…a nanoscientist’s quest to mimic Nature’s molecular blueprints

Have you ever found yourself entranced by the exquisite beauty and complexity of living things? Like the intricacies of a budding flower, or the mesmerizing patterns on a butterfly’s wing? Have you ever wondered: “what are living things made of?” Are these materials just as beautiful if we were to zoom way way in and look at the actual molecular building blocks that make up life? Take a look at the interactive link The Scale of Things to see just how small the building blocks of life really are! Well the answer is “OMG – totally!” All living things share a ubiquitous set of molecular building materials we call proteins, and they are absolutely stunning! They are not only smashingly beautiful to look at, they are capable of performing a mind-numbing myriad of very intricate and complex functions that are essential to life. In a very special guest post, leading nanoscience Professor Ron Zuckermann of the renowned Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory recounts his life’s mission as a chemist to try and build artificial microscale sheets made up of nature’s very own building blocks—proteins. Everything you wanted to know about what nanotechnology is, exactly, why engineering proteins is the science of the future, and what we plan to use these discoveries for, under the “continue reading” cut.

I am a Materials Scientist working in a nanoscience research institute called The Molecular Foundry. A fundamental problem in nanoscience is how to make man-made materials with a similar level of precision and complexity at the molecular level found in nature. I am interested in applying lessons from the world of protein structure to practical man-made materials. If we are successful, we should be able to make materials that are cheap and rugged like a piece of plastic, yet be able to perform highly sophisticated functions, like recognizing a molecular partner with high specificity, or even catalyzing chemical transformations. Such materials could be used to make sensors for the detection of harmful chemicals, or as robust medical diagnostics that could survive harsh conditions, say in an underdeveloped nation. In a nutshell, we aim to make artificial proteins. This is an incredibly difficult problem, and one I have been working on for more than 20 years now. Sound a bit ambitious, or maybe a bit crazy? As I will describe in this article, it may actually be quite possible if we break the problem down into bite size chunks. The challenge comes down to two fundamental things: design and synthesis.

Protein architecture
When I look at the molecular structure of a protein molecule, I see an architectural blueprint that has survived untold generations of evolution and optimization. How then do we break open the hidden rules in these structures and use them to guide us in the design of man-made materials? Over the past several decades, scientists have used the biophysics techniques of X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) to determine the exact three-dimensional (3D) structure of thousands upon thousands of proteins. What’s cool is that these are all available for anyone to look at (for free!) and study in the Protein Data Bank.

The most fundamental thing to notice is that nearly all protein structures share the following characteristics: (1) they are made of a linear polymer chain that is folded into a precise 3D structure and (2) they are comprised of only 20 simple molecular building blocks called amino acids, arranged in an exact sequence along the polymer chain. When we think of a ‘polymer’ we think of a long chain of repeating chemical building blocks (called monomers) found in materials like nylon or polyethylene. Such man-made materials are incredibly useful and ubiquitous now in our environment (plastic bags or saran wrap, for example). But nature beat us to the punch a long, long time ago. Biopolymers, like proteins and nucleic acids are fundamentally way more sophisticated than man-made polymers. Even though they share the same basic architecture – a linear chain of chemical building blocks – biopolymers contain information encoded in their monomer sequence. This is not unlike the way we store information in a computer. But instead of a long string of 1’s and 0’s, nature uses long polymer chains of either 4 nucleotides (the building block units of RNA and DNA), or 20 amino acids (the building block units of proteins). These 20 chemically distinct amino acid building blocks are arranged in a particular order along the chain that we refer to as the protein’s “sequence.” This sequence is powerful because in many cases it provides all the information or “molecular instructions” necessary for the polymer chain to fold up into a precisely defined 3-dimensional structure. Once folded, the protein is poised and ready for action. The fields of Structural Biology and Protein Folding have revealed the exact way that proteins fold to form local “secondary” structures, called alpha helices and beta sheets, and how these assemble together to create the fully folded protein structure. Think all this sounds a bit too complicate? Try visiting FoldIt, a really fun video game where you can actually learn all about protein folding!

Protein Mimicry
If we ever hope to create man-made protein-like materials, it is safe to assume that we will need a polymer system that shares some of the basic protein-like characteristics: for example, they will need to have a sizable set of chemically diverse monomer building blocks that can be arranged in a particular order along a linear polymer chain of at least 50 monomers long. This is a quite a tall order simply from a chemical synthesis perspective. Moreover, once we are over that hurdle, design tools will be needed to help us figure out which sequences to make.

In the early 1990s, I invented a way to synthesize a new family of non-natural polymers we called “peptoids.” I had just graduated from UC Berkeley with a PhD in organic chemistry and joined a start-up biotechnology company to develop new technologies to accelerate drug discovery. We developed peptoids to be potential therapeutic drugs. The cool thing about peptoids is that the building blocks are very very close in structure to Nature’s amino acids, but different enough to be much more rugged. They can be made from very cheap and simple chemical building blocks, and they can be made in any predetermined sequence you want. We soon developed robotic synthesizers to automatically synthesize these materials for us (see below).

Before long we discovered that short peptoid chains (just 3 monomers long) could have potent biological activities and showed promise as drug candidates. But what really floored me was that the peptoid synthesis chemistry we developed worked so efficiently that we could link over 50 monomers together, one after the other. This means each building block was being attached to a growing chain with an incredible accuracy of over 99.5%! This was exactly the tool we needed to begin the quest for creating artificial proteins. We had discovered the most efficient and practical way to make non-natural polymers of a specific sequence. This was completely awesome!

There was only one problem – the company I worked for had no interest in such a bold quest into basic science. How could such a pursuit lead to a moneymaking product in a few months? In 2006 I moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where I set out in earnest to search for artificial proteins. Fortunately, tackling difficult problems in basic science is much more the norm here. And more good news – my previous employer was kind enough to donate my robots to me. Armed with this technology to synthesize peptoid polymers, we turned to the next daunting task: which sequence of monomers should we make? It turns out that there are an absolutely astronomical number of possible peptoid sequences that can be made. Consider that there are several hundred building blocks to choose from at each of the 50 positions of a polymer chain. This means there are over 100 to the 50th power potential sequences to choose from. This is more than the number of atoms in the universe! What was a chemist to do?

Like Oil and Water
To help us focus our sequence design, we once again turned to nature. A long-time collaborator and friend of mine, Professor Ken Dill of UC San Francisco has studied protein structure in detail for decades, and has distilled some fundamental rules that are universal to all protein structures. He notes that protein structures are like globes with a water-loving surface and a water-hating (or oil-like) interior. The bottom line is you can basically lump each amino acid in the protein’s sequence into one of two categories: oil-like or water-like. This simple classification can tell you whether an amino acid is located on the inside or the outside of the protein.

The amazing thing about this insight is that it’s like looking at a protein wearing X-ray glasses! Instead of seeing 20 different “colors” of amino acids, we see only two: black and white. We are back to a simple binary code—like 1’s and 0’s. This makes it much easier to see the secret patterns hidden within the sequence. In fact, many researches have convincingly demonstrated that these binary patterns are simple, plentiful and predictable.

So with our handy X-ray glasses on we returned our gaze to the peptoid structure problem. We realized that all our sequence recipe needed was a touch of Dill! This meant we could greatly simplify our search for the right peptoid sequence. We needed to only consider two, diametrically opposed building blocks: water loving and water hating.

Nanosheets
Inspired by these insights, we set out to find the right sequence patterns that would result in a precisely ordered structure in a non-natural peptoid polymer. We began to systematically unlock the sequence code by using our robots to synthesize all the possible repeating patterns of these two disparate building blocks. We reasoned that if we were to make something precisely ordered, it would “crystallize” into something that we could see. Fortunately we have really powerful electron microscopes in my building. So we started cranking through all the possible sequence patterns, dissolving up each new sequence in some water and taking it down to the basement to look at them really close up.

Now it is a little nuts to think that we could make something precisely structured from a peptoid polymer, since it is known that each strand is about as stiff as a piece of overcooked spaghetti. And as one might expect, most of our sequences looked really messy and gooey. But very soon we saw something quite striking. In one particular sample, we saw large, flat paper-like objects with sharp, straight edges. And they were floating around everywhere in the solution. An unexpected sight to be sure!

Fast-forward another year of making careful measurements and reproducing the results over and over. We determined that these sheets were only two molecules thick, and yet millions and millions of molecules wide. We had discovered the largest and thinnest organic crystals ever! We were able to use one of the most powerful electron microscopes in the world in the National Center of Electron Microscopy, to look directly at the individual polymer chains that make up the crystal. We could see these chains wiggle around and slide against one another as if they were alive. No one had ever seen such detail before – a truly awe-inspiring sight!

We were able to use many kinds of advanced analytical tools to tell us that these nanosheets were indeed very special. They have the same kind of ordered structure that a protein has: they have a defined inside and outside, and we know almost exactly where each atom is located in the structure. Essentially, we discovered the sequence code that programs the polymer chain to form a 2D sheet. No doubt there are more complex codes waiting to be discovered that will form even more sophisticated structures. This discovery was recently reported in the journal Nature Materials, and was picked up by the more mainstream publications WIRED.com and Chemical & Engineering News. These sheets are likely to be important for all kinds of potential applications. Their discovery is kind of like the invention of ‘molecular plywood’: a new kind of nanoscale building material from which we can engineer even more complex molecular architectures. It’s amazing what kind of beauty you can create from simple building blocks!

Basic research like this can move seemingly very slowly, which makes the occasional breakthrough like this all the more meaningful and exciting. It reaffirms for me that it is so important to listen to and cultivate your inner curiosity, surround yourself with like-minded people, and aim high. With enough patience and persistence, wonderful things await discovery!

Take a look at a brief video of Dr. Zuckermann explaining his lab’s nanosheet discovery:

Ron Zuckermann is the Facility Director of the Biological Nanostructures Facility at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Dr. Zuckerman also provides numerous consulting services at the intersection of chemistry, biology and engineering.

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Last year around this time, ScriptPhD.com posted Breaking Bad, Chemistry Good, an in-depth article about AMC’s breakout hit Breaking Bad, and its stunningly accurate science content. Walter White, the show’s anti-hero, is a cancer-stricken high school chemistry teacher who starts cooking and dealing methamphetamine for financial security. In our article, we highlighted several clever uses of chemistry throughout the show’s run that not only integrated brilliantly into the plot but had realistic real-world applications as well. What a difference a year makes! Last week, Editor Jovana Grbić sat down with Breaking Bad‘s delightful Creator and Executive Producer Vince Gilligan to talk about the show’s origins, the science, and some behind-the-scenes secrets that will surprise even dedicated fans. We hope you enjoy reading our interview as much as we enjoyed chatting with him. The secrets of Breaking Bad, under the “continued reading” cut.

ScriptPhD.com: As a scientist (and PhD chemist in particular), Breaking Bad’s premise was very intriguing to me from the start. Can you share a bit about the inspiration for its origins?

Vince Gilligan: You know, Jovana, I wish I always had a better answer for where it all comes from. But I only can put a date to things—I only seem to remember when ideas came to me. In this case, Breaking Bad was an idea that came to me when I was speaking to an old college friend on the phone. He and I are both writers, and were both bemoaning the fact that—this was was about 2005—we were having trouble getting work and we were wondering where our next writing gig was going to come from. We thought instead, maybe we should switch occupations. Maybe we should buy an old RV and put a meth lab in the back and ride around in the Southwest. And we were joking around, but this character that became Walter White jumped into my head very quickly, right in the midst of this phone conversation. That’s when the idea came to me!

I have to say, as far as the science angle goes, I’ve always loved science, and yet I never had any real facility for it. I’ve always been a terrible student of mathematics in high school and in college. I’ve never even taken chemistry, I hate to admit it. But I’ve always loved science. And for most of my life, I’ve been a subscriber of Popular Science magazine and Popular Mechanics. But I’ve never made the jump from Popular Science to Scientific American! I don’t have a deeper understanding, but I love the idea that there are real concrete black-and-white answers in science and math, that we don’t unfortunately get in the rest of our life. The world, and our lives, is full of gray areas and uncertainties and opinion versus fact. And yet in mathematics, 2+2=4 and always has and always will. In science, certain chemicals put together in a certain way always create the same compound. I love that idea about science and I always have. I just wished in my heart of hearts that I had a deeper facility and understanding for it, but I have to say it is fun to live it by proxy and to write about a man who has a very profound understanding of chemistry and of science.

SPhD: I find it ironic hearing you say that, because a lot of people who are far less humble about their scientific capacity, their shows are far less accurate to incorporate it. Breaking Bad is one of the few shows or films that we have given a top-notch grade to for scientific accuracy and plausibility, allowing for some Hollywood liberties, of course. Who are some of the people that you consult with to write the chemistry experiments and tidbits, and what has been the general reaction within the science community?

VG: We have a lot of really good help. We have a woman named Dr. Donna Nelson, and she is the Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oklahoma. When Breaking Bad first went on the air, she contacted our office pretty early on (a few episodes in) and she said she liked what we were doing and if she could ever be of any help to us, she’d be happy to be a resource. And we have taken her up on that offer, and she has been a resource to us over the seasons. We run certain moments that happen in the story by her is as accurate as possible, and she’s been a great help. I know Bryan Cranston [Walter White], our star, shadowed a UCLA chemistry professor for a week or two before he shot the pilot, to immerse himself in the world of chemistry, not just to learn a bit about chemistry, but to see what a prototypical chemistry professor looks and sounds and acts like. Also, a part of my original inspiration, to be fair, was my long-time girlfriend Holly, her brother Hank, who I borrowed the name for Walt’s brother-in-law from, got a PhD in chemistry while he was in the Navy and is a chemist for a government organization out East and is studying red tides off the Atlantic coast. I also cannot leave out a man named Dr. Victor Bravenec, and he’s a DEA chemist based out of Dallas. I have to give great credit to the DEA, because they have been helpful since Day 1 on our Pilot, and Dr. Bravenec in particular has been helpful with the chemistry of methamphetamine and the particulars of how it is created in a laboratory. I’m so proud of the fact that you’re reacting to how realistic the chemistry is on our show, and so much of that is due to our wonderful advisors.

SPhD: One of the things I love most about Breaking Bad is that chemistry acts like an integral character, one that plays a very important role in Walt’s identity, the cooking and production of the meth, and in some cases, their very survival in some pretty hairy situations (as in the case of the fulminated mercury and homemade battery). Was it always the plan to have it be such a big part of the show or is that something that evolved?

VG: I did always like the idea that this would be a cable TV version of MacGyver. That was not first and foremost when I was coming up with the idea. First and foremost to me, the show is a character study about a man who is undergoing a radical transformation. He’s transforming himself from a protagonist to an antagonist. The whole show, in that sense, is an experiment to continue chemistry analogy. But there was always an element that I thought we could have fun with is the MacGyver aspect, as it were and the idea of using [Walt’s] knowledge to get him out of a jam every now and then. And I have to confess, as much fun as we have with that stuff, the show has taken so many dark character turns as he progresses from a good guy into a bad guy that of it goes by the wayside, although not intentionally. But those moments you speak of were a lot of fun to come up with and a lot of fun to write, and I’m hoping we’ll find a way to insert more of those moments as the season progresses.

SPhD: You’ve brought it up, so let’s just talk about where Breaking Bad goes from here. To me, Season 1 was very much about the construction of these characters, their situation, the “building up” of their individual new worlds. In many ways, Season 2 was the de-construction, where each character felt something fall apart in some way; Walt’s lies and second life, Jesse’s addiction and girlfriend’s death, Skyler’s trust in Walt, and possibly Hank’s DEA career. What do we look forward to in Season 3?

VG: Good question. And I hate to admit it, but I’m not the best at looking forward. You know the old expression “You can’t see the forest from the trees?” We are so deep into these characters’ lives that sometimes, I myself and my writers are not the best people to ask for a complete bigger picture explanation of what in fact is going on. All I know for sure is that Walt is in the process of change and transformation, and it’s an interesting experiment, one that we’re doing for the first time, as opposed to a repeated experiment. We can’t even predict the outcome!

SPhD: What’s funny is seeing the first few episodes of Season 3, I get the feeling Walt misses the badness and the danger of it all. He wants so badly to be good and to repudiate this person he’s become, and yet, I get the feeling he misses some of the perks and the thrills that it brought. Am I completely off-base here?

VG: No you are not off-base at all. That’s very astute. He’s an interesting character, because a lot of what this show is about to me is the human capacity for rationalization. We all rationalize our behavior to ourselves, our ideas, our actions. It’s just something that human beings do, it’s part of us. We usually do it in small, minor, insignificant ways. But Walt takes that to the nth degree. He stretches that to the breaking point. He’ll go around saying to himself, and when pressed by others to them, that this criminal behavior he finds himself engaged in is done purely to aid his family. He does it for their financial benefit. And yet we put the light on that pretty early in Season 1. If you’ll remember, he gets this offer from his rich former lab partner for a great job that sounds like it’s no strings attached and with all the money that he’ll need to treat his cancer and for his family to be financially solvent. And lo and behold, he doesn’t take it. That’s one of the moments I’m most proud of on our show, because prior to that moment, the show could have gone in a very different direction—we could have had the show become a weekly procedural. This week the meth lab burns down, and next week his money gets eaten by rats, and the next week after that the police arrest him, but he has to weasel out of that.

But early on we all recognized that a show like this can’t reach its full potential if we don’t really examine this guy at a deeper level. A lot of people, millions of people, especially with the economy being in the toilet, face similar situations, unfortunately. People face the issues that Walt faces, where money is a real problem. And most people don’t decide to cook crystal meth! So we realized early on that Walt has to have some kind of darker component to him that he’s perhaps always had. This is a man who is, above all else, prideful. And he bursts with pride at this avocation that he’s taken up, and he’s prideful about his product, about its quality. In so many ways, he’s just a sad little man who has felt passed over his whole life. He feels like he hasn’t really existed until he’s become a criminal, until he’s broken bad.

SPhD: My favorite episode to date has been the Season 2’s Peek-a-Boo, and its exploration of the beautifully complex character of Jesse Pinkman. His filial relationship with Walt is a cornerstone of this show, and has rather ironically blossomed amid the self-destruction of Walt’s relationship with his family and Jesse’s estrangement from his own parents. Can you talk about their relationship and your take on how these two individuals fit in each other’s worlds?

VG: Absolutely! It is a very interesting relationship, and it’s one that I didn’t realize what it would become. I’d love to say I knew from Day 1 when I was writing the pilot what this show would be, exactly, and all its dynamics, but the truth is that they’ve been a work in progress. A lot of this grows and creates itself, and the actors and writers bring so much to it, and it’s amazing to stand back years later and realize what you’ve had a hand in creating. But yes, it’s very much a father-son relationship between Walt and Jesse. And I have to say, as further evidence that this wasn’t the original intention of the show, my intention was to kill Jesse off at the end of Season 1. He was going to be kind of a character who helped Walt get into the business, and then got violently killed in a drug deal gone wrong. And the whole point of his existence would have been to get Walt into the business and then give Walt a reason to feel very, very guilty, further fueling bad behavior on his part. Luckily, we hired Aaron Paul to play Jesse, and he is such a fine young actor and so talented and charismatic that very quickly on, like in Episode 1 or 2, I realized that there was no way I was killing him off.

SPhD: And where do they go from here? They’re in a tenuous place right now. Together but apart, not really sure where things are going.

VG: It’s interesting, you put your finger on quite a lot of it. And it’s very much a love-hate relationship between these two guys, but it’s mostly love-hate on the part of Jesse. There are times when I’m not sure Walt has any regard for Jesse at all. Very often, there’s a coldness to Walt, and a desire just to get the job done and he sees Jesse as a useful tool but not much else. He doesn’t seem to have much regard or respect for Jesse, so every now and then, when he throws Jesse a scrap of respect, you feel how thirsty Jesse is for that. It’s funny, Jesse is sort of the moral center of our show. Even though he started off in the business before Walt, and Walt was a straight-arrow character before we meet Jesse, somehow Jesse seems to have a more refined and defined moral center. Very often, Jesse is the one who says “Should we really be doing this? Aren’t we being greedy? Haven’t we made enough money already?” He really is the moral center of the meth trade that we portray on the show, and Walt, who should be a father figure to him, who should be ushering Jesse out of the business, and a large part of us as the audience wishes that he would do the right thing. We know in our hearts that he most likely never will.

SPhD: They’re all beautiful relationships and I can’t wait to see where they all go. I love that you’ve even made me hate Skylar [Walt’s long-suffering wife], which I never thought I would do. I’m so sorry for that!

VG: It’s so funny, and I’m glad you brought that up, because you are definitely not even close to being the first person to say that. It’s just a funny thing about storytelling. Even when your hero is not a nice person, and he’s doing bad things, because he’s your protagonist, if you’re along for the ride, then you start to see the world through his eyes. It’s the nature of storytelling. It’s the same thing when you’re watching The Sopranos or some other show where there’s someone who is pretty much a reprehensible character is nonetheless your protagonist. You’ll root for that person to succeed. And right now, Skylar gets in the way, on a purely mechanical level, of Walt’s success and happiness and therefore we see her as an obstacle and we don’t like her for what she’s doing. So you’re not alone in feeling that way. But the funny thing is, I see Skylar as the good guy and Walt as the bad guy. I love Walt! He’s a great guy to write for, but he’s kind of a monster when you think about it. He shouldn’t be breaking back into the house, trying to get back into her good graces when the things he’s done and the lies he’s told really make him not the good guy. She’s being heroic when she doesn’t tell the police on him.

SPhD: Thanks, Vince, and we really appreciate you joining us!

VG: Thanks, and it really makes me feel good to hear that you think the science is authentic, because we do our best, and we will continue to.

Interested in watching the show? Start with this brilliant six-minute catch-up video:

Season 3 episodes of Breaking Bad air Sundays at 10 PM on AMC.

~*ScriptPhD*~
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“Whiskey is for sipping, but water’s for fighting.” —Mark Twain

Today, March 22, 2010, is World Water Day, an initiative formed at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. As we head into Earth Day next month, no environmental issue carries more sociopolitical, economic and health ramifications than a clean and abundant supply of water. Some of the highest global morbidity and mortality rates are directly related to lack of access to clean water—both in contracting communicable diseases as well as agricultural impact that aggravates famine. At the heart of this discussion is a frenzied (and growing) thirst for bottled water; Americans alone bought more than 29 billion bottles in 2007. If you have long suspected that bottled water is not good for the environment, but only had a hazy notion about the specific consequences of the bottled water industry, Tapped, an Atlas Films documentary about to be released on DVD, will knock your socks off. The film expertly chronicles the insidious practices of bottled water companies and the dire consequences it has on our collective health, communities, environment, economy and policy in ways you never would have imagined. Our special World Water Day post under the “continue reading” cut.

Tapped features sparkly footage of bodies of water the world over, from oceans to rivers, lakes, ponds and streams. The sounds of burbling brooks and waterfalls throughout the film feel primal and urgent, as much a reminder of nature’s fragile beauty as they are a ticking clock, and the countdown is not in our favor. An opening salvo in the film’s first sequence sets the tone with a chilling statistic: by 2030, two thirds of the world will lack access to clean water. The film quickly segues into a scary question that is explored throughout the film; what happens if you take water, a requirement for life on earth, and turn it into a commodity, controlled by private corporations?

The answers are disturbing.

The first third of the film focuses on the three largest bottled water companies in America; Nestle, Coke and Pepsi. Nestle operates in the United States under multiple brands, including Poland Springs, Arrowhead, Ozarka, Ice Mountain, Deer Park and Zephyrhills. Coke owns Dasani and Pepsi owns Aquafina. Bottled water started as a small trend in America in the 1970s when Perrier introduced bottled sparkling water to urban professionals by way of small green glass bottles. But it wasn’t until 1989 when plastic bottles made from more mobile and lightweight PET plastic were introduced that the business really took off. At that point Coke and Pepsi got into the game because their soda sales were declining. The industry continued to grow at explosive rates, and by 2007 Americans inexplicably spent more than $11.7 billion on a free natural resource, something that was rightfully pegged in the film as “one of the greatest advertising and marketing feats of all time.”

Where these companies get their water is a controversial issue. Often, they buy small, cheap plots of land in small communities, install a water pump to access the community’s underground supply, and pump to their heart’s content with little-to-no overhead, taxes, regulation or accountability. The laws governing water usage in the US make this scenario possible. Surface water (oceans, lakes, rivers, etc.) is held as a public trust, and hence protected from poaching, or water mining, as the practice is often called. The loophole, however, is that underground water in most states is governed by a law established in the late 1800s called “absolute dominion,”

which basically translates to “he who has the biggest pump gets the most water.”

Small communities all over the country have been subject to this process, and often don’t know it’s happening until the corporations have already set up an operation. Communities in these situations have started organizing to stop the corporations from taking their water, but it is an uphill battle as corporations have teams of lawyers, lobbyists and other resources to advance their interests. In one small town in Maine profiled in the film, Nestle has set up a Poland Springs pump where it costs about six cents per gallon to pump water out of the ground. (A recent fight by Maine citizens, documented here and here has caused considerable headaches to Poland Springs.) The corporations then turn around and sell the water for $6.00 per gallon. This practice is happening in states around the country including California, Colorado, Arkansas and Michigan. The film points out that these corporations are setting a dangerous precedent that will allow them to control water sources in the future, which is why activists and concerned community members are desperately fighting to change the laws. Even citizens of Serbia, the birthplace of ScriptPhD.com editor Jovana Grbi?, are crying out against privatizing and selling its 300 natural springs, the most abundant in all of Europe, for water production.

When Congress tried to hold the water manufacturers accountable for depleting municipal water sources in times of drought, Pepsi testified that their water pumping had nothing to do with lowering the water levels of the local lakes and rivers. In a particularly surreal moment of the film, a Pepsi official tells a congressional panel with a straight face that beavers and their dams are to blame for lowered water levels. Dennis Kucinich (D, Ohio), the congressman leading the panel, counters back, “How many beavers would that take?” It might be funny if it weren’t so alarming. Take a look at this CNN report that resulted from revelations during the Congressional hearings:

The Environmental Devastation of Plastic

Act II of Tapped reveals the deleterious ecological and health fall-out from plastic bottles. Most of the bottles end up in a landfill or the Pacific Ocean. Often called “The World’s Largest Dump,” the Western Garbage Patch, located between Hawaii and California, is twice the size of Texas and largely composed of plastic. (An Eastern patch also exists, and video of it has been compiled here by the marine research group Algalita.) The film takes us to a bottling plant in Corpus Christi, Texas where local residents are dying from cancer due to the benzene emissions from the plant. They are often stuck living in a dangerous situation because no one wants to buy their home due to the close proximity to the plant. The film interviews several of these residents in one of the saddest moments of the documentary. One such interviewee, a man dying of cancer, says that were it not for the love of his family, he would feel like a piece of trash, his body the unwilling receptacle for toxic emissions from the faceless corporation making plastic bottles in his backyard. This man died shortly after the making of the film, and the film is dedicated to his memory.

Captain Charles Moore, the founder of Algelita, appeared last week on David Letterman’s show to discuss the Garbage Patch:

About 40 minutes into the film there is a quick shot of a customer at Whole Foods placing his groceries on the conveyor belt at the cash register. The camera angle is low enough so we don’t see his face or the cashier’s face. We only see what he is buying; a sandwich, a bag of chips and a bottle of Smart Water. The image is a punch to the gut because that nameless, faceless scene has been me, too many times to count, and most likely it’s been you as well. The scene is a subtle reminder that every time we purchase a bottle of plastic water, we’ve voted “yes” for a system that is killing poor families in Corpus Christi (and elsewhere) and littering beaches in Hawaii with such large amounts of plastic that an army of dump trucks couldn’t clean it up. Even more insidious is the amount of microscopic plastic particles floating around in oceans from thrown-away plastic bottles. When one activist scoops up a handful of sand from a Hawaii beach, it looks like he’s holding a fistful of pulverized Lego’s; the plastic particles quickly replacing the sand particles. This is a result of what happens when people don’t recycle their bottles. Bottles left on the street are picked up by rainwater and washed into rivers and stream, and ultimately end up in the oceans. But recycling bottles is not exactly an entirely sustainable solution either, as the film points out. Municipalities who produce tap water, and who are in direct competition with bottled water, are often left holding the tab to recycle the leftover plastic bottles from their competitors, but with only a fraction of the budget that the corporations have.

BPA: Dangerous Chemistry

A more worrisome horror of plastic bottles is an insidious chemical called bisphenol A (BPA), used to make the hard, clear 5-gallon kind bottles most often found at a water cooler. Frederick Vom Saal, PhD at the University of Missouri, Columbia is a leading expert on BPA and its effects on human health. He calls it one of the most potent, toxic chemicals known to man because even in small amounts, it profoundly disrupts every single part of the developing male reproductive systems in lab animal studies, even at doses 25,000 smaller than any dose that has ever been studied. In larger doses, it disrupts the thyroid gland, and its been linked to a plethora of diseases from cancer to obesity, diabetes, and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. A recent study even found a link between BPA exposure and permanent fertility effects. These diseases have been killing people at increasingly higher rates over the last 30 years, a direct correlation to the amount of BPA floating around in consumer products over the same period of time. The FDA has not closely regulated BPA and for a long period of time, as the film reveals, relied on studies from bottle manufacturers (the people who make bottles out of BPA for a living!) that state BPA is not dangerous in small quantities. The Huffington Post recently published a series of articles revealing that BPA is found in cash register receipt paper and cardboard pizza boxes, among a host of other everyday items.

In a particularly effective scene from the film, filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig boldly asks an FDA official about their role in regulating BPA. A furious FDA press official abruptly interrupts the interview from off screen and states that if he knew BPA would be discussed, he wouldn’t have allowed the interview. The failure of the FDA to protect the public from a chemical as dangerous as BPA could be the last straw in the public’s tolerance for government incompetence and corruption, which explains why the FDA doesn’t want to discuss such a volatile subject. BPA is found in a whole host of consumer products including dental fillings, canned foods, food wrappers, food labels, and baby bottles. The good news is that due to mounting public and scientific pressure, the FDA is conducting a new study on the safety of BPA, but the $7-billion-a-year BPA industry will surely put up a fight to stop any regulation. To protect your own health, the film’s website says you should look for “BPA Free” labels whenever you buy hard plastic and avoid eating canned foods or drinking from hard plastic water bottles.

The soft plastic water bottles that most of us drink from do not contain BPA, but that doesn’t mean they are safe. As one expert in the film says, we don’t know the long term effects of drinking from PET plastic bottles. A recent British study showed that pregnant women exposed to phthalates, common across all plastics, gave birth to babies with gender defects. And in a particularly disturbing sequence from the film, the crew of Tapped buys their own samples of bottled water and sends them to toxicology labs for testing. Due to the large marketing and advertising budgets of bottled water makers, we have been led to believe for a long time that bottled water is safer than tap water. But the list of chemicals found in the bottled water, including styrene, dimethyl phthalate, and di-n-octyl phthalate, shatters that notion.

Tapped ends on a hopeful note, reminding us that change is possible, and highlighting the various battles that water activists and concerned citizens have won in recent years along with some tips for the consumer to drink filtered tap water from a reusable water container and to urge leaders to invest in our municipal water infrastructure. The Mayor of San Francisco banned bottled water at any municipal or government location. Seattle banned sales altogether at city events. Perhaps change is in effect. News outlets reported late last year that bottled water sales are starting to slump for the first time.

Look for Part II of this article containing an exclusive ScriptPhD.com Q&A between CaptainPlanet and filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig in the coming week as we continue to explore conservation issues and what can be done to enact positive change.

Take a look at this hair-raising 5:00 extended Tapped trailer:

Tapped is slated for official DVD release (with bonus features) May 1. Visit their store to purchase the DVD and Kleen Kanteen PBA-free water bottles.

CaptainPlanet is an LA-based, Northwestern University-educated eco-charged sustainability guru who loves film, psychology and saving the planet, one waterless urinal at a time…

~*CaptainPlanet*~
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He is one of the most popular and explosive (sometimes literally!) science columnists of our day. Since 2005, he has written the Popular Science blog Gray Matter. He has been willing to try virtually any chemistry experiment known to man, all in the interest of proving a theory and educating (and entertaining) a fortunate lay audience. He has created the most widely acclaimed periodic table ever, which has been replicated into posters, an actual table, playing cards, and now, a gorgeous full-color hardcover book. Who is this mad scientist I am referring to? Why, Theodore Gray, of course! For Day 3 of Science Week, ScriptPhD.com is thrilled to review his new book The Elements, an equal parts homage to chemistry and photography. Editor Jovana Grbić sat down with Theo in a candid, in-depth interview about his books, his favorite elements, and the responsibility science writers have to informing the public. More more content, please click “continue reading.”

It is a staple of every high school and college science class. Its familiar shape has stayed largely the same since 1869, when Siberian chemistry professor Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev first grouped chemicals together according to similar properties. It is indispensable to scientists of all disciplines, and has even inspired our very own ScriptPhD.com logo! It is, of course, the periodic table of the elements. There is an immense challenge in taking such a well-known, immutable scientific entity and making people see it in a way it has never been seen before. And to do so using photography and creative writing? To the moon, Alice! Yet in Theo Gray’s gorgeous new book The Elements, this is precisely what occurs—a rebirth for ruthenium, rhodium, radium, rubidium… and the rest. Each page (as seen below) is elegantly laid out with gallery quality photography, sometimes of compounds, minerals and applications that would surprise you, and fascinating stories that turn each element into its own unique chapter in the hallowed Bible of chemical history.

Chemistry is the central science. But as you get to know the periodic table better while reading The Elements, it quickly becomes apparent that chemistry is also a science with much character. It is smelly, as is the case with sulfur. It’s sometimes a mouthful, as in the longest element name, praseodymium. It helps us control mood swings, as is the case with lithium. It helps us when we’ve overdone it at the weekend barbeque, as is the case with bismuth subsalicylate. Perhaps you know it better as Pepto-Bismol. Chemistry helps doctors and scientists to save lives. A radioactive isotope of technetium is naturally bone-seeking, and helps radiologists diagnose everything from compound fractures to cancer. Should you ever need to get an MRI, chances are you’ll have to consume a contrast dye composed of the element gadolinium. Sometimes, a fickle element both saves and takes lives. Chlorine, for example, has saved hundreds of millions of lives as an antiseptic and disinfectant in small quantities, yet is poisonous in large quantities. Likewise, selenium is an essential nutrient, but toxic in large doses. Gray also pays tribute to a sullied, marginalized element that has gotten a bad rap over the years: zirconium. If you’re considering proposing to that special someone, zirconium, like the overpriced aged carbon of which it is a replica, is near the top of the hardness scale and equally as beautiful for a fraction of the cost! On an unrelated note, thallium is one of the most effective poisons on the periodic table, owing to common symptoms that few doctors can pinpoint. For utter destruction on a wanton scale, however, one need look no further than uranium:

What is most unique and attractive about The Elements is the lengths to which it goes to envelop artists and creatives in the world of science, many of whom would be surprised how much of their craft they owe to chemistry. Iconic photographers like Ansel Adams would be nothing without magnesium, which has been widely used in camera flashes to provide light. For you font and graphic design nerds out there, one thing the typeface documentary Helvetica omitted is the magic that lies in the combination of antimony, lead and tin—it expands when solidified from a molten state. Voila! 650 years (and counting) of movable typeface. Film buffs who have enjoyed movies like Avatar (and the upcoming Hubble 3D) on IMAX would be interested to know that IMAX projectors use 15 kW short-arc Xenon projector lamps. Jimmy Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, ZZ Top, BB King, and countless other guitar legends would be silenced were it not for the obscure element samarium, which in combination with cobalt is used as a magnet for electric guitar pickups. And for all of you DJs and musical purists who agree with The ScriptPhD that no musical sound is sweeter and sharper than that of a vinyl record, did you know that phonograph needle tips are made of osmium?

Interview With Theo Gray

ScriptPhD.com Editor Jovana Grbic was fortunate to chat with Theo Gray recently, and was eager to get his perspective on the making of The Elements and Mad Science books, and some more meaty science policy issues as well.

ScriptPhD.com: Tell me a bit about the idea to put together The Elements.

Theo Gray: The book goes back quite a ways. I started collecting elements, really by accident, in 2002. We needed a table for the common area of the office I was moving into, and I didn’t want some kind of an ugly thing that you could get from an office supply catalog, so I had tables on my mind. Then, I was reading Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sachs, and he describes a periodic table that he used to visit at the science museum. I took that literally, and thought the table literally looked like a table, and that seemed like the coolest thing—someone should make a periodic table [with slots for the elements], and at that point no one ever had! Because of the way the table was designed, it was easy to make little compartments underneath each element where you could put a sample of the element. This was right around when eBay was exploding, and it turned out you could get a great many elements there. It kind of happened by accident. One table led to another, and pretty soon, I had thousands of element [samples], pure and industrial compounds. Then I started photographing them to remember what they are. I put the cataloged list and accompanying photographs on the web, and people liked it, and the Ig Nobel Award I got in 2002 made me think that this is something other people might be interested in, too.

One thing led to another, and the cameras started getting fancier, and the photography started getting better, and pretty soon I thought I could make a poster [of the elements]. This poster is now seem on TV shows from MythBusters to Hannah Montana, which eventually led to The Elements.

SPhD: One of the things I really loved about The Elements was the humor interspersed throughout the copy. You manage to really make it fun, lively and at times hilarious. Was this writing style meant to parallel how you view science, and chemistry in particular?

TG: The other thing that I’d been doing [while compiling the book] every month, was writing a column for Popular Science Magazine, Gray matter. And it’s popular, it’s a popular magazine, as the name implies, written very much for a lay audience. So I did that every month, writing 350-450 words about a certain topic of science and working with excellent editors there to refine the language to compete with other popular publications—immediately engaging, and with some fun in it. I think it’s fair to say that over the course of the five years that I’ve been writing the column, I’d refined my ability to write consicely about a focused topic. And that’s what The Elements book is, a hundred Popular Science columns all wrapped up. In some cases, the story behind an element was so much more interesting than any practical uses we could highlight. [Editor’s note: radium is a particularly good example of this!]

SPhD: What were the biggest challenges during the making of the book and photography of the elements?

TG: In terms of the writing of the book, the rare earths, or Lanthanide series, was the toughest by far, because all of the Lanthanides are very similar [in chemical property]. In many cases, for commercial applications, they’re essentially interchangeable. If you’re making lighter flicks, it really doesn’t matter what rare earth you’re using—and they don’t even purify them, they just take them out of the ground. And many of them don’t really have any interesting applications. Although, it was interesting to discover Thulium (Tm 69), for example, which I’d gone for years thinking that no one actually cared about. But it turns out in the lighting industry they care passionately about thulium, and they couldn’t live without it [for metal halide lamps].

The challenge with the photography is that these are all essentially lumps of gray metal. 90%+ of all the elements are gray metals and shapeless. One of the few other photo periodic tables out there was published in the 1960s by Time-LIFE, and they all look the same—not very interesting! Our job was exactly like the job of a commercial photographer, an advertising photographer. They’re given a product that might be the most boring thing you ever saw, and they have to bring out its inner beauty by way of lighting and arrangement. We tried to think of the most exciting examples of each metal. We also did cheat a bit, with some of the beautiful, colorful crystals, which are not pure elements but rather compounds. But it is an excuse to put a splash of color on every page!

SPhD: You know I’m going to ask… you’re the Element King… What’s your favorite element and why?

TG: Ahh, the favorite element question! My first answer is that I don’t have a favorite child, either. But there’s different elements that I like for different reasons. Sodium, for example, if you have a lake near-by, is the element you want to have. [Editor’s note: BE CAREFUL! HIGHLY EXPLOSIVE!] On the other hand, something like titanium is a wonderful metal in every way—it doesn’t rust, it’s malleable, highly useful, strong, and many of its applications are interesting and exotic. Copper is so great as well, because it’s the only colored metal that is reasonably priced and not explosive. Cesium explodes, and gold is very expensive. That leaves copper, but people don’t tend to make sophisticated shapes out of it other than jewelry. But if I had to name two, it would be sodium and titanium.

SPhD: Let’s talk about your other book for a moment, Mad Science. Some of my favorite experiments that I want to replicate are the lightbulb, homemade pencils, 1-volt liquid battery (which I’ll use to charge up my iPod), plating the iPod, and my personal favorite, preserving a snowflake. Was there an experiment in this book that made it in or didn’t where you either felt like your life was in danger or you were like, “OK, change of plans, we’re not doing this.”?

TG: I have a policy of not doing anything dangerous. These experiments [from the book] are only dangerous if you don’t do them right, which I explain fairly well in the safety section. Because basically, I’m a complete ninny. I’m terrified of that stuff, which is the way that you ought to be. There is a good bit of thought that went into the worst case scenario, and if there was a shred of doubt, we rethought the experiment—smaller scale, or do it differently. One of the advantages of doing it for photography as opposed to in person is that we were able to get away with extremely small quantities. We also hired specialists where applicable, such as an electrical engineer for shrinking coin trick, or an industrial chemist for the chlorine experiment.

The one experiment that I suggest your readers do is the snowflake one, which is just so nice, and only took me three or four tries. The key is to keep your slide really cold and pre-cooled, and to handle them with your hands the least amount possible.

SPhD: You are, of course, most well known for your Popular Science column Gray Matter. How has writing Gray Matter, particularly focused for a lay audience, changed your role in science?

TG: It’s interesting to be faced with the challenge of trying to explain something that is actually quite complicated and deep in a format where you only have a few hundred words and you can’t assume that your audience has four semesters of college chemistry. If I were writing for Scientific American, it would be quite different and you could use a certain shorthand quite freely. Here, I have not not only explain everything, but also make it fun and entertaining. The most important thing is that I have an opportunity to speak to people, particularly young people, who probably aren’t getting any actual science anywhere else. Rather than preaching to the choir about the value and interestingness of science, I can reach out to a new audience. Often in lay magazines, it’s frustrating to read so much pseudo-science because the people doing it don’t actually know what they’re talking about. The other thing I like to do is scatter some breadcrumbs throughout my writing to leave hints or terms that can’t really be explained to encourage people to look things up on their own.

SPhD: So much of our modern culture is influenced by the growth of technology and science, which play a huge role in our lives and economy than ever before. And yet, as a whole, mainstream public knowledge of basic science can be shockingly absent or misinformed. What is the single most important thing people like you, myself and others in the science community can do to mitigate this?

TG: There’s a couple of things. One is, and I’ve written a couple of blog posts about this for Powell’s Books, that you need to be relatively fearless in getting out there and telling the truth without worrying about repercussions or consequences. I’m talking about things like creationism or homeopathy, which are two basically stupid ideas which are very widely believed. People like me have a responsibility not to beat around the bush [as to their accuracy or lack thereof]. One needs to have strong attitudes because that’s what gets people riled up. At the same time, one needs to communicate that science is something that is worth putting effort into and learning about, because it’s very powerful. If you understand it, and your competitor doesn’t, you win, in many, many situations. We see this both in technology and at the societal level, one that we’re frankly losing to China. While we’re arguing about evolution and homeopathy, they’re gathering all the natural resources they can to become the dominant global economy next Century.

SPhD: You are one of the few scientists that have crossed the barrier to entertainment and wider popular appeal. Why do you think more academics have not? Is it a problem of the public welcoming these figures, hesitation in the academic community of going mainstream, or something in the middle?

TG: It depends. There’s different motivations. I, for example, grew up in an entirely academic household; both of my parents were math professors. I completely understand that world and that mindset. The kind of articles that I write for Popular Science would be considered more than a little bit embarrassing if I were an academic and had to worry about tenure committees and citations of academic papers. It’s not a very respectable profession, from an academic point of view, and I think that keeps a lot of people out who could write for a broader popular audience. It’s also a quite different skill, one that’s taken me decades, to develop the writing style that works for a lay audience—and it’s not easy to do.

And then on the other side, there’s a resistance among the publishers and media types to take science seriously because they assume it’s going to be boring. It irritates me greatly when TV shows about science end up being frantically edited, with lots of flashy graphics going up. And you can just tell that what happened was that none of the people involved knew anything about science (or possibly cared). But if you look at a show like MythBusters, for example, it’s a fantastic science show.

SPhD: Yes! We love MythBusters!

TG: They are one of the most successful of all cable shows, and they are 95% a science show wrapped up around the theme of a “myth” that they have to “bust.” Fundamentally, what they do is pose a question and then hypothesize and answer it using the scientific method. I don’t know if people appreciate how revolutionary it is for them to do that consistently.

SPhD: This is why ScriptPhD.com loves The Discovery Channel and MythBusters so much. We are in contact with them, we’re big supporters, and we wish them, and you, a lot of luck with shepherding the next generation of curious young scientists!

TG: Delightful to talk to you as well. Thanks!

~*ScriptPhD*~
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ScriptPhD.com covers science and technology in entertainment, media and advertising. Hire our consulting company for creative content development.

Follow us on Twitter and our Facebook fan page. Subscribe to free email notifications of new posts on our home page.

When it comes to the interface of art and science, in many ways Madison Avenue finds itself in the position of the early days of sci-fi entertainment, where campy, unrefined productions took decades to evolve into the sophisticated films and shows we enjoy today. To be brutally honest, 95% of current science and technology advertising ranges from hackneyed to terrible; unimaginative, uncreative, uninspired. But here at ScriptPhD.com, we want to focus on the superlative 5%. What makes these campaigns work, what elevates their content above the crowd and most importantly, how do they fit within the theme of the science or industry they are promoting? This is why we are expanding our umbrella of coverage—which has heretofore included film, television and media—to the final frontier: advertising. In our brand new series entitled “Selling Science Smartly,” we will profile the best that science and technology advertising (print, TV, radio, digital and everything in-between) has to offer. Where possible, we will interview the respective campaign’s agencies and creative teams to give you a rarely revealed behind-the-scenes purview into the process and foundation of making these ads. We are proud to launch the series with the exceptional Dow Human Element campaign, including an in-depth interview with Creative Director and mastermind John Claxton of Draftfcb Chicago, who breaks down the thought process behind the creation of the campaign.

Campaign: Dow Human Element (print, television, web)
Agency: Draftfcb Chicago
Industry: Chemistry

Originally founded in 1897 by Canadian-born chemist Herbert Henry Dow, Dow Chemical Company is the second-largest chemical manufacturer in the world. Their primary output is plastics, including familiar products such as Styrofoam, Saran Wrap and Ziplock bags, but they also produce agriculture and performance chemicals, as well as hydrocarbon and energy materials. In 2006, Dow hired advertising agency Draftfcb Chicago to rebrand its image, with a corporate focus on working together to apply science to improve the human condition. The campaign was called “The Human Element” and was the recipient of a 2008 Effie Award for Corporate Reputation, Image and Identity. ScriptPhD.com has chosen this campaign for our Selling Science Smartly series because we feel it embodies a perfect combination of creativity, risk-taking, effectiveness and uniqueness to represent science at its pinnacle. Take a look at some of the spots below:

All images and logos ©Dow Chemical Company, all rights reserved.

Why we like it:

How many times have you seen a formulaic pharmaceutical ad that could interchange virtually any product or drug without batting an eyelash? Or my personal pet peeve—a generic science ad with the now-standard happy researcher staring off into the sunset holding up a test tube of colorful liquid? These images are safe, boring, and ubiquitous. What makes The Human Element stand out is that it’s striking, gorgeous, poignant, different. The images within these ads are evocative, sensual, and they tell a story. The most recent versions of the campaign (pictured on the left) include the stunning photography of National Geographic photographer Steve McCurry. In advertising, the product is King and is showcased as such. However, in the case of science and technology, this leads to the same over-used imagery and tropes. It takes a lot of skill and bravery to attempt to tell a science story using abstract ideas, and I love that Draftfcb was willing to try. Because it has storytelling at its heart, this campaign is also malleable and adaptive to longevity, having just launched a series of supplementary web videos.

Why it’s good science advertising:

Dow is a chemical company. They make chemicals. Using chemistry. This is their central corporate identity, and no advertising campaign would be complete without using that as its foundation. With a logo representing a “missing” element of the periodic table, and copy evoking the language and reaction processes of chemistry, The Human Element campaign condenses the most basic substance of what Dow Chemical does. With that logo containing an atomic number representing the global human population, it becomes instantly intimate and conveys the idea that science serves to advance humanity. Aesthetics aside, it’s a functional piece of branding that concomitantly reminds us the history of what Dow Chemical was established to stand for and looks forward to what it can achieve in the future.

Why it works:

The Human Element struck me, in essence, as a corporate rehabillitation campaign, and it succeeded on that level. While it has given us some practical and even beneficial products, Dow cannot escape a litanny of environmental transgressions (Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India) and the shame of being the sole provider of Napalm during the Vietnam War. CEO Andrew Liveris has expressed firm commitment to continuing an environmentally-sustainable corporate strategy, which has included successful collaboration with The National Resources Defense Council and being named by the EPA as the 2008 ENERGY STAR Partner of the Year for excellence in energy management and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. One year into this advertising campaign, not only did the stock price of Dow appreciate 29%, but more importantly, their brand-equity rating skyrocketed by 25%. Secondly, large corporations such as Dow, particularly those in manufacturing industries, are conflated by activists and even ordinary citizens with greed, arrogance, environmental insouciance, and downright evil, something ScriptPhD wrote about earlier this year. These highly adhesive visceral impressions can be difficult to break. The Human Element campaign shows a subtle awareness of this fact, and, by focusing on people and nature, humility. Finally, Sandy Colkey, Executive VP at Draftfcb and head of the Dow campaign, commented that the ads were also effective in recruiting green-minded chemists and scientists to Dow, which only reinforces and amplifies the purpose of this campaign to begin with.

What other science campaigns can learn from this one…

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. Of course I do not here speak of that beauty that strikes the senses, the beauty of qualities and appearances; not that I undervalue such beauty, far from it, but it has nothing to do with science; I mean that profounder beauty which comes from the harmonious order of the parts, and which a pure intelligence can grasp.
– Henri Poincaré, physicist, mathematician and science philosopher

In Selling Science Smartly, don’t be afraid to be beautiful, lyrical and poetic. Science is a tool that utilizes rigor, precision and experimental design to reflect the natural beauty and wonder that does and can surround us. Moreover, the most analytical, objective scientist still has to employ out-of-the box thinking to stumble on a new discovery or solve a difficult puzzle. Good advertising should strive to communicate that. One of the biggest weaknesses (and challenges) in science advertising is resisting the temptation to construct campaigns with the same linear process that science experiments are fundamentally built around. Infusing creativity, lyricism and a humanist perspective help to make these ads accessible and empathetic, all qualities achieved superbly by the Human Element spots.

Interview with Draftfcb Creative Director John Claxton

The Human Element campaign was conceived and crafted by Draftfcb Chicago, recently named by Advertising Age as Number 5 on their Agency A List. ScriptPhD.com was honored to speak with John Claxton, Creative Director of the Human Element campaign and author of the print ads and TV spots.

ScriptPhD.com: When Dow first came to you for this rebrand, what was their overarching objective?

John Claxton: A new CEO, Andrew Liveris, was just establishing himself and his philosophy at Dow. He had put a great deal of thought and effort behind his mantra for the company—making Dow the most respected chemical company in the world—and was anxious to make it a reality.

SPhD: How much of the Human Element and its message of empowerment did they have input in?

JC: As a creative idea, the Human Element came from us. But their eagerness to redefine the company and their clearly articulated business goals left no question about which direction to go in. Dow had carefully laid the foundation. We simply provided the creative idea to bring their vision to life.

SPhD: Take us through a couple of key steps of the creative development to help us conceptualize going from point zero (a blank slate, essentially) to the final product.

JC: One of the first steps was a creative meeting at our agency during the “pitch process.” I walked into the meeting with a new element for the Periodic Table. . . not carbon, hydrogen or oxygen, but the Human Element.

That pretty much put everything in motion. Including the Human Element on the Periodic Table of the Elements changed the way Dow looked at the world and the way the world looked at Dow.

Every creative decision we made from that point on was filtered through the lens of the Human Element, and that’s what took us down a very non-science approach to science advertising.

SPhD: Tell me a little about the strategy and aims of the written portion of the campaign (the copy).

JC: In terms of the strategy, we knew we wanted to find a “voice” for the campaign that lived at the other end of the spectrum from traditional science advertising.

There were three things that inspired the “voice” of the campaign we ultimately landed on. Science essays. The writing of E. O. Wilson. And contemporary American poetry.

SPhD: What was the biggest challenge for your team on this project?

JC: The television shoots are incredibly time-consuming (most of them a month or more) and span several continents.

SPhD: In retrospect, what surprised you the most about this campaign?

JC: We were completely surprised by the passionate response from people at all levels of society. From teachers to politicians to parents, people were so moved that they felt compelled to write to the company and express their feelings. The campaign struck a nerve in a way that we had never imagined.

SPhD: What do you feel makes branding science and technology a different or unique creative proposition?

JC: It is very difficult to make something abstract like science relevant to people, particularly in traditional media like television and print.

SPhD: What’s your favorite commercial or print ad of all time?

JC: I know this will seem like heresy, Jovana, but I really don’t study advertising. In fact, I don’t own a television. I read science essays. I study human behavior. I study and enjoy contemporary poetry.

We thank the wonderful, talented advertising team at Draftfcb Chicago, including Creative Director John Claxton and Communications Manager Joshua Dysart, for their cooperation and help in this installment of Selling Science Smartly.

~*ScriptPhD*~
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One of my favorite movies as a kid, and now, as a professional scientist, is Andromeda Strain. The heroes are mostly older, professorial types who work feverishly to understand an alien organism and save the planet. After being asked to review ReAction! Chemistry in the Movies for ScriptPhD.com, I was so curious to consume (with relish) the book’s guesswork about the chemistry found in Andromeda Strain. After returning to the beginning of the book and giving it a read, I was thrilled to find that ReAction! is a detailed, thoughtful exploration of the representation of chemistry in film. The book addresses, first and foremost, the fact that chemistry can play a lead role in film. The authors also discuss the dichotomy between the “dark” and “bright” sides of chemistry (and science) as illustrated by films in which chemistry or chemists play a central role. Also included are several playful explorations of the real science behind some famous examples of fictional chemistry in film. After the break is a full review of the book along with an in-depth interview with authors Mark Griep and Majorie Mikasen on the process of working together as chemist and artist, portrayal of chemists in film and how film can change public perception in science.

Often referred to as the “central science,” chemistry (and chemists) have a rich history of adapting to focus on the problems of their day. Therefore, chemists often make breakthroughs that are remembered as medical, technological or biological. Penned by chemistry professor Dr. Mark Griep and his painter wife Marjorie Mikasen, ReAction! points out that many examples of science in film are, in fact, misclassified as chemistry. Chemistry, the authors suggest, seems to occupy an interesting and unexplored niche in film; ReAction is the culmination of their years-long quest to understand how chemistry is portrayed in film. Intriguingly, the book is also an exploration of the history of chemistry as a discipline as reflected in the film, charting the course from the creation of the periodic table to chemical synthesis to modern drug discovery.

An important theme of the book involves the stark difference between the use of chemistry for “dark” or “bright” purposes. The authors’ view is that this duality underpins how society views science, as both great and terrible. One of the most well explored “dark” films of the book is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. While the basic story is nearly universally known, the authors explore its film representations carefully, exposing both chemical and cinematic features of interest. The mirror-like duality between Jekyll and Hyde is used as a vehicle to confront the concept of chirality, which is the notion that molecules can have non-superimposable, mirror image isomers. As the authors undertake an exploration of the fictional chemistry of Jekyll’s formula, a stunning amount of chemistry is discussed. Jekyll’s formula contained “a white crystalline salt, blood-red liquor and a mysterious impurity.” The blood-red liquor, consisting of red phosphorous dissolved in carbon disulfide, introduces both nanoscience and stoichiometry. A discussion of the white crystalline salt centers on the observation that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s author, Robert Louis Stevenson, likely suffered from a bleeding disorder. At the time, the best treatment and likely identity of the salt was a water extract of the ergot plant. This, the authors argue, means the unknown impurity was probably ergotamine. The historical developments surrounding ergot leads to a discussion of the beginnings of the pharmaceutical industry and introduces the concept of plant-derived drugs. Interwoven in the science is, of course, a discussion of the dark themes of self-experimentation and violence.

In this clip from the original classic 1912 silent movie, Boris Karloff transforms from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde (and back):

On the “brighter” side of things is Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, a film that tells the story of the extraordinary scientist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1908 for important contributions toward understanding the immune system, and also developed the first synthetic chemical treatment for disease. The authors describe how Ehrlich developed his “side chain theory,” which suggested that drugs and receptors interact in a specific way. This theory led Ehrlich to realize he could start with a “lead compound” that was weakly effective, or even toxic, and develop it into a powerful drug. Ehrlich started with the syphilis lead compound atoxyl and found a derivative, salvarsan, which was the first effective syphilis treatment. The magnitude of this discovery cannot be understated—Ehrlich’s methods ushered in the era of modern drug discovery and because Ehrlich was working at a time when the thought of injecting chemicals into humans to treat disease was unusual.

ReAction! gives a detailed analysis of the science and history of science related to many of the chemistry-related issues raised by the films it discusses. In fact, the science concepts introduced range from the very simple (stoichiometry) to the very complex (statistics); some of these concepts might be a bit difficult for a lay audience without a scientific background to grasp. However, the overall impression is that the authors have succeeded in using film as a vehicle to impart an incredible amount of science.

When I first picked up ReAction! and tried to think of examples of chemistry in film, I didn’t have too much success. Like the authors, I initially called to mind the myriad examples of technology, biology and medicine that are present in film. But after reading ReAction!, I’m sold on the idea that a rich tradition of chemical themes is present in film. At the end of the book, the authors give a list of 10 archetypal films that have chemical themes (table on the left). I’ve seen a few of these films, but now, I’m eagerly looking forward to watching the rest! And what about the chemistry of the alien microorganism in Andromeda Strain? I’m sad to report that ReAction! reveals that the mass spectral analysis in the film reports an elemental composition that can’t exist. After a bit of tweaking, the authors suggest that perhaps the alien life form could be alkaloid-like, and that the rock-like substance the life form arrived on could be a siloxane. It turns out the science behind that bit of Andromeda Strain wasn’t so sound; I guess you can’t have it all…

I caught up with Dr. Griep and Ms. Mikasen for an in-depth interview about their book, the portrayal of scientists in film, and the social outreach responsibility of scientists to enable better public perception of science.

Doug Fowler: I’m fascinated by collaborations between artists and scientists, which are often intriguing. Can you tell us how you decided to write ReAction!, and write it together?

Marjorie Mikasen: The first thing you have to know is that we are married and that we’ve been enjoying movies together since our first date. We prolong the movie experience by discussing them afterwards. Cut to 2000 when we rented the Elvis movie Clambake to take our new TV out for a spin. It was in Technicolor. Imagine our surprise when, one hour into the movie, Elvis was revealed to be a chemist on the run from his father’s oil company. The Elvis character was developing a superhard, superfast-drying varnish that he called GOOP. In a song, he sings its name as “Glyo-Oxytonic Phosphate”. We thought it was clever and funny that varnish is sometimes called goop and that the screenwriter turned the nickname into an acronym.

The impetus for the book started during the next few months. Mark is a chemistry professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Since he knows the chemistry naming rules, he wondered whether he could draw the structure for Glyo-Oxytonic Phosphate. He couldn’t. A few months later we watched the movie again in hopes there were other clues. Surprisingly, another character clearly enunciates its name as Glyol-OxyOctanoic Phosphate, a name for a structure Mark could draw after assuming “oxy” is short for “epoxy” and that the compound was designed in analogy to linseed oil, a real varnish. After watching Clambake, it seemed every third movie we rented had some chemistry in it. After collecting about 20 examples and searching for common themes among them, Mark decided to keep a list so he could search movie encyclopedias and online databases. We began purchasing movies with chemical themes. The tipping point for writing the book occurred when we realized the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation had a Public Understanding of Science program for movie-related projects. We were able to persuade the program officer that a book such as the one we wanted to write would be useful for chemistry instructors who wanted to inspire students to want to learn more chemistry. We were delighted that Oxford University Press wanted to publish such a book.

DF: How did your two very different points of view come in to play in considering how to approach the subject?

MM: After we decided to write the book, we had lunch together once a week to discuss it. Mark had already assembled about thirty common chemical themes found in the movies. In half the cases, chemists or chemistry was portrayed as a bad thing and, in the other half, they were portrayed as good. Keep in mind that Elvis used his new varnish to win a boat race, which allowed him to win the affection of his girlfriend and the respect of his father. It was easy for the two of us to select the six or seven strongest themes out of the thirty.

Mark Griep: Marjorie is an artist who is always playing ideas and themes off one another. In her consideration of other types of dualities, she saw that Jekyll and Hyde is the chemical embodiment of benevolence and darkness so it quickly became the book’s overarching theme. With that in place, we developed the structure of five dark themes (Jekyll & Hyde, Invisible Man, chemical weapons, bad chemical companies, and illegal drug use) followed by five bright themes (chemical inventors, chemical detectives, chemical instruction, benevolent chemical researchers, and drug discovery). The actual order of the chapters was deliberately chosen to emphasize the dualities between the two halves of the book. For instance, the difficult-to-detect invisible man is the second chapter on the dark side while chemical detectives are the second chapter on the bright side.

DF: I read that the book was funded by an Alfred P. Sloan grant for the Public Understanding of Science. Is the book part of a lifelong interest in public outreach?

MM and MG: Artists and Scientists are always educating the public about their work. Both of these fields are at the edge of society’s quest for understanding so it is important for their practitioners to discuss their exploration of the frontiers. This book isn’t our first collaboration but it does represent our biggest co-venture. With our book, we wanted to use feature films to show the wider public how chemistry is an integral part of our society and how real chemistry ended up in the movies. Like it or not, movies are mediators of public understanding. They selectively portray things about society and, because of their wide dissemination, they have the power to influence many people. It is important for our society to have a scientifically literate public and we thought this would be a fun way to generate a thirst for more scientific knowledge.

DF: How did you decide to focus on chemistry found in movies as opposed to more mundane but realistic venues?

MM: Mark found that students responded to the chemistry in movies much better than they responded to the chemistry in news reports. When Mark taught General Chemistry for the first time, he gave the students a 600-word writing assignment. They were supposed to write about the chemistry in a recent newspaper or news magazine. Such an exercise promotes deep learning because the student has to process the issues and decide what is important. Mark was surprised that only 60% of the students completed the assignment and disappointed that some of them wrote about topics such as vaccines, supernovas, etc. without mentioning their chemical aspects. Mark decided he needed more control over the student choice of subject material. By that time, he had a list of based-on-a-true-story movies that were chemically inspirational. The next two times Mark taught General Chemistry, he projected two of these movies and had the students write about one of them. It was a great success; 95% of the students completed the assignment and the quality of writing was vastly superior. To make it easier for other instructors to repeat this blockbuster of an idea, we published a summary of it in the Journal of Chemical Education that included a list of the chemical and societal themes for 12 movies based on true chemical stories.

DF: Throughout the book, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was the most discussed prototype movie. I wondered how you made the decision to make that movie central to the book. Is it a movie you particularly like or have a personal connection with, or is it just because it’s such an old, publicly recognizable movie involving chemistry?

MM: Like everyone else, we knew the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” before we ever read Stevenson’s 1886 book or saw one of its many movie adaptations. The first dramatic version we watched was the 1931 version starring Fredric March. His transformation scene is enjoyable because it is theatrical. You can imagine it would be an interesting challenge for an actor to change personalities to match his appearance and March does a great job.

Even though Jekyll is shown mixing chemicals, Mark was intrigued that the transformative formula was not described in enough detail to know what it was supposed to represent. Stevenson’s original story describes a contaminant in a white powder that changes color when it is added to a blood-red solution but it doesn’t name the powder or the contaminant. Seeking other avenues to pursue, Mark contacted Stevenson scholar Richard Dury to find out whether any scholarship had been done on this topic. Dury told him that Stevenson’s wife Fanny had written a letter immediately before Stevenson wrote the novella in which she says he suffered from hallucinations after being treated with an ergot extract. This episode appears to have inspired Stevenson to write the story. Mark then discovered that ergot fungus is a pharmacological toolbox containing compounds to constrict arteries but also compounds to cause hallucinations. It seems that Stevenson’s doctor had treated him with the ergot extract to stop the bleeding in his lungs. The hallucinogenic side effect was caused by a minor component of the extract. This led Mark to conclude what Jekyll’s compound might be.

MG: When we

began preparing to write our book, Marjorie pointed out that Jekyll’s physical transformation was the external manifestation of his personality change. Mark responded that these transformations link it to chemistry because chemistry is about the study of matter and its transformations. Marjorie suggested using Jekyll and Hyde as the overarching theme for the book because the character of Jekyll/Hyde transforms between a dark side and a bright side, giving us a way to describe the positive and negative depictions of chemistry in the movies as a whole. As we further honed the chapter structure of the book, we knew there were going to be many echoes of the Jekyll and Hyde. In fact, anyone who self-experiments in the movies is following in the footsteps of Dr. Jekyll.

DF: My favorite movie about scientists is Andromeda Strain, because it portrays a relatively realistic view of who scientists are and what they can accomplish. However, in most movies, scientists and their abilities are rendered in a much more dramatic, unrealistic style. How do you think this affects the public’s view of scientists?

MM and MG: It is important for the pace of a feature film to use stereotypes. It helps the audience get into the story quickly so they can watch the interaction between the characters rather than the actors.

How do you recognize a chemist in the movies? When the chemist character is an inventor, he wears a white lab coats as he handles beakers and flasks while solutions bubble in glassware behind him. He often accidentally synthesizes a compound that solves a personal problem. These sorts of films are still being made and show an archaic view of the modern laboratory where nearly everything is on a small scale and instruments are used to analyze the material.
When the chemist character is a criminologist, he or she wears a white lab coat while using microscopes and other instruments to examine the minutiae of a crime scene. The solution to the crime, however, usually relies upon intuition. Chemically determined facts are used to eliminate possibilities. These chemists understand chemical analysis and criminal behavior.
When the chemist character is a researcher, he or she searches for a solution to a problem affecting other people. Most of the research chemists are based on true stories and aren’t as popular as the above two types of movies. They tend to move at a slower pace because the nature of the science and tools has to be explained in an engaging but understandable way. They are usually biographical pictures.

These three chemist stereotypes give us the shorthand view of what fictional chemists look like and their motivations for doing research. All three types are obsessive about their work, which is not too far from reality. In general, we think these stereotypes are benign.

DF: Does it help or hurt the cause of publicizing science?

MM and MG: Let’s just say we will always need good educators to clear up these sorts of misunderstandings. It would be great if we could teach people to be optimistically skeptical when they encounter new claims. Movies and television are problematic in that viewers are able to see that something works with their own eyes. Even if they know it is “only a movie” or “only TV”, the image has entered their memory cells. If it is reinforced in any way, they will remember the image long after they’ve forgotten its source. As long as academicians keep putting out good information in reliable locations, the public will have somewhere to look when they are seeking answers.

Another answer to this question is that it helps and hurts. Consider the “CSI Effect” that trials have been experiencing in recent years. It seems that juries are demanding more sample analysis than the investigators carried out. For instance, juries might want to know why DNA analysis wasn’t performed on all samples at the crime scene. The people serving on juries don’t realize how expensive or time-consuming it is to run each analysis. The positive spin is that juries want to have all the dots connected by solid scientific methods. It is great they want to rely on physical evidence rather than on unreliable eyewitnesses.

DF: Your book touches on the fact that chemistry has also changed a lot over the course of recent history. Can you expand on how these changes are reflected in the portrayal of science and scientists in the movies?

MM and MG: The portrayal of chemists and chemistry in the movies has become much more realistic in recent years. Since comedies often rely much more heavily on stereotypes, they mirror their time really well. In the 1930s comedies such as The Chemist (1936) starring Buster Keaton and Violent is the Word for Curly (1938) starring the Three Stooges, the chemist characters are professors who wear a black mortar boards and capes rather than white lab coats. Of course, these slapstick artists were making fun of the arcane knowledge produced by higher education. Flash forward to the 1990s when we had The Nutty Professor (1996) starring Eddie Murphy and Flubber (1997) starring Robin Williams. There is still too much glassware and these inventors are still University professors but they use correct scientific terms, have appropriately outfitted laboratories, and colleagues who interact with them realistically. These 1990s comedies were made for the youth market, none of whom would know whether these things were correct or not. These comedies use the reality of factual chemistry and its accoutrements to launch their satirical fantasies.

DF: Chemistry is often defined as “the central science,” and chemistry seems to influence many different fields of science. As such, it’s often hard to know just what qualifies as chemistry. How did you draw this distinction when classifying movies?

MM and MG: The basic rules of classification are simple. It is the exceptions that are complex. The two simple rules for inclusion are: 1) a character is identified as a chemist, or much more rarely, a biochemist, geochemist, etc.; and 2) one of the characters mentions an element, isotope, compound, or simple mixture. The characters are further categorized according to the type of chemistry they do. The chemicals are usually categorized by name. Overly common chemicals, such as gold and water, are not tracked even though one is an element and other is one of the most important compounds on Earth. On the other hand, when gold plays a role in a movie that has other chemical features, the gold is tracked. For example, munitions maker Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) isn’t an iron man for very long in Iron Man (2008). For most of the movie, he’s actually gold-titanium alloy man whose suit is powered by a plutonium-powered arc.

DF: Aspects of science and the scientific establishment have come under increasing attack by various organizations and individuals. Public distrust of science and scientists seems to be increasing, whereas scientific literacy has decreased. What role do you see movies and other media playing in these trends?

MG: Before I answer the question, I’d like to disentangle a few issues. The National Science Foundation published an interesting study in 2002 titled “Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Public Understanding”. There have been many changes since 2002 but the public probably still believes overwhelmingly that scientists wear glasses and white lab coats while working with beakers and flasks for endless hours alone in the lab. On the other hand, the public also says that “scientist” is the second highest prestige occupation (56% enthusiasm), just behind “doctor” (61% enthusiasm). The public respects science although they don’t necessarily want to be a scientist. The NSF article also noted the public thought economic and educational issues were more important than global warming. It is not really a contest to determine which of these three topics is of greatest interest to the public but it does say most people are most interested in issues that touch closest to home. Knowing that the average global temperature is slowly rising is only part of the equation. People want to know what they can do to adapt now in a way that doesn’t harm them economically. I don’t think that message has been communicated at all.

I agree that scientific literacy has decreased but there are many factors at play. One is that people rely less on their memories today and more on the internet for factual knowledge. For instance, you can learn an awful lot by reading Wikipedia, but you should always verify the cited sources. Another factor is the sometimes incredible expectation raised by the science in TV shows, movies, and news articles. As authors of a book about chemistry in movies, we see this as a great opportunity for a teaching moment. It is one of the main reasons we wrote our book. Yet another significant factor is that science is taught as a collection of facts rather than as a method of discovery. There are many ways to solve the latter problem. One is to educate students how to develop and test their own hypotheses. At first, students would reproduce well-known phenomena but they would develop an appreciation for proper methodology and the power of science to test a hypothesis. These hands-on experiences could be coupled with student-centered instruction where groups of students work together to answer a series of factual questions. In this way, the students take possession of the knowledge. Finally, introductory science material should be presented as a series of tested hypotheses rather than as building up from basic established principles. Introductory courses should explore local and global issues so that students can see that science is being used to address the biggest questions of our time. All of this would help students experience the wonder of science, where your understanding of something changes after you learn something new.

It may seem like a contradiction to what I have just written but feature films can be used to help teach chemistry. The movies in our book were selected because they present chemistry in a social context, even when the movie is fictional. The dozen movies that are based on true stories about chemists can be shown to students in their entirety. The chemist character’s social hurdles are emphasized along with the scientific ones. The assignment could be to answer a series of factual questions or to write a report with citations that emphasizes the chemical aspects presented in the film. There are often factual inaccuracies or time compressions that gloss over some relevant details. Besides these biographical movies, there are several dozen movies with a 2- to 5-minute sequence in which the chemistry that drives the narrative is explained. I call these the scientific-explanation scenes. They tend to be funny or exhilarating. In our book, the cue time for each of these scenes is indicated in the narrative summary, along with descriptions of the real chemistry upon which it is based.

Douglas Fowler, PhD is a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington working to implement new technologies to investigate protein sequence/function relationships. Although more of a biologist these days, he got a BA in chemistry and philosophy at Northwestern University and a PhD in chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute.

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I must preface this next post with a little truth in advertising. I’m a chemist. True blue, to my very core. College degree in physical chemistry, PhD in chemistry. So when I heard about a cable show on AMC whose whole premise rested on a chemistry teacher manufacturing meth, I must say, I was slightly skeptical. The propensity for letdown was huge, both in plot and in science. Well, let me assure you that Breaking Bad broke good. A “Break”out hit in its second season, the show has managed to layer complex serialized storytelling with compelling characters and stories, and even better science. In fact, chemistry itself can very well be considered a recurring character on this show and we’ll highlight some of the best moments in a bit.

ScriptPhD Grade: A+

The Premise
If the pilot episode doesn’t get your attention in the first five minutes, then I don’t know what will. A man wearing nothing but his skivvies and a gas mask careens a Winnebago in the New Mexico desert, a passed out body beside him, two more dead in the back, and a toxic sludge of chemicals seeping on the floor. With impending sirens approaching, he videotapes a final goodbye and apology to his family. Through flashbacks, we come to find out that the man is Walter White, an unassuming chemistry teacher in Albuquerque, NM. While on his humiliating moonlighting shift as a car wash attendant, because we pay our public school teachers so well, Walt collapses. The culprit? Lung cancer. Terminal. Inoperable. He decides to infuse some excitement into his life on a bust ride with his brother-in-law, a DEA agent. Only instead of discouraging Walt, the bust shows him how much money can be made. While pondering the possibility of leaving his family financially secure after his passing, he spots an old flunky student, Jesse Pinkman, fleeing the scene. “You know the business, I know the chemistry,” he proposes to Jesse. An idea is born, and the metamorphosis of Walter White begins. Back to the original scene, the sirens turn out to be fire trucks, one of the many hair-raising escapes to come, and Walt and Jesse live to sell meth another day.

In addition to Walt (played by the talented Bryan Cranston), and Jesse (dazzling newcomer Aaron Paul), we meet Skyler (Anna Gunn), Walt’s supportive but perplexed wife, who grows to be very suspicious of him as he has a harder time curtailing his clandestine activities, and Walt, Jr., a teenager with Cerebral Palsy, sensitively portrayed by RJ Mitte. The relationships serve as a centerpiece of the show are unraveled like the plot, in layers and tantalizingly. As Walt’s own family unit faces turmoil, Jesse, too, is disowned by his for his drug use. What started out as a business transaction between a teacher and former student blossoms into a tender father-son relationship. Meanwhile, while Walt’s well-meaning DEA brother-in-law Hank (Dean Norris) closes in on the hottest new meth dealer in town, Walt and Jesse face a series of personal and professional setbacks. For every two steps forward, for every dollar made, there is a new foe, a new nemesis, or new unintended collateral. All of the action culminates in an electrifying Season 2 finale sure to generate buzz and anticipation for Season 3.

The Science
Science on Breaking Bad is given the red carpet treatment: it’s sleek, sexy, geek-chic, tongue-in-cheek and everywhere. The show revels in delightful touches such as the title credits interspersing elements from the periodic table. Walt’s classes brim with interesting blink-or-you-miss-it factoids, such as H. Tracy Hall inventing the first reproducible process for making diamonds. To a stupefied, gun-happy Jesse, he makes the suggestion of killing a drug lord with castor beans, the source of the protein toxin ricin. And let’s not mention the two separate synthetic methods he comes up with to cook and crystallize the best meth the New Mexico DEA has ever seen. The darkly comedic highlights of the show are Walt and Jesse’s interactions in their “laboratory”, a beaten-down Winnebago camper. Shocked by Jesse’s sloppy street cooking, Walt pilfers glassware and equipment from his classroom—gas masks, round bottom flasks, reflux condensers, crystallization dishes—to build a setup worthy of Pfizer. Along the way, Jesse gets some remedial chemistry that he failed back in high school. I mean, sure, they’re making a devastating and highly illegal narcotic, but at least it’s via a proper Grignard reagent amination of a Schiff base!

On a more serious note, Breaking Bad also strives for a VERY candid and unrelenting portrayal of both cancer and the ramifications of the modern-day drug trade. Often whitewashed in entertainment, Walt’s cancer, and the side effects are shown in a brutal way, but the stark realism also underscores his desperation as the illness unfolds. Easily on par with David Simon’s brilliant The Wire on HBO, in the world of Breaking Bad no one is absolved from the intertwining effects of drugs—the rising body count, both from use and dealing, the strain on law enforcement, and families torn apart. In an astute opening TRULY ripped from the headlines, a Season 2 Breaking Bad episode starts with an original narcocorrido, a Mexican drug ballad evolved from its folk music tradition that is often used to chronicle the drug trade and escalating violence over the last two decades. Take a look:

Bottom line: the science is white-hot, the writing is red-hot, the meth is blue and the humor is black, so why aren’t you watching?

Accolades
Breaking Bad has been the recipient of a number of recent awards and critical acclaim. They won a 2009 Peabody Award for excellence in television achievement. Bryan Cranston won the 2008 Emmy for Outstanding Leading Actor in a Dramatic Series. Series creator and executive producer Vince Gilligan won a Writers Guild of America award for the Pilot episode. Many more achievements are sure to come for their outstanding sophomore effort!

For the ScriptPhD.com Top 4 Walter White Chemistry Moments in the show thus far and an in-depth discussion of the neat science behind them, click “continue reading”…

Top 4 Walter White Chemistry Moments

4) A salt and battery…
Sometimes, desperate situations call for desperate (and clever!) chemical measures. The sticky wicket? Jesse, as you will come to learn when you watch this show, is not the sharpest knife in the drawer. While on an exotic synthetic staycation in the lovely New Mexico desert, he stores the key to his Winnebago-cum-meth lab in the ignition. Two days later, the result is a dead battery and no one around for miles to help. D’oh! To make matters worse, their spare generator catches on fire, they run out of cell phone charge, and the only person who knows how to come get them gets lost. Walt suggests rebuilding a battery.

A battery (or a voltaic cell) is really just a series of fuel cells that store combined chemical energy to provide a high source of voltage power. And a fuel cell is an electrochemical device, or a galvanic cell (named after its inventor, Luigi Galvani), which converts free energy of a chemical reaction into electrical energy, or electricity. Generate electricity, generate charge, find a way to collect said charge, you’ve got power. Simple, right? In the case of batteries, the basic building block is a primary cell (also called a simple galvanic cell), which is made of four components: an anode electrode (the negative end), a cathode electrode (the positive end), an electrolyte solution that will generate positive and negatively charged ions for the two chemical reactions that take place, and a conductor (usually a wire) to carry the current of the electrons from one side to the other. The flow of charge ALWAYS goes from the cathode (the positive end) to the anode (the negative end).

Now that we are armed with the basics, here’s how Walt built his galvanic cells. For the anode (or source of negative charge) he uses a galvanized metal, specifically zinc, which they get by collecting coins and spare metallic parts (nuts, bolts, washers, etc). For the cathode (the positive charge where the current will flow out), Walt uses graphite and mercuric oxide that he ground down from the Winnebago’s brake pads. For the electrolyte, he soaks a sponge in potassium hydroxide (KOH). So in this case, referring back to the picture of the galvanic cell, the flow of positive charge will come in the form of K+ ions, and the negative charge from the OH– ions. Remember, we also need a conductor to carry the current of electrons—the charge—from one half-cell to the other. Walt uses copper wire, which he then connects to the jumper cables by collecting all six cells and pooling the electric current to restart the van’s battery.

Realistically speaking would this actually restart the camper? Sadly, probably not. We’ve talked about what a galvanic cell is, now let’s talk about how it works. The charge, or electric current, is generated by two separate chemical reactions (or half-reactions) that occur on either electrode of the cell. At the anode, an oxidization reaction strips electrons from the electrode (usually a metal of some sort), resulting in overall negative charge. At the cathode, free electrons that have traveled through the conducting circuit are used to reduce the electrode species to generate a positive charge. Taken together, these two values add up to the total cell potential, defined as the ability to force electrons through a circuit, and measured in voltage.

The zinc-carbon cell that Walt has built is a variation of a classic Bunsen cell, and we can estimate the cell voltage at around 2 total Volts. If we break down the two half-reactions, oxidation and reduction, we can add up the total potential using a fancy-schmancy mathematical equation called the Nernst equation. The potential of the mercuric oxide reduction, used in commercially available mercuric oxide batteries, is 1.35 Volts, and the potential of zinc oxidization is -0.76 Volts. To determine the full potential of a cell, we subtract the anode from the cathode, and this reaction adds up to 2.1 Volts. Walt mentions that he only has material enough for six cells. So if we add this up, we get enough voltage, give or take, to build a typical 12 Volt battery. Perfect in theory. But, when we talk about real-life circuits, we have to factor in electrical resistance, the opposition of electric current. Resistance occurs in all sorts of conductors, including metals (due to electron scattering) and ionic liquids (depending on concentration and insularity of the solution medium). If we’re going to get super-technical, we could invoke a physics property called Ohm’s Law which states that the ultimate current (which we measure in amperes) potential is inversely proportional to its resistance. The higher the resistance, the lower the ultimate current. So while Walt was able to build a battery with the proper voltage, the internal resistance would likely not generate enough current to provide the immense power necessary to jump-start a car that big. Most cars use a standard 12 Volt battery, but for cold-cracking need about 400-600 Amps, higher if you are going to start something like the Winnebago. The battery that Walt built would probably generate 20-30 Amps of current, based on current for a typical basic Galvanic cell, and that’s being generous. But how many shows on the air are even attempting this kind of clever science? So Breaking Bad gets an A for effort and that’s just all there is to it!

Incidentally, you can easily make your own galvanic cell at home. Check out this neat video of six lemons powering a low-wattage LED bulb:

Lemon Battery – Watch more funny videos here

3) What’s your name?
Of course, every drug kingpin worth his weight in meth has to have a nom de guerre. Mr. White’s sobriquet choice? Heisenberg. I must admit my inner chemistry geek did major cartwheels when I heard this. It’s such an appropriate name for him on so many levels. Heisenberg, of course, is a tongue-in-cheek reference to Werner Heisenberg, one of the great physicists of our time. He is the father of the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle” in quantum mechanics, which states that measured values for a particle’s position and momentum cannot be ascertained simultaneously with equal precision. It turns out that particles actually act more like waves, whose three-dimensional spatial function can be separated into three axes, or directions, x, y and z, horizontal, vertical and diagonal, respectively. So, if for a certain particle we can specify momentum with absolute certainty, then its position can be found anywhere along those axes with an equal probability. For this contribution, Werner won a Nobel Prize in physics in 1932.

What a clever and ironic name for Walt, whose own life and identity faces so much uncertainty as the show unfolds: in his cancer diagnosis, his long-term prognosis, his deteriorating relationship with his family, his precarious one with Jesse, and the theoretical uncertainty of his motivations for manufacturing meth, which certainly evolve over the two first seasons.

It’s important to note Heisenberg is also a very controversial historical figure. He played a prominent role in the German nuclear energy project, the race to develop an atomic bomb prior to World War II, although never formally affiliated with the Nazi movement. He later joined a prominent group of scientists who opposed the use of tactical nuclear weapons as warfare. The Tony-award winning play “Copenhagen” centered around the possibilities of a mysterious meeting in 1941 between Heisenberg and fellow physicist Neils Bohr in German-occupied Copenhagen around which there remains to this day… well… uncertainty.

A big ScriptPhD props to the writing team on Breaking Bad for this little gem!

2) It’s enough to just melt you!
Not since the CSI Season 2 episode “Bully For You”, in which a victim’s body found in a duffel bag decomposed so badly it had to be poured out, has a liquefied body played such an important role on a television episode. You’ve just killed the drug dealer who was supposed to peddle your batch of crystal meth, but you have to make the body disappear quietly without your DEA brother-in-law finding out. I mean seriously, folks, we’ve all been there, right? “The best thing to do,” Walt concludes, “is dissolving [the body] in strong acid.” We’ll talk more about this in a second, but first, check out the minisode for the episode “The Cat’s in the Bag…”. Pay particular attention to the disastrous results of this suggestion in the last 1:30, especially if you have a strong stomach.

In the episode, Walt asks Jesse to pick up a plastic container in which to dissolve the body. Even Jesse, dubious of this, says to him, “Any decent acid is gonna eat right through this.” “Not hydrofluoric [acid],” Walt concludes. What? An acid that can eat through flesh and bones but will leave a flimsy plastic bucket intact? This sounds like crazy talk! Well, actually, he’s right. An acid, chemically speaking, is nothing more than a compound that is able to give up a proton to a willing base in solution. By proton we mean a positively-charged hydrogen (H⁺) with water acting as the accepting base in most cases. The stronger the acid, the more readily it gives up this proton, and the higher the concentration of H₃O⁺ protonated water ions floating in solution, called the dissociated state. Why wouldn’t it react with plastic? Walt tells Jesse to look at the bottom of the bins for a symbol called “LDPE”. He’s talking about low-density polyethylene, the plastic polymer that makes up everything from plastic bags, various containers, dispensing bottles, wash bottles, tubing, to molded laboratory equipment. The repeating units of CH₂, some linked by side branches, make for a strong, compact bond and very low reactivity. That is, this chemical will neither give up its hydrogens when exposed to a solution, nor will it accept any. In this case, the acid will primarily disintegrate the body, which as we know is about 80% water, thus creating a solution, but the nonreactive hydrocarbon of the bin would remain chemically inert.

Hydrofluoric acid, contrary to Walt’s statement, is NOT really that strong of an acid, compared to other options, but has some interesting properties useful for Walt and Jesse’s predicament. Back up for a moment. There’s two ultimate determinants of acid strength—electronegativity (the charge on the molecule that the hydrogen is attached to) and the size of the atom that the hydrogen is attached to, which has to do with the strength of the bond. As you move across the periodic table, atom charge strongly increases, which is why fluorine is a much better acid candidate than nitrogen or an unreactive atom like carbon. BUT, as you move down the periodic table, elements get bigger and bigger, and as their size increases the strength of the bond with hydrogen weakens for various reasons. (We’ll skip discussion of covalent bond orbitals for next time!) So acidically speaking, HF < HCl (stomach acid) < HBr < HI. Personally, I really would have chosen a very concentrated hydrochloric acid or sulfuric acid solution like John George “The Acid Murderer” Haigh, or better yet, liquid lye (the base NaOH), which would be able to react with the organic components of tissue and fat content and wouldn’t have dissolved Jesse’s tub, but where’s the drama in that? Realistically speaking, HF would not be able to liquefy the body to the substantial extent shown in the episode. But because it is a weak acid and exists primarily in its undissociated state, it is able to penetrate deeply into the skin before deprtotonating, thus making it an excellent and efficient corrosive for human flesh (and very dangerous!). That’s right, it eats your body from the inside out. More importantly, it reacts strongly with calcium and magnesium, so it would be able to efficiently dissolve Emilio’s bones for disposal. [Incidentally, when people are treated at the hospital for HF poisoning, the first line of treatment is calcium gluconate to “compete” with the calcium in your bones as a neutralization reaction.] Unfortunately, it also reacts with silicon dioxide, the major component of glass and ceramics. Hence the look of absolute and profound horror on Walt’s face as Liquid Emilio, the bathtub, and everything in-between come crashing down.

Take home lesson? If you’re desperate to get rid of a dead body by chemical disincorporation, for God’s sakes, read up on your chemistry first!

Annnnnnd ::drumroll:: the best Walter White chemistry moment to date?

1) A little tweak of chemistry!

Without question, the scientific highlight of the show to me, thus far, is the integration of clever reaction chemistry to advance a major plot on the show. Early in the episode “Crazy Handful of Nothin’”, Mr. White is teaching his class about the power of chemical reactivity. Sometimes, it’s gradual and imperceptible, to which he gives the example of metal oxidation. But other times, the reaction is violent, quick, and produces tons of energy. On the chalkboard, he writes an example of an explosive compound, mercury fulminate, Hg(ONC)₂. Relatively easy to make synthetically, fulminated mercury is a powerful explosive and was long used as a detonation primer for dynamite.
This chemistry lesson proves to be a dynamite primer of its own later in the episode. The first good large batch of meth—1 pound!—that he and Jesse were able to synthesize was stolen without compensation by Albuquerque’s toughest drug wholesaler. What’s a wronged high school chemistry teacher to do? Walt shows up at Tuco’s casa with a large crystal of what looks like more meth and a demand for his money. But Walt surprises him by announcing that it isn’t in fact meth, and throws the crystal to the ground. The result? KABOOM! See the before and after pictures. What is that stuff, a stunned Tuco asks. “A little tweak of chemistry.” Most notable about this scene is that it caps the season-long transformation of Walt’s character. As he walks over to his car, money in hand, reputation restored, he hasn’t just earned the respect of a thug. This is the moment in the show that delineated a before and an after, where the line was drawn in the sand, and we never again saw the innocent sick chemistry teacher desperate to save his family. A drug dealer was born.

The only slight criticism that I have is that in reality, mercury fulminate wouldn’t actually look like the large meth-like crystals portrayed on the show. The chemical synthesis process usually leads to very fine white powder precipitate crystals like the one in the picture on the right. But we can just assume that Walt used his past career as a “Crystallographer Extraordinaire” to produce the largest mercury fulminate crystals to date ;-). Secondly, this stuff is unstable and extremely reactive. As in don’t touch it, don’t expose it to light, don’t mess with it unstable. It can be detonated by sparks, shock, friction, or even a wayward glance. Realistically speaking, Tuco handling the stuff with his knife and dropping it on the table would be enough to ignite it. We’ll also have to assume Walt was very careful in handling an entire plastic bag of it. Nevertheless, this whole scene is so creative, well-written and downright badass, that here at ScriptPhD.com, we can’t allow minor quibbles to detract from the moment.

The season finale of Breaking Bad aired May 31, 2009 on AMC, but for those of you not yet watching this spectacular series, there is plenty of time to catch up. The Season 1 DVD is available in stores and the Season 2 DVD release date will be updated on our site as soon as we know it! And we’re going to do our darndest to welcome Vince Gilligan, the show’s brilliant creator and executive producer, to our in-house ScriptPhD lab to chat all things Breaking Bad! Stay tuned!

For a look ahead at Season 3, check out this sneak peek preview:

All video clips and pictures are © 2007-2009 AMC Television and Sony Pictures Television. All rights reserved.

~*ScriptPhD*~