Mar
15
15
Ripped From the Pages
‘CENtral Science’
Posted by Rudy Baum on March 15, 2010 in Ripped From the Pages, The Editor's Blog
C&EN launched “C&ENtral Science,” the magazine’s permanent blog, in March 2008, in time for the spring ACS national meeting in New Orleans. A number of C&EN staff members attending the meeting posted blog entries on everything from symposia they had attended to tchotchkes being given out by exhibitors at the meeting exposition. A smattering of readers followed us on the blog.
We created “C&ENtral Science” with a bit of trepidation. There was concern about diverting staff resources from covering hard news of the chemistry enterprise toward what some viewed as ephemera. There were questions about setting priorities. People pointed out that successful blogs often had a snarky tone that we thought was inappropriate for C&EN. Others worried that the lighter, breezier tone we were hoping to achieve on “C&ENtral Science” could detract from the perception of C&EN as a serious newsmagazine.
For the past two years, “C&ENtral Science” has been something of a grabbag. Numerous staff members attending national meetings continued to post on, yes, tchotchkes, dining experiences, and people they ran into on shuttle buses, as well as symposia and governance functions. C&EN’s informal “staff photographer,” Associate Editor Linda Wang, worked with C&EN Online Visual Designer Tchad Blair to create memorable slide shows from the meetings.
Celebrating The Laser
Mar
9
9
Posted by Lauren Wolf on March 9, 2010 in Ripped From the Pages
In honor of this week’s laser-rific cover story, which takes a look at the laser’s impact on chemical research during the past five decades, I’m also giving a nod to its influence on pop culture.
After all, what would movies and television be without lasers that blow up planets and sharks that use them for frickin’ nefarious purposes?
Here, then, are my top five picks for the Best Uses of Lasers in Film:
5) Countless movies have used “laser fields” to protect some sort of data or priceless artifact from being stolen. And characters have always gotten by those laser grids with a lot of practice and, well, flexibility. Take Catherine Zeta-Jones in “Entrapment,” for instance. She and Sean Connery practiced really hard to defeat a laser-based security system and steal a desirable Chinese mask in the film. An even more elaborate dance through a laser field in a much better movie, however, was undertaken by the Night Fox in “Ocean’s Twelve.” He dances his way through the lasers to steal the Coronation Egg, an antique he eventually finds out was a fake all along.
4) No one could forget the moment the Death Star blows up Princess Leia’s home planet of Alderaan in “Star Wars.” An entire planet gone in the blink of an eye, my friends. And what technological wonder was responsible? You guessed it: a really, really big laser.
Blame It On The Brain(s) Behind The ACIEs Puns
Feb
11
11
Posted by Sarah Everts on February 11, 2010 in Chemistry is Everywhere, Ripped From the Pages, Where is C&EN?
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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Fake medicine
Jan
4
4
Posted by Sarah Everts on January 4, 2010 in Chemistry in the News, Ripped From the Pages
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.
Innovation
Dec
8
8
Posted by Rudy Baum on December 8, 2009 in Ripped From the Pages, The Editor's Blog
We take it as a given that innovation is good. We also take for granted that the U.S. has always had a knack for being innovative, and that that knack is an important factor in the remarkable prosperity this nation has long enjoyed.
But what is innovation exactly? Why has the U.S. been good at it? Is the U.S. losing its innovative bent, at least relative to up-and-coming nations such as China? How does a country foster its innovative capacity?
These were some of the questions addressed at the two-day “Innovation Economy Conference” held last week in Washington, D.C. The conference was sponsored by the Aspen Institute, Intel, Democracy, and “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.” The program featured industry leaders such as Intel President and CEO Paul S. Otellini and GE Chairman Jeffrey R. Immelt, government officials such as Education Secretary Arne Duncan, academic leaders such as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President Shirley Ann Jackson, and thought leaders such as Aspen Institute President and CEO Walter Isaacson. Panels during the conference were moderated by “News Hour” correspondents.
One panel during the conference that should be of particular interest to C&EN readers focused on “Are We Doing Enough To Support Science in America?” and featured ACS Executive Director and CEO Madeleine Jacobs, NIH Director Francis S. Collins, and Columbia University physics professor Brian Greene, who is also the founder of the World Science Festival.
More On Dan Brown And Liquid Breathing
Dec
7
7
Posted by Lauren Wolf on December 7, 2009 in Ripped From the Pages
In this week’s Newscripts, I wrote about some of the science Dan Brown used to spice up his latest novel, “The Lost Symbol.”
Schematic of partial liquid ventilation being applied to an infant in respiratory distress. Courtesy of Thomas Shaffer
As mentioned, Brown uses the concept of “liquid breathing” in the book as a way to snatch his hero, Robert Langdon, from the jaws of death. That Langdon survives really shouldn’t surprise anyone: A) He’s the main character and therefore cannot die, and B) Brown couldn’t write another cash-cow story about symbology and secret societies without the code-breaking protagonist. But I apologize if I’ve ruined it for you.
So Langdon survives being trapped in an enclosed tank that ultimately fills with liquid. It turns out that the tank is a total liquid ventilation (TLV) chamber, and Langdon is “drowning” in oxygenated perfluorocarbons rather than water. No fewer than eight chapters go by while Langdon is enveloped by the fluid, seemingly in limbo. (Yes, I said eight.)
I asked Thomas H. Shaffer, professor emeritus of physiology and pediatrics at Temple University School of Medicine, whether the scenario Brown describes is plausible. According to Shaffer, “a person could survive for a limited time without circulation of [perfluorocarbons], provided the liquid was rich with oxygen and devoid of carbon dioxide.” In addition, he says, if the fluid is cold (to lower metabolism) and treated with drugs to alter the subject’s state of mind (as Brown mentions), it could assist the process. (more…)
Share Your Hot Flash Anecdotes
Nov
23
23
Posted by Sophie Rovner on November 23, 2009 in Chemistry is Everywhere, Ripped From the Pages
When a hot flash flares, what’s a woman to do?
She can cool herself with a fan or open a freezer door and stick her head in. She can peel off as much clothing as she can decently get away with. She can chance hormonal therapy, though her friends might give her a hard time about it. Or she can test out a folk remedy 
from the Internet.
With all the options out there, what’s the most creative solution you’ve come up with? What happens to you when a hot flash strikes? And what’s your most embarrassing hot flash tale?
We hope you’ll share your story with us.
In the meantime, check out my article about research into the causes of and treatments for this dreaded symptom of menopause.
20 Years After The Berlin Wall Fell
Nov
8
8
Posted by Sarah Everts on November 8, 2009 in Chemistry is Everywhere, Ripped From the Pages, Where is C&EN?
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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Meet Wauwatosa’s Favorite Son
Oct
8
8
Posted by Carmen Drahl on October 8, 2009 in Ripped From the Pages
I had to share what I think is both the most awesome and most touching video about a Nobel winner I’ve seen yet. Newly-minted chemistry laureate Tom Steitz hails from southeastern Wisconsin. His hometown ABC affiliate, WISN 12 Milwaukee, has the local angle. Touching because of the family photos and the proud family members, awesome because of the muttonchopsfacial hair.
On Foxes And Half-Full Glasses
Oct
7
7
Posted by Carmen Drahl on October 7, 2009 in Ripped From the Pages
Looks like the glass is half-empty around some of the chemistry blogosphere (and twittersphere, if that’s even a word) today. But here’s some good news. Consider Jack Szostak, the most chemistry-oriented of the Medicine-Nobel-winning trio. The fact he’s shared in this prize should matter a lot to people thinking about what kind of work *should* win the Nobel Prize.
Unlike his co-winners, Szostak isn’t really in the telomere field anymore. His interests have since shifted- to RNA and to the origins of life. Szostak is a fox in the Isaiah-Berlinian sense- someone who’s looked at the world through a variety of scientific lenses.
Szostak has had multiple scientific careers, Tom Cech, former HHMI president and himself a Nobel laureate (in chemistry) told me over the phone. “I don’t want to give the impression that he flits around from one thing to another. Whenever he moves into a new area, he makes deep and lasting contributions, and then moves on to something else where he can make a big impact,” he says.
In choosing the scientists who won for telomere biology, “clearly the Nobel Committee went back to the intent of Alfred Nobel’s will, which said that the award was supposed to honor an important discovery and not be a lifetime achievement award,” Cech adds.
UPDATE: FWIW, Terra Sig has a fantastic post about the chemistry prize. The money quote: “If I see electrons being pushed around, it’s chemistry.”
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