ChemBark

I am a bit behind in reading my C&ENs. It might be just as well, as yesterday, I was dismayed by an advertisement placed by Lilly on the inside cover of the 20 February 2012 issue:

I can think of no worse way to honor an outstanding, up-and-coming chemist than to misspell his name in the pages of the official news magazine of the American Chemical Society:

How insulting. For the record, it is T-e-h-s-h-i-k Yoon, and you can view his interesting work in synthesis and photochemistry here or follow him on Twitter at @TehshikYoon.

The error aside, Lilly has picked a fine group of chemists over the years, haven’t they? Most of the biggies in organic chemistry have found themselves on the receiving end of Lilly’s grant, and all were chosen when they were young and juicy. It’s definitely a list worth showing off in a full-page ad, but preferably one without an obvious spelling error.

Update (8:50pm): An astute reader e-mailed to say that the ad also messed up the spelling of Amir Hoveyda‘s name. Click on the top pic and see for yourself. Ouch.

Update II (4:10am): The hits keep coming…commenters ZAL and See Arr Oh point out that Lilly also misspelled the names of Glenn Micalizio and André Charette.

Update III (3/6): Commenter Giagan points out Tom Lectka‘s name is also misspelled. Ugh.

Today’s image was kindly sent in by Santiago, who stumbled across this scene at the Globus department store in Geneva, Switzerland:

(click to enlarge)

Kiehl’s makes beauty products, and what could be more beautiful than phenanthroline, right? I sure hope there is plenty of carbon monoxide in my skin cream—especially carbon monoxide that’s missing four electrons.

But not all is wrong in the world of chemical art: check out the cool gate at Yale that See Arr Oh found. The chemical structure represents a tetrapeptide that spells out Y-A-L-E (tyrosine-alanine-leucine-glutamic acid). Pretty cool.

It’s déjà vu all over again. Today’s edition of What’s Wrong with this Picture? comes to us courtesy of a concerned reader who discovered this grotesque conference room at Iowa State University:

If I were Ben or Gail Plummer, I’d be furious. These structures are a hot mess. Texas carbons, irregular bond angles…yuck.

Remember the new undergraduate labs at Georgia Tech? It seems interior decoration with nonsensical chemical structures is really catching on.

If you encounter chemical nonsense you’d like to share, please send it in. Blog editors are standing by.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I attempted to salvage a post from my (defunct) personal blog in which I had ranked the top 5 “power couples” in chemistry. Unfortunately, the Internet Archive’s spider somehow managed to miss it, and I fear that the thread has been lost forever. All I can remember is that I ranked Jackie Barton & Peter Dervan (Caltech) first, Laura Kiessling & Ron Raines (Wisconsin) second, then somewhere down the line were Mary & David Gin (Illinois). I know that was waaaay back in March 2006, but if you can remember the others, leave a comment.

While controversial rankings have become a staple of ChemBark, I am going to take a pass on updating my list for 2011. It’s just too difficult, though I’d definitely add Christina White & Marty Burke (Illinois) to the mix—I’m a big fan of both.

So, no new rankings, but I do have an interesting story about the old “power couples” post.

As you might imagine, I occasionally receive IRL/human feedback on the blog—both positive and negative. The feedback runs the gamut from dirty looks across hallways to direct, verbal accostings, and it comes from people at all levels of our grand institution (from undergrads to retirees). I am always willing to awkwardly accept praise or criticism, though afterward, I usually end up wishing the discussion had occurred in a comments thread where more people could benefit from it.

So anyway…in March of last year, we had a big party at Caltech to celebrate my current advisor’s 75th birthday. The event was staged on the Saturday before the ACS National Meeting in Anaheim, and many of chemistry’s brightest stars were able to attend. It was a really fun night.

As things were wrapping up, my eyes caught a former grad student from our lab directing a woman through the crowd. I was the obvious target of their advance. The woman’s face was instantly familiar, but it took me a couple of seconds to realize…

Hey, that’s Laura Kiessling!

In the next three seconds, my mind raced through the familiar routine:

Uh, oh…what have I said about Laura Kiessling? Hmmmmm. And this was such a good night. Ugh.

It was great to meet Prof. Kiessling, and as we exchanged hellos, it clicked that I had mentioned her and Ron Raines (who would join the conversation a few moments later) in the “Power Couples” post. Sure enough, that ended up being the first topic of conversation:

LK: We’ve got a bone to pick with you.

PB: Ah, ok.

LK: You had a post on your blog about the top power couples in chemistry, and you only ranked us number #2!

The conversation was all in good fun, and they were both very nice. I conceded that those rankings were many years old and in desperate need of an update.

But, of course, I never delivered that update and I won’t provide it now, either. But if you want to have a go, dear readers of ChemBark, please feel free…

A concerned labmate brought my attention to a chemical abomination on last week’s episode of the increasingly unpopular television show House, M.D.

Thanks to a very special friend of mine, we can all enjoy video footage of what Hollywood writers believe constitutes a realistic demonstration for a high school chemistry class:

Marvelous, isn’t it? Notice how the teacher isn’t wearing a single piece of personal protective equipment—no gloves, no goggles, no lab coat—whilst working in front of a poster that reads “LAB SAFETY RULES”.

Who knows what this demonstration was supposed to be, but the last time I checked, HF wasn’t combustible. In fact, its NFPA 704 flammability rating is zero. Oh well, I doubt the flame coming out of the Bunsen burner is real anyway, seeing as how the dude just picked up the metal with his bare hands. The limp gas line and the fact that the blue flame doesn’t deflect upward when it is tilted are also nice pieces of laziness on the part of the production staff.

If you plan to replicate this experiment at home, I suggest that you work with hydrofluoric acid in plastic containers instead of glass ones. HF is a great etchant for glass and many other materials that contain silicon. Furthermore, if you have an accident and get HF on your skin or in your lungs, you are going to be in a world of hurt. That stuff is nasty and goes right for the calcium in your body. In the event of an accident, you should apply calcium gluconate gel to the affected areas of your skin and seek medical attention immediately. Preferably, not from Dr. Gregory House.

It always surprises me how companies will happily spend thousands of dollars to run printed ads with inventories of chemical structures. These structures are unsearchable by computer, and is there anyone out there who thumbs through science magazines on the lookout for fine chemicals?

“Wow! That 1-bromo-3-methylbutane looks fantastic. I’m calling these guys right away!”

Maybe such a response has occurred once or twice in the past decade, but this approach seems like a shot in the dark. I imagine most people who find themselves in need of 1-bromo-3-methylbutane turn to the catalog of their favorite vendor, the Available Chemicals Directory, or Google.

While the following ad certainly fits the profile (C&EN, 1/23/2012, p. 31), it bothered me for a different reason:

I can’t understand why you would go through the trouble of paying thousands of dollars to run an ad and not bother to proofread the thing. Let’s start from the bottom right corner and move clockwise, shall we?

1. Coumarin. Great. I have no problems here.

2. O-Anisaldehyde. This is a rather common error in style, but it is still an error. If the “O” is meant to signify “ortho,” then it should be written as a lowercase letter, even if it begins a sentence. It should also be italicized. A capital “O” written like that in a name usually signifies substitution on oxygen.

3. 2-Hydroxy-benzaldehyde. There are two problems here. First, you don’t need a hyphen after “Hydroxy.” Second, if you are going to use common names like o-anisaldehyde, then why not call salicylaldehyde by its common name? Alternately, you could have called the previous compound “2-methoxybenzaldehyde.” Basically, why not be consistent?

4. 5-Helo-salicylic aldehyde. <Facepalm> Now I guess it’s OK to use a common name? More importantly, what the hell is a “helo” group? The period after the “Cl” is also a nice touch.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. If I were in the advertising department at GPhS, I’d take $200 from the budget to buy a copy of the ACS Style Guide and pay for an eye exam.

When the quality of your advertisements is this poor, do you think people might question the quality of your other products?

Just a thought.