives. 

As far as I know, Julian never came up with an original synthesis of hydrocortisone (or cortisone, for that matter).  What Julian is famous for making is Reichstein’s Compound S, which Upjohn later found a way to oxidize to cortisone using a microorganism.  In fact, once Upjohn discovered the process for selective oxidation at the 11-position, there were many routes to cortisone, not just through compound S.  Julian’s route through steroids isolated from soybeans was not as effective as Syntex’s route through the Mexican Yam, since this species of yam produced a greater yield of the steroid precursors.  Julian eventually quit his job as director of the Soya Products Division at Glidden so that he could work with the Mexican Yam.

While we’re busy correcting things, the 45 articles by Julian that the ACS claims to have in its “Legacy Archives” include two addition/correction notices.  Thus, the correct value for the number of articles he published with the ACS is 43, two of which he later amended.  Feel free to check my math.

So, let’s recap:

1.  Julian did not make hydrocortisone in 1948.   He reported the partial synthesis of Compound S in 1951 (submitted to JACS in 1950).  I don’t know what 1948 has to do with anything.

2.  Julian never came up with an original, complete route to hydrocortisone.  Upjohn’s fermentive oxidation of the 11-position of steroids made it possible to take Julian’s route to Compound S all the way to cortisone.  This process was developed in 1951/2.  (Although he did not make the key discovery, Julian should be praised for predicting that this amazing transformation would eventually be discovered.)

3.  Julian/Glidden applied for a patent on the “Preparation of Cortisone” on September 9, 1950, but it was one of those pie-in-the-sky deals.  They never actually made the key transformation, and basically said so in the patent: “The present invention is not concerned with the introduction of the 11-keto group, nor with the formation of the acetyl group in the 17-position of the molecule, but is concerned with the other conversions and reactions mentioned.”

3b.  In light of this important fact, it is amazing that Julian was inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame for this particular patent.  Why not choose one of his many other inventions?

4.  The ACS Legacy Archives contain 43 (not 45) articles by Percy Julian.

Do not leave with the wrong impression; Percy Julian was a truly excellent chemist.  But the fact that the ACS didn’t even bother to get its facts right suggests that this full-page ad was more about pandering to a perceived need to participate in Black History Month than about honoring an excellent chemist.  In the future, I hope that the ACS publishes an ad that accurately reflects Julian’s wonderful contributions to our field, and I hope it doesn’t wait until next February to do so.

I just pre-ordered a copy of the new Aldrich Catalog Handbook of Fine Chemicals. After two editions with preposterous colors (teal and orange peel), they finally got it right: glorious crimson.

I don’t know about everyone else, but the Aldrich catalog ranks #1 on my list of the top desk references of all time. Vogel’s Handbook of Practical Organic Chemistry is #2, followed by March, Silverstein & Webster, and Jencks. While I’m increasingly using Web sites and databases (e.g. ISIS) to place orders, I can always count on the Aldrich catalog for FW, b.p., and density.

My chemistry lab partner from high school said that when he took sophomore organic chemistry here, Jacobsen told the entire class to go on the Web and request a copy of the Aldrich handbook. I bet the guys in Milwaukee were really pleased about having to ship a hundred of these 5-lb. monsters to Cambridge for students who didn’t need to order anything. That said, giving handbooks away as freebies probably makes good business sense. I’m always surprised at my fellow researchers’ loyalty to the company; they blindly order from Aldrich without looking at Alfa Aesar, TCI, or anyone else. A lot of times there’s a big difference in price, and I doubt that the quality is that far off. The only other example of chemical brand loyalty that comes to mind is organometallic chemists’ love of Strem. They either sell higher quality reagents or have an outstanding marketing department.

While cleaning my desk before heading back to DC this weekend, I came across these ads from Dionex in two recent editions of C&EN:

First, from the Nov. 20 edition (p. 7, click to enlarge):

While I applaud Dionex’s choice of using data instead of a hot model to peddle their products, I’d like to see some units on those ordinate axes, please. Someone must have called them with a similar request, because they had inserted units by the Dec. 11 edition (p. 5):

Here’s an excellent example of how scientific units are case-sensitive. To most scientists, “AU” refers to an astronomical unit, the distance from the Earth to the Sun. In lower case, “au” stands for atomic units, while “uA” is generally accepted as an abbreviation for microamps and “Au” refers to gold.

Here though, Dionex is using “AU” to refer to arbitrary units, presumably of absorption intensity. That leads me to wonder: what the hell is an “mAU”? One-thousandth of an arbitrary unit? Isn’t that…ummm…still arbitrary?

Anyway, since it’s the season for giving, let’s do the physicists and astronomers a favor by spelling out “arbitrary units” in 2007. In return, they can let a chemist snag their Nobel Prize once in a while.

You knew it was bound to happen, and now it finally has: a chemistry professor has made a video advertisement to attract first year graduate students. Check it out (pops).

Aside from her mesmerizing voice, the spokesmodel’s eyes will follow your cursor around the screen. From the looks of her hair, it must be really windy in Professor Grzybowski’s lab. Then again, he is in Chicago.

For the purpose of full disclosure, I should note that Bartosz was a former labmate. We overlapped for under a year, so I never got the chance to get to know him, but he’s a wicked smart guy and his research is really cool. Now, let’s see if anyone follows his lead in making lab ads.