In the News: Larissa Schuster

From CNN.com:

http://tinyurl.com/4bfb8n

Chemist gets Life for Husband's Acid Vat Murder

A biochemist was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole Friday for killing her estranged husband by knocking him out and stuffing him into a vat of acid, possibly while he was still alive.

(snip)

Prosecutors said Schuster and her former lab assistant, James Fagone, first immobilized Timothy Schuster with a stun gun and a chloroform-soaked rag. Then they bound his hands and feet, dumped his body headfirst into a barrel while he was still breathing and poured hydrochloric acid on him.

At work, my colleagues and I have been watching this story unfold. If you are into grisly details, you can google this lady's name and read the blogs of local reporters covering her trial. It is truly horrific what she was convicted of doing. It is hard to fathom that someone could do this to another living being.

I don't know which is worse: (1) that a biochemist used her powers for evil instead of good or (2) that she didn't know that there are better things one can use to dissolve a body than concentrated HCl. She was trained in the chemistry of biological systems and that was the best she could come up with?**


**I say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek but in my lab at work, we were able to come up with a dozen things off the top of our heads that would have worked better. Just sayin'.

In the News: Problems with Botox?

Newsweek has published a report of new evidence that Botox may be inflitrating the central nervous system and finding its way into the brain:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/131749

A New Reason to Frown

Does Botox get into the brain? Troubling research contradicts earlier findings about the treatment.

By Sharon Begley

In a reversal of the usual sequence in science, researchers have discovered, after millions of people have received the drug, something fundamental about how Botox can act. Contrary to what turned up in preclinical testing, botulinum toxin can travel along neurons from the injection site into the brain, at least in lab animals....

Within three days, the toxin had migrated from the whisker muscles to the brainstem, where it disrupted neuronal activity. "The discovery was quite serendipitous ... and surprising," Matteo Caleo, who led the study, told the journal Science. "A significant portion of the toxin is active where it's not intended to be." That stands in contrast to the findings of earlier studies, which suggested that the neurotoxin is completely broken down at the injection site into innocuous compounds and does not migrate beyond it—or if it does, only into the bloodstream or lymph system.

An Open Letter to the Producers of AMC's "Breaking Bad"

Dear Producers of "Breaking Bad":

I have really enjoyed your new series that follows a high school chemistry teacher, who having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, decides to set up a meth lab to provide for his family after his death. It contains some dark and twisted humor that is right up Mad Chemist Chick's alley.

However, there are some glaring inconsistencies and errors in the chemistry that is presented. I realize that some of it is artistic license, and some of it is that you can not show step-by-step the process for making crystal meth on TV, otherwise every teenager between here and the Canadian border would attempt to cook some up in their bathtub.

But please, for the love of all that is holy, fix the structures of the molecules that appear behind the title of the show in the opening graphics.

Several of the structures contain carbons with 5 bonds. Carbon can only make 4 bonds. Also, some of the charges shown on the structures are suspect. Every time I see them, I get an eye twitch accompanied by an overwhelming urge to grab a red pen and draw corrections all over my TV screen.

If you would like to hire someone to catch such errors before you air the episodes, I gladly offer my services for a nominal fee.

The Mad Chemist

P.S. Last night, I was really disappointed with the main character caving to his wife's demand that he undergo chemo. Especially after he gave that big speech about how he had never made his own decisions and this time would be different.