Angewandte's songbook

Out here I spoke about attempted humor in graphical abstracts of Angewandte. The abstract often begins with a few words aiming to create some hilarity.

I have no idea whether Jerry Lee Lewis could laugh about it (or Otis Blackwell and Jack Hammer).

It seems to be a hype to use song titles (or derivatives) for this. Many other songs can be identified.

Chubby Checker:
Let's twist again
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704465)

The Beatles of course:
You say you want a resolution
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704021)

All together now
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200703877)

Queen:
Who wants to live forever?
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704137)

Culture Club:
Chemical chameleon
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704520)

Pete Seeger (and of course The Byrds):
Turn, turn, turn
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704602)
Yeah I know it's from Ecclesiastes 3, verses 1–8.

Wilbert Harrison (or Brian Ferry or Bob Dylan)
Let's stick together
(http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200704654)

Maybe in the future musicians will be rated according to the amount of songs that have been used by Angewandte. The Beatles are number 1 right now.

Champagne chemistry

The previous post about was about Wine Chemistry. One discipline in this area is Champagne Chemistry

A while ago Industrial and Engineering Chemistry published a wine special (Vol. 27, No. 11: November 1935).

One article fits very well in those days around Christmas and new year.

Manufacture of Champagne and Sparkling Burgundy
F. M. Champlin, H. E. Goresline, D. K. Tressler
Ind. Eng. Chem.; 1935; 27(11); 1240-1243.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/ie50311a003

It is a nice article to read and it has some bad quality but nice pictures.



Here is another nice article for Christmas time: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/fam.810180103

Enjoy... Happy X-mas and a happy etc. etc. etc.

Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine

Do you like wine?

An alarming title of a paper by Harry Drake Gibbs (1872 – 1934). This is the guy from gibbs reagent (2,6-dichloroquinonechloroimide for a phenol test, Chem. Rev. 1927, 3, 291)
The arsenic in the wine came from arsenic-containing pesticides, clarifying agents, aniline-dyes and agents to clean the wine casks.

You may think: ‘I don’t care I prefer beer.’ Well don’t feel safe.

The Manchester 1900 arsenic brewage resulted in 6000 poisonings and 70 deaths. The arsenic came from glucose, so the beer did not comply with the Reinheitsgebot.

Invert sugar (hydrolyzed sucrose) can be added while brewing beer to speed up the fermentation. Invert sugar can be made by cooking normal sugar in the presence of an acid (resulting in fructose and glucose). The 1900 brewer used invert suger prepared by by this method using sulfuric acid. The sulfuric acid was made from sulfur obtained by combution of sulfur containing ore (pyrite). Unfortunately this ore contained quite some arsenic. The sulfuric acid was polluted with this arsenic and in the end there was the arsenicated beer.

This type of beer is still not very popular, most homebrewers prefer decent stuff.

Arsenicated wine is not rare. It has been said that Napoleon died from arsenic poisoning on Saint Helena in 1821.

If this is true it does not mean that someone poisoned him deliberately. Maybe he just drank the wrong stuff.

Mother's milk chemistry

There is this very nice paper by Prof. Albert Ripley Leeds (prof of chemistry at the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, N.J. who died of gastric cancer in 1902)

He analyzed the ingredients of mother’s milk and relates that to age, nationality, hair color etc.

The style of writing is awesome.

Prof. Albert screwed things up, writes it down and publishes it. That’s something you don’t see a lot nowadays.

Apart from analyses Prof. Albert describes physical properties.

When you study mother’s milk you have to describe this property.

Can you imagine a German brunette giving a chemistry professor (probably with beard) a breast?

Maybe Prof. Albert preferred being nursed by someone else:

Here are some other details of the Polish lady.

Too bad, no exact measurements of her breasts.

Maybe Prof. Albert preferred a younger lady.

This amazing 19th century paper clearly shows how careful they were back then with collecting their data.

Angewandte's graphical abstracts

It’s always nice to go through the graphical abstracts of Angewandte. A lot of colorful things that try to catch your eye.


A little bit of humor is often present

http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200703486


http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200702200

The latest issue contains a graphical abstract with pictures of a lovely way to recover a catalyst.




http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/anie.200703418

Nature Chemistry! Looking for a job?

Do you want to be an editor for Nature? See here.

Named chemical process patents

Baekeland Process – Leo Baekeland; US942699 (production of bakelite)
Bosch-Meiser Process – Carl Bosch and Wilhelm Meiser; US1429483 (production of urea)


Creighton Process – Henry Jermain Creighton; US1612361 (reduction of sugars)

Gibbs Process – Harry Gibbs; US1285117 (production of phtalic anhydride)

Haber-Bosch Process – Fritz Haber; US971501 (production of ammonia)

Raecke(or Henkel) process – Bernhard Raecke/Henkel&Cie Gmbh; DE936036 (production of terephthalic acid)

Twitchell Process - Ernst Twitchell; US601603 (cleavage of fatty acids)

Tyrer Process – Daniel Tyrer; US1210725 (sulfonation of hydrocarbons)

There are more named processes but I was not prepared to do more patent searching, maybe some other day.

Incredibly incredible

Angewandte Chemie International Edition wants to convince us of the fact that it is the best journal there is. In the last few issues they inserted a page with shrieking text in the graphical abstracts.
I can’t wait for the next issue to appear. Maybe this blog will inspire them to have an issue with articles by bearded chemists only.

Dignifying Science

This is great!

From G.T. Labs : Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists


The numbers 1, 2 and 3 of the Top 5 female chemists are in this comic. Several other chemists play a role as well.

Post 100

This post number 100!!! (so what?)

Time to look back 100 years. What is the best article in JACS of 100 years ago (june 1907)?

JACS, 1907, 6, 942

This is so nice. A brass strip with white corks as hydrogen atoms, black corks as carbon atoms, and springs.

In order to obtain a the ring structure the model is bent round to form a circle.
Beautiful! More than 40 years after Kekulé's paper!

You could make more proposed structure (like the ones from Ladenburg, Dewar, Adolf Claus, Armstrong and Baeyer) with meccano as a hobby. The Claus/Armstrong-Baeyer benzene model is easily constructed the paper says, but the most important message is the endline.

I haven't received it yet...
---------------------------------

Greg the chemist (Carbontet) commented on this post:

Interesting. After this paper was published, Prof. Lang became a commanding officer at the University of Toronto during WWI.

Here's a link to his portrait.

http://www.alumni.utoronto.ca/groups/Soldiers/illustrations/lang.jpg

"Colonel W. R. Lang VD was the first Commanding Officer of the University of Toronto Contingent COTC. He commanded it during and after the First World War (1914-1925) and later became the first Director of Military Studies at this University. He was appointed to The Canadian General Staff in 1914 and among other responsibilities was in charge of Coast Defence in the Maritimes in 1918. Before the war he was a professor of Chemistry at this University. He was president of the Canadian Operatic Society."

The Dehn-Hartman apparatus

Have you ever heard of the Dehn-Hartman apparatus. It is a great piece of equipment.
Do you know the purpose of this thing? Here is a hint: Dehn and Hartman are those guys, and the device is described here:

JACS 1914, 36, 2114

I'll explain the thing. In case you need it one day.

Urine in flasks A is dispensed with siphons into bottle B where the urine is passed through an ether layer. The water layer is dispensed into flask C with a siphon. Flask C is heated so that ether that came with the water layer is vaporized and condensed in the condser on top of bottle B. The ether layer is dispensed with a syphon into flask D and concentrated, leading the vaporized ether into the condenser back into bottle B.

So what we have is something like an continuous urine extraction and concentration device. The Dehn-Hartman apparatus is just brilliant.

Urinod

You may think that concentrating urine on large scale is just for alchemists in the 17th century... well, it's not.

Have a look at this lovely paper.

J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1914, 36, 2136

In order to isolate the so-called Urinod they concentrated a lot of urine.Unfortunately they do not tell how they obtained the urine.

I'm very pleased that I do not have to reproduce their experiment.

And I am very happy that I didn't work in that lab at that time.

After fifteen months they were just unable to smell anymore I think.

And what is this Urinod that makes our urine smell?

I can't believe it... and I'm not the only one.

Big bad industry

Are there people that think you work in the big bad polluting industry or the industry where they do not want people to get healthy? Tell them there is always worse, and give them this book about I.G. Farben:

The crime and punishment of I.G. Farben by Joseph Borkin



You can get a free copy here.

If you want to read horrible patents.


Check out : DE438818, DE447913 about Blausäure, Later known as Zyklon-B(lausäure).
Developed as a pesticide but later used to commit massive war crimes.

DE447913; Haltbarmachen von Blausäure

'Making Hydrogencyanide not perishable'

What I hate about patents (part II)

A while ago I already told what I hate about patents. Here is another example of the 'I'm not gonna tell you'- style.

Ah, that is enlightening...

Lovely cancer research

In Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 2007, 6, 115 there is a paper to motivate everybody who is working on oncology. 'Why is cancer drug discovery so difficult?'

'Oncology has one of the poorest records for investigational drugs in clinical development, with success rates that are more than three times lower than for cardiovascular disease. The widespread, relentless and lethal nature of cancer persists, with only incremental overall improvements in treatment outcomes, despite billions of dollars of public and private investment. The few notable successes, such as imatinib (Gleevec; Novartis) in the treatment of chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML), are, so far, exceptions.'

Somewhere else they state :'cancer models are notoriously problematic'

Should I be glad that I am not working in this field? Hmm, I do not care, I am used to failure. That is my job I think.

They have another wise remark: 'A good target is useless without a correspondingly good cognate drug.'

I would like to rephrase this to : 'I do not want your well validated target for which there is only a lousy biological assay.'

Markovnikov's rule

I was reading an essay about named things and saw this picture. (The Road to Chemical Names and Eponyms: Discovery, Priority, and Credit, Angew. Chem. int. ed., 2004, 43, 5888)

Figure 3. V.V. Markovnikov (1838-1904). He
would hardly recognize the rule now bearing
his name.

In the text there is no reference to this Figure 3, but I thought it was probably a nice example of how things become named to people who had just 'a role in it'.

We all know Markovnikov's rule:

In elctrophillic additions of H-X to alkenes the hydrogen ends up attached to the carbon of the double bond that had more hydrogens to start with. (Clayden, Greeves, Warren and Wothers' textbook).

Nowadays we learn the reason behind this observation, which is far more important. Markovnikov's rule is not a law.

Now I wanted to know how Markovnikov formulated this rule himself so I searched for his paper and found it quite easily. The rule can be found in an addendum of a paper on isomeric buturic acid. (Ueber die Abhängigkeit der verschiedenen Vertretbarkeit des Radicalwasserstoffs in den isomeren Buttersäuren, Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie, 1870, 153, 2, 228)

He starts to say : 'I cannot here enter into a detailed examination of the various facts that alows us to postulate this rule rule.'

Then he says (in italics): 'When an unsymmetrical alkene combines with a hydrohalic acid, the halogen adds on to the carbon atom containing the fewer hydrogen atoms, that is the carbon that is more under the influence of other carbons.'

Markovnikov said exactly the same thing as the Clayden book does. Why would Markovnikov hardly recognize the rule now bearing his name?? The only reason I can think why he would not recognize it now is because he is dead!!!

Markovnikov 's paper is quite sloppy. It contains several errors and it is not obvious which chemistry was done by himself. It is obvious he relied on the work of people like Butlerov.It took about 60 years before his rule became well known because of the work done by Maas (1924) and later Kharasch (1933). In Markovnikov's time stereochemistry was about to be born, nobody saw the important addendum in his paper, but he formulated the rule himself, Prof. Pedro can deny it, but it is true.