Archive for the 'Popular Culture' Category

I recently came across this screenshot I took of an episode of Deep Space Nine (part of the Star Trek franchise):

That molecule is a key component of Ketracel-White, the sole source of nutrition for a species of warrior slaves. When the wormhole to their home-world was blocked by a minefield, the employers of the warriors needed to find a way to synthesize it.

Sadly, that’s where the chemistry ended. I think it’s the only time I saw a chemical structure in the whole series, which was otherwise littered with fantastic challenges in biology, physics, and engineering. Of course, it’s not just Star Trek that slights our field. Maybe it’s just that engineering problems are more entertaining. I saw Apollo 13 when flipping through channels Saturday night and couldn’t stop watching it. NASA is just full of these cool stories, including my favorite: the one about flight controller John “SCE-to-AUX” Aaron saving Apollo 12’s mission when the rocket was hit by lightning during launch. There’s audio here of the communication loops, where you can listen to how Aaron saved millions of dollars and enabled a cool science mission to proceed by knowing the vehicle’s instrumentation inside and out.

Anyway, in hopes that someone in Hollywood is reading this blog, here are my best ideas for how chemistry could be worked into a hit project:

1. Book, with possible movie deal (depending on sales): A postdoc in a total synthesis lab discovers a cure for cancer, but fearing that his advisor will take the credit, doesn’t tell anyone so he can publish it as an assistant professor. Unfortunately, he doesn’t manage to get a single job offer due to his poor record of publication. He eventually pursues a career in drug discovery and dies of melanoma at the age of 33.

2. Tweener Movie: A girl genius (played by Hilary Duff) extracts a natural product from a pretty flower and discovers that it cures AIDS. When the government forces her to marry the smartest man in the country (played by me), she steals the identity of a grad student and chooses a life of misery over a life of misery.

3. Action Movie: A nerdy agoraphobe (played by Ethan Hawke, or possibly, me) solves the world’s energy crisis by using his basement lab to synthesize a donor-acceptor dyad that undergoes photoinduced electron transfer when irradiated with sunlight. The petroleum industry puts a price on his head and chases him through the corridors of the US Patent and Trademark Office in an ultimately successful attempt to eliminate all knowledge of the molecule. The movie ends with the nerd’s lab notebook disappearing into a boiling vat of crude oil being stirred by the Secretary General of OPEC.

4. TV Sitcom: In every episode, a country bumpkin uses his barn-based laboratory to cook up a new way to get high. He often runs afoul of the law, but fortunately, the local sheriff is a bumbling idiot who doesn’t understand how to interpret a simple first-order NMR spectrum or solve the Schroedinger Equation.

5. Theater: A diabolical foreign dictator assembles a team of scientists to build a chemical weapon that recognizes DNA sequences only present in the ethnic race of their enemy. The weapon works, at first, before something goes horribly wrong: every living creature on Earth dies except for me and Hilary Duff.

Anyone wishing to produce any of these ideas should feel free to contact me for the associated scripts and musical scores.