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Fragrance Overload?
Credit: Pascal Blachier via Wiki commons
When humanity’s predilection for perfume meddles with the sense of smell of insects and animals, it can sometimes be fortuitous. Case in point: the discovery that Calvin Klein’s Obsession perfume lures jaguars, tigers, and other big cats to expectant nature photographers and videographers. But meddling with odor receptors of other creatures can prove problematic. For example, the cosmetic and food fragrance 1-methylbutyl 3-methylbutanoate elicits aggressive defense behaviour in hornets. Sometimes people meddle with an insect’s ability to smell sexual pheromones as a means to combat invasive species. In 2007, California’s agricultural industry tried spraying an overwhelming amount of invasive moth species pheromone onto fruit crops because they hoped the signal overload would confuse the male moths and disrupt the species’ mating cycle–a solution that led to serious controversy.
The question that Richard Bolek, a PhD student, and his adviser, Klaus Kümmerer, at the University of Freiburg Medical Center, in Germany, want answered is whether some of the fragrances we use—in perfumes, personal care products, and cleaning agents, which get released into the air or down the drain–are inadvertently interrupting some of the chemical communication networks that benign or beneficial insects and animals rely on. Continue reading →
Snacking On Cereal Packaging
Credit: Shutterstock
The Washington Post‘s continued coverage of the massive Kellogg’s 28 million cereal box recall in June, when 2-methylnaphthalene from the packaging percolated into the cereal, and yesterday’s news that Congress is now investigating that recall are good reminders that for any food you consume, a small part of the wrapping inevitably ends up in your body, too. Ditto for pharmaceutical drugs.
Last summer I wrote about how food and pharma companies are starting to deal with these packaging leachables, and so a couple of people at C&EN asked me to speculate on how the 2-methylnaphthalene had ended up in America’s Froot Loops.
According to the Kellogg’s press release, the voluntary recall occured due to an “uncharacteristic off-flavor and smell coming from the liner in the package.” The CDC’s website notes that naphthalene is often found in moth balls and deoderant, but it can also be found in resin (presumably how Kellogg’s thinks the 2-methylnaphthalene ended up in the cereal box liner) and printing dye ingredients. Substituted naphthalenes have high vapor pressure, which means they can migrate through all sorts of packaging, including cardboard and polyolefins.
ETH Data Manipulation Report Posted On-line
Last fall, chemist Peter Chen voluntarily resigned from his post as the vice president for research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zürich, (ETH) following a report from a scientific board of inquiry–that Chen had himself requested–which found that data from his lab published a decade ago in two peer-reviewed papers and a doctoral thesis had been falsified.
The university announced the board of inquiry’s results in September 2009 but it was prevented from releasing the full report publically by a court order from the graduate student involved. According to a post today on the ETH website: “The Court has now ruled, in an initial decision taken at the end of December 2009, that ETH Zurich may in principle publish the export report but only in such an anonymised form “that no conclusions can be drawn about the dissertation or the identity of the complainant”.”
You have to go to the university’s German site to access the report. The blacked out lines are actually multicolor and here is the legend: Blue = PhD Student, green = molecule 1, yellow = molecule 2, black = miscellaneous, red and grey = additional members of the research group.
The basic conclusion from the board of inquiry: “The only credible explanation is manipulation of the data.” They finger the graduate student and vindicate Chen.
Some parts of the 22-page document are dry, but in general it is well-written and shows a measured and comprehensive analysis by the scientific board of inquiry. It also gives insight into how such investigations proceed…
Blame It On The Brain(s) Behind The ACIEs Puns
So. My breaking point came a few weeks ago when I read one of ACIE’s genius abstract caption titles, “Just another Mannich Monday.” After laughing out loud, I proceeded to hum the cheesy tune by the Bangles, loudly, from C&EN’s rooftop Berlin office, for three days. From here until perpetuity, the lyrics “I can’t be late because I guess I just won’t get paid” will remind me of Mannich-derived, stereoselective, one-pot syntheses of “spirocycles, 1-aminoindanes, and 5,6-fused azabicycles that have a quaternary carbon center.”
Yeah yeah. I know I’m not the first to grin, groan, or comment about the puns, pop references, and general goofiness ACIE puts into its online abstracts. Many a blogger (Derek Lowe, Excimer, “Phil,” and Chiral Jones ) have also, um, “admired” ACIE’s ability to bring Shakespeare (“Double, double, no toil and trouble”), Star Trek (“Beam me up,” twice), the X-files (“The truth is out there“), and the disembodied voice from the London Underground (“Mind the gap”) into the world of chemistry. The journal has even gotten pretty risqué of late with “Metal ménage à trois” and “Balls galore!”
But Mannich Monday followed soon on the heels of the caption “The Write Stuff,” which permitted the New Kids On The Block hit–(oh yes, here’s the video)–to breach my consciousness for the first time in 20 years—a particularly traumatic reminder of the boy band phenomenon.
So much so, that I had to meet the evil mastermind behind it all.
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Chemist Rumored To Be Next Boss Of France's CNRS
According to the French newspaper Le Monde, France’s prestigious National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) might soon have chemist Alain Fuchs as its new director general-president. Neither the CNRS communications office nor the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research are confirming the Fuchs appointment, stating that they will make an official announcement next Wednesday. Fuchs is also declining to speak to the media at the moment.
Fuchs is a physical chemist who leads a molecular simulation group at Chimie Paris Tech, and is also the university’s director. Chimie Paris Tech is part of a distinguished and influential group of higher learning institutions in France called “écoles nationales supérieures.” According to Le Monde, a mathematician named Antoine Petit and a cryptologist named Jacques Stern were also considered for the CNRS position.
Whoever gets the job will be responsible for 26,000 permanent CNRS staff and a budget of 3 billion Euros ($4.3 billion). That person will also be at the helm of an organization in transition: The French government is splitting the CNRS into 10 institutes by subject. For example the institute of chemistry will be separate from the institutes of physics and biological sciences.
The new CNRS director general-president will be kept busy: The relationship between President Nicholas Sarkozy’s government and French scientists (including those from CNRS) has been rocky. Some of the government’s proposed reforms to the CNRS and to universities have brought thousands of scientists out of their labs and into the streets in protest.
Fake medicine
A counterfeit drug manufacturing lab in Colombia
As I was doing interviews for an article on fake pharmaceuticals, Paul Newton told me a story that I am unlikely to forget. Newton is a doctor in Laos who is involved in several projects to track down counterfeit malaria drugs in Southeast Asia and Africa; he’s also a doctor at a Wellcome Trust-funded hospital that is associated with tropical medicine at the University of Oxford.
We were talking about the fact that nobody knows exactly how many fake drugs are consumed around the world, but it’s pretty clear that the problem is greater in developing countries where there is less funding for regulation and/or policing. (The WHO estimates that markets in industrialized countries such as the U.S. and many parts of the E.U. have no more than about 1% counterfeits. In developing nations, some 10-50% of pills are guesstimated to be bogus.)
“Counterfeiters have killed with impunity,” Newton said. He went on to tell me that people sometimes spend what little money they have to unwittingly buy fakes, and then have succumbed to otherwise curable diseases because the medicines have not worked. “A Burmese patient died a few years ago of malaria having clearly taken fake artesunate,” a malaria drug, Newton said. “When he was admitted with malaria all the signs were that he should recover rapidly but then he deteriorated and died of cerebral malaria very tragically,” Newton added. The man’s community was so upset that people in “the village where the patient came from took all the medicine he had been taking from the shop. They burned it in a bonfire in the village in a spontaneous protest,” Newton told me.
It’s stories like these that have motivated the WHO to team up with INTERPOL to form an international anticounterfeiting task force called IMPACT (International Medical Products Anti-Counterfeiting Taskforce). Drug counterfeiters pull in a–guesstimated again–$75 billion per year. According to many who follow pharmaceutical counterfeiting, hard drug traffickers are now turning to the business of making bogus medicines because the profit margin is better and the penalties are softer… than for say, cocaine or heroin. The IMPACT taskforce has just a couple of full-time staff members, which seems rather small for the challenge of coordinating the international fight against fake medicines. Yet IMPACT has brought down counterfeiting operations in Southeast Asia, Tanzania, Uganda and in Nigeria. Here’s a catch of bogus drugs, courtesy of IMPACT:
Fake meds in nabbed in Tanzania and Uganda
Here is an example of the storage conditions for fake medicines found in Kenya, also courtesy of IMPACT:
Storage of counterfeit drugs in Mombasa
And last but not least, here’s a shot of manufacturing facilities for a counterfeit ring tracked down in China. Photo courtesy of Pfizer’s David Shore:
Fake drugs, made in China
Even though it may seem like counterfeiting is on the rise, Newton pointed out to me that the business of making fake medicines is as old as remedies themselves. Around 1500 BC, an Egyptian queen called Hatshepsut got so fed up with the quality of herbal medicines she was exposed to, that she led an expedition herself to get good quality medicines in the land of Punt, near current day Somalia. More recently, in the 1600s, quinine-containing Cinchona bark imported to Europe from South America as treatment for malaria was adulterated “at such an enormous scale that the public gave up on the medicine because it seems not to work,” Newton adds.
More Falling Walls
Before heading to last evening’s rainy celebration of the Berlin Wall’s collapse at the city’s historical Brandenburg Gate–which featured a symbolic toppling of 1000 painted, wall-like dominoes, statements by various political dignitaries (Merkel, Clinton, Brown, Gorbachev, Sarkozy, Medvedev, etc), and performances by Placido Domingo and Jon Bon Jovi–I spent the day at a conference called Falling Walls, which was organized by the Einstein Foundation.
Taking place in a renovated water pumping station in the middle of the former so-called death strip, the no-mans land that abutted the Berlin Wall, a variety of top researchers from the sciences and humanities described the “walls” which were falling or which needed to fall in their area of research. The organizers had also managed to book German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is a scientist-turned-politician from the former GDR (more below). Although no late-breaking new discoveries were announced, the conference provided a fascinating overview of research in a real potpourri of great topics: vaccines for neglected diseases like malaria and TB, three-dimensional televisions, how to make concrete less polluting, and how researchers are cracking the secrets of ancient civilizations , the origin of Homo sapiens. We also heard from Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, about the Large Hadron Collider (which will hopefully start pumping out data one of these days) and from Norbert Holtkamp, who heads Iter, the fusion energy transnational research organization that originated during a 1985 conversation between Gorbachev and Reagan.
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20 Years After The Berlin Wall Fell
A remaining section of the Berlin Wall
C&EN Berlin’s office is about a block-and-a-half from where the Berlin Wall used to stand, on the former Communist, East side (known as the German Democratic Republic, or GDR). When I get out the wrong subway stop exit, I have to retrace my steps across the infamous death strip–a no-man’s land just before the wall to the West–where people were shot dead trying to escape. Just down the road, one of the few remaining stretches the Wall has been left standing. Where the Wall has been torn down, a double brick strip in the pavement demarcates its former path. Even after two years in the neighborhood, I am amazed and sobered by how easy it is for me to pop over to the West, to buy some printer toner or to pick up lunch supplies at a nearby supermarket.
In this week’s issue, I’ve got an article about what it was like for GDR chemists who worked behind the wall. I talk to researchers who describe what it was like to be surveilled by the Stasi, the East German spy service, or what life was like after their supervisor escaped to the West. One chemist I spoke to named Christoph Naumann escaped by foot from Hungary to the former Yugoslavia and then to West Germany.
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