Beard chemistry

Shulgin is a bearded chemist. It might be wise for him to shave it off. His beard contains evidence for the narcotic brigade. See here:


Occult chemistry is nice but beard chemistry is awesome. It is a privilege to perform such analyses.

Very nice that they explicitly pay attention to hygiene.

Unfortunately they failed to mention the brand of the shaver in the 'Apparatus' section.

Nobel beards

It has been said several times on this blog how important a beard can be for a chemist.

Ψ*Ψ even suggested to include the tag beard on this blog. (Great idea!)

Anyway... The Nobel laureates in the 5 traditional disciplines of 2007 are known. I am quite dissapointed. Let's compare this year to the first Nobel Prize year.

1901

Wilhelm C. Röntgen (Physics), Emil A. von Behring (Physiology or Medicine), Rene F. A. Sully Prudhomme (Literature)
Jean H. Dunant and Frédéric Passy (Peace), Jacobus H. van't Hoff (Chemistry)

5 bearded laureates, 1 not bearded

A bummer that the beardless guy is a chemist, but 5 out of 6 is a good score.

2007

Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg (Physics), Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies (Physiology or Medicine)
Doris Lessing (Literature), IPCC and Al Gore (Peace), Gerhard Ertl (Chemistry)

No beard at all!

How about the chemistry laureates? How bearded were they in history. (I mean that they must have a beard on the portrait on the official website.)

1901 was not very good but in 1902 there was Emil Fisher to show the world how it should be done.

A beard and a pince-nez!

A great shock when you count the amount of bearded chemistry Nobel laureates over the years.


149 laureates and only 13 were bearded (a lousy 8.7%).

1901-1925 : 9 bearded laureates. In 1995 Mario J. Molina was the first bearded laureate in 70 years.

There were 3 beards after Molina. The last hero was (sure) 'The Man' in 2005. Okay, not an imressive beard, but any visible facial hair on the chin is sufficient.

Let's hope that next year there is a prize for someone like Stoddart or Seeman.

Thomson and Anderson

Couldn't resist posting this...

I posted that picture of the old lab and a picture of the guy who set up that lab; Prof. Thomas Thomson. The picture was taken around 1864. Thomson died in 1852 and was succeeded by Thomas Anderson.

How about this beard? Quite impressive I'd say.

Pelger-Huët, pince-nez and the Top 5 pince-nez chemists

I was reading some bio-stuff and encountered a story about the Pelger-Huët anomaly; a congenital disorder in which granulocyte nuclei fail to segment normally. In heterozygotes most granulocytes have bilobed nuclei.This is often called a pince-nez cell.

You don't see them a lot nowadays those pince-nez things. The last I've seen was a sun-pince-nez.

A pince-nez (meaning 'pinch-nose') is very nice equipment for a chemist. Sure a beard, moustache, good pose, lousy way of dying, statue and a lousy grave are great, but a pince-nez is something that can make you quite distinguished and it's for women too.

So, now it's time for the:

Top 5 pince-nez chemists

1) Emil Fischer

The man always looked the same. It is said that he was born with a beard and a pince-nez.

2) Walther Nernst
3) Fritz Haber

He lost his hair but gained confidence and stopped using a pince-nez safety line.

4) Henri Louis Le Chatelier
5) Moses Gomberg

Decided to wear a pince-nez although his big ears were perfectly suited to place temples over.

A synthetic environment - reloaded

Two weeks ago I mailed syntheticenvironment@gmail.com to tell Een of andere vent that I hoped he would not delete the blog and should continue to post things every now and then. He replied: ‘Do it yourself.’ I said that had no access to the blog. He gave me access. It turned out that I knew him.

He is my supervisor now. He wants me to call him Sir now, so we have a strict professional realationship. I do the work and he will say it was his idea. In the meantime Vent is just doing nothing besides having an Ellen Swallow Richards obsession and a special interest in facial hair. I will probably post less often than Vent did, but I’ll do my best.

Well this was his idea I must admit, a new category: What they said…

With Einstein on the beach

Vent demanded two other 'What they said' things in this post.

Deductive technique

Vent demanded facial hair things as well.

Recognize a genius

Vent spoke about his urinating behavior and I wonder if he could help me with this reduction I am working on.

JACS, 1900, 22, 309

Top 5 beardless chemist moustache designs

This had to be done since I already did the Top 5 bearded chemists.

1) The pince-nez/moustache combination

Walther Nernst, Henry Louis Le Chatelier

2) Victor's tangled food residue collecting moustache

Victor Grignard, Victor Goldschmidt

3) The moustache with extensions on the cheeks

James Crafts, Charles Pfizer

An improved design was the ‘only on the cheeks moustache’, developed by Charles-Adolphe Wurtz

4) The hanging moustache on round face with a piercing look

Alfred Werner, Theodor Curtius

This design is closely related to:

5) The modest moustache on round face

Carl Bosch, Peter Debije

Top 5 of bearded chemists

In order to look like a true eccentric scientist you must have a beard and be old. To be qualified to compete for a place in this top 5 the chemists had to be bearded, dead and must have lived in the 19th century for the most of their lives.

1) Dmitri Mendeleev (it is said that he had a haircut once a year)



2) August Wilhelm von Hofmann



3) Hugo Schiff



4) Vladimir Markovnikov



5) Sir William Perkin