June 2007

Chemistry World Podcast - June 2007

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Brought to you by the Royal Society of Chemistry:   The Chemistry World Podcast.

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Interviewer - Azi Khatiri

Hello and welcome to the 9th episode of the Chemistry World podcast with me Azi Khatiri, this month what the outgoing prime minister did and didn't do for science in the UK. 

Interviewee - Peter Cotgreave

"For a prime minister, Tony Blair, who came in saying his "priorities were education, education, and education" it is a disgrace that 16% of secondary schools do not have a chemistry teacher of any kind and that means a million children are being taught chemistry in school today by people who aren't chemistry teachers.

Interviewer - Azi Khatiri

Also a different way of saving the environment by removing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Interviewee - Markus Antonietti

"Every houseman or housewife knows that if you put your cake for too long in the oven it's turning into carbon and we are doing something very similar.

Interviewer - Azi Khatiri

And the science that is too green to be true.

Interviewee - Richard Van Noorden

Researchers are rather afraid to frame their work in green chemistry terms because they think the terms become so devalued by everyone saying "Ah, my work is green" and not framing a work as green means that you're not thinking about the whole reaction process.

Interviewer - Azi Khatiri

That's also to come later on in the program, but first the outgoing UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, may have cause to worry about his international legacy but UK Science has much to thank him for or does it? To find out Chris Smith spoke to Peter Cotgreave, the director of the campaign for science and engineering in the UK and asked him what Tony Blair has done for chemistry in this country.

Interviewee - Peter Cotgreave

He has done a number of things for science in general, from which chemistry has benefited and the most obvious one of those is that the science research budget has doubled during Tony Blair's government and one of the most important things that's happened with it, is that the infrastructure for research, particularly in universities, which was in the most appalling and crumbling state when Tony Blair came to power is now being rejuvenated and you can't go to any university in the country without seeing cranes and men in hard hats building fantastic new laboratories and many of those will be chemistry laboratories or be laboratories in which some chemistry is being done.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

Sounds rosy, but this comes at a time when I know of several chemistry departments that have faced or are facing potential closure because they've had a problem attracting people because they've had a problem with funding.

Interviewee - Peter Cotgreave

Yeah!

Interviewer - Chris Smith

And also other people would argue, yes, doubling the budget is a big step forward but for years it has been so under funded, it could've done with more like quadrupling to get us up to the rest of the world's standards.

Interviewee - Peter Cotgreave

Yeah, I think that is perfectly fair.   I don't think you can blame Tony Blair for the fact that the infrastructure was in such an appalling state when he came over, but it is true that even though we have doubled the amount of money we put into research in this country, the rest of the world hasn't stood still and the UK is still not even average among the G7 group of industrialized countries, so there is still a long way to go.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

So what're you going to tell Gordon Brown, if you have the opportunity that he needs to do about this?

Interviewee - Peter Cotgreave

Well, we do have the opportunity, we're going into the treasury in July within about three weeks of Gordon Brown taking office and I think there are two very obvious ones and there's a third issue, where the government under Tony Blair and with Gordon Brown, as chancellor, have not delivered and one of them relates to that issue of chemistry department's closing and it is to do with the education system.   We are not getting through to young people that chemistry and other science subjects are exciting and rewarding, that's why not enough people want to do chemistry and that's one reason why some chemistry departments have closed.   And for a prime minister, Tony Blair, who came in saying his priorities were education, education and education, it is a disgrace that 16% of secondary schools do not have a chemistry teacher of any kind and that means a million children are being taught chemistry in school today by people who aren't chemistry teachers.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

That's not a very rosy picture you're painting Peter.

Interviewee - Peter Cotgreave

On that issue -- on the issue of education, which is crucial to the future, they have failed.   Gordon Brown says he wants to do something about it, but he really needs to get grips with that.   I think, a second issue that he needs to get grips with for the research community is that a lot of the new money has come with strings attached to it and it's become very difficult for academic researchers to fulfil their traditional strength, which isn't doing very novel, very new things in generating ideas that are outside the general paradigm that everyone in industry and everywhere else is working and the third thing which both of those two things, I think, feed into is that they've not yet made the UK a really attractive place for private sector investment in research and development and that's important in chemistry because the chemical industry has traditionally been strong in the UK and if we don't deliver those people from the education system in the schools, if we don't deliver that novel research coming out of the universities and if we don't have a tax regime and other factors that make the UK attractive, then we will lose that chemical industry in the future.   So those are kind of the three broad areas, where Gordon Brown and his new team of ministers really got to get grips with.

Interviewer - Azi Khatiri

Peter Cotgreave, the Director of the campaign for science and engineering, preparing to give Gordon Brown, a piece of his mind.   Now moving quickly away from politics, a new scientific study has shown that plants may not be contributing to the greenhouse effect by producing methane after all.   Here's Chris Smith talking to Chemistry World's science correspondent, Richard Van Noorden.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

Richard, there's interesting news about plants and methane, because last year fierce speculation that the plants may be a major source of methane, it was subsequently refined down and now you're saying "could also be", completely rubbish!!!

Interviewee - Richard Van Noorden

Yeah, last year, Frank Keppler, at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany really stunned the scientific world, when he said that plants belched out methane gas, didn't seems to be any reason for this, since they got quite enough carbon dioxide and oxygen to breathe out so to get energy and keep them happy.   I mean, normally you get bacteria giving out methane from cow's stomach, from the earth's crust and scientists think they understand the sources and sinks of methane.   Now with these plants, Keppler estimated that the methane they gave out could be quite a lot of the proportional total methane given out, that really threw off our understanding of what sources and sinks of methane were.   But now a Tom Dueck of Wageningen University in the Netherlands says his team has made the first independent check on this claim and they found that plants don't emit any methane at all.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

Well how did he do it, and how could the initial research have gone so wrong to have said there is all this methane?

Interviewee - Richard Van Noorden

What Dueck did was he fed his plants on carbon-13 isotopes, if they gave out any methane, it would be carbon-13 labelled methane, which would be very easy to detect among the carbon-12 methane in the air and he didn't detect any carbon-13 methane.   What Keppler appears to have done is that, he didn't have this labelling approach.   What he did was he sucks the air out of the container holding the plants and flushed with something like nitrogen, took away all the atmospheric methane away, because it will be quite hard to detect any more methane over the atmospheric level and then he said, "right, anymore methane that I see must have come from the plant," but Dueck reckons that he didn't' quite realize that methane can stay trapped in little pores in the soil and in plant leaves and as he flushed the air out and flushed it with nitrogen, a diffusion gradient of methane might have come back out of the plant, it wasn't   really being made by the plant, it just got trapped there.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

It was there to start with? 

Interviewee - Richard Van Noorden

It was there to start with.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

And so when you take the labelling approach, of course there was no labelled methane there before and hence you don't see any.

Interviewee - Richard Van Noorden

Exactly!   Now its only fair to say that Keppler comes back and says of course he didn't do such a thing, he knew, very well that was a problem but Dueck says he now may have to account for it completely and Keppler comes back and says, well this labelling approach may actually change the way the plants see their metabolism, if everything they have is labelled carbon-13, may be their metabolism is going to be very different, which Dueck thinks, not much of.   There's a certain controversy between those two, but in fact many other scientists are weighing into this debate as well saying that they are about to publish papers on one or other side of the argument that plants make methane or don't make methane.   So we are, kind of, looking forward to this one with interest.

Interviewer - Azi Khatiri

We shall indeed.   So, watch this space.   Now researchers from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in the US have identified crucial behaviour-controlling subsections of prions.   These are protein particles thought to be infectious agents responsible for neurodegenerative diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or CJD.   Chris Smith spoke to the Chemistry World science correspondent, James Mitchell Crow.

Interviewee - James Mitchell Crow

These researchers have been studying prions and have been looking at short subsections of the prion protein, which they have termed recognition elements and these short subsections control quite a few aspects of the way that the prions behave from the way that they fold or rather the way that they misfold to the way that they could potentially cross from one species to another species.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

So what do these elements do normally?   What's their role apart from diseases?

Interviewee - James Mitchell Crow

Well, they are just a part of the total protein structure.   So, normally these proteins are folded in a particular way, but something might trigger one of them to misfold and then that triggers all the neighbouring proteins to misfold in the same way, so it's kind of a cascade reaction.   So this is why prions can cause disease in mad cow disease, BSE and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

And the way in which these two proteins actually interact is via this particular domain that's being studied here?

Interviewee - James Mitchell Crow

That's right, yes.   If you just isolate this one particular short sequence and add it to a normally folded protein, then all the normally folded proteins will be triggered to misfold in that way.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

So how did those scientists then extend that finding? 

Interviewee - James Mitchell Crow

What they did was, they were studying prions in fungi, one was in a yeast, and one was in a different species of fungi and they took the prions that are native to both of the species, cut them in half, so that this particular recognition element of each species were still present in the half that they kept and then they knitted those two together to form a chimera prion.   When they tested this chimera in both species, that protein misfolding was triggered in both cases, which shows that it is this particular short recognition element which triggers the misfolding of all the other proteins.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

And this is the area insufficient for the disease to occur.   So, is that how we think it might have the capacity to jump from one species to the next as well?

Interviewee - James Mitchell Crow

That's right, yeah.   The researchers have postulated that natural prions may have more than one recognition element and so that's how they might be able to trigger protein misfolding in more than one species.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

So BSE out of a cow into a human.

Interviewee - James Mitchell Crow

That's right yes.   So that's why they are planning to do next to test mammalian prions and see if the same thing might be happening there.

Interviewer - Azi Khatiri

James Mitchell Crow explaining how new research is gradually unfolding the mysteries of infectious prions.

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Interviewer - Azi Khatiri

On the way how Afghanistan is getting on top of its geological surveys and how China is seeking alternative routes to remedy an ailing environment and a growing energy demand.   But first, rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases have prompted many scientists to look for ways of controlling and even reducing the global levels of CO2.   Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Potsdam, Germany, have shown that cooking waste biomass at 300 degrees Centigrade in a pressure cooker with some citric acid thrown in as a catalyst, is an energy efficient way of producing coal; they believe this can offer a real solution for the CO2 problem.   Here's Markus Antonietti talking to Chris Smith.

Interviewee - Markus Antonietti

Every year, we drill 4 cubic kilometres of oil and these transfer in about 13 cubic kilometres of CO2, once taken as a solid.   This sounds like a big number, but if we consider that the yearly production of plant material is about 120 cubic kilometres and this is some type of bound CO2 too.   Indeed the oil problem is minor as compared to what the plant is generating as a plant material.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

Doesn't it make a different though that plant material represents carbon that's already in the atmosphere, its not de novo liberated carbon, that's at the moment sequestered away like oil is.

Interviewee - Markus Antonietti

Well indeed the plant material of course is created from CO2, but usual problem of plant material is that it decomposes into CO2 again, so the art has to be indeed to take the plant material and transfer it into something more permanent to sequester the carbon.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

So, in the same way as over millions of years we made coal and oil, I suppose you are saying, find a way to re-create that process.

Interviewee - Markus Antonietti

This is exactly right!   There are just a few effective carbon sinks on earth and soon enough the most active, nowadays are Scottish swamps; swamps later on transfer into brown coal and black coal.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

But the natural process of making coal takes millions to hundreds of millions of years, so how can you do it in a time scale that's going to be compatible with reversing climate change, because current predictions would give us what 20-30 years?

Interviewee - Markus Antonietti

Yes, but this is exactly the art of chemistry of course.   Once, you've analyzed the natural process, you have to worry about ways to accelerate the process and this can be done by increasing the temperature, by adding catalysts, by increasing the pressure, and indeed if you do the carbonization of biomass at about 200 degrees Centigrade in 20 bars of water pressure, then the whole process can be accelerated down to 16 hours.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

So, what's actually happening when you do this?   What are the conditions you need and what's actually happening to the carbohydrates in there to turn it into something resembling coal?

Interviewee - Markus Antonietti

If you look into the chemistry of swamps, you see that the carbohydrates are just dehydrated and if you dehydrate the carbohydrate, carbon is left, so coalification is nothing but elimination of water, and we can quite effectively control this at elevated temperatures, but every houseman or housewife knows that if you put your cake for too long in the oven, it's turning into carbon, and we are doing something very similar.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

Now how much energy does it actually take to do this though, Markus, because if it's going to cost us more in terms of carbon released into the atmosphere to power this process, then we've gotten no net gain.

Interviewee - Markus Antonietti

Well, this was in fact a big surprise for us because this process is not costing energy, it liberates energy and thinking about it again, it has to be like that because all natural processes which are spontaneous are exothermic and in fact this process is highly exothermic, so in the very end we don't have to add energy.   At some times, we even have too much energy and we have to carry away the heat to keep the process in a controlled fashion.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

Have you just done this on a small scale or have you tried this on the big scale on the kind of scale we are going to need if it's going to make an impact on climate change.

Interviewee - Markus Antonietti

The biggest amount I ever did is one kilogram and we are currently planning with engineering partners to set up larger constructions to prove indeed that the process also works on the larger scale.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

Now where do you propose getting this biomass from because presumably a lot of it is coming out of places that are inaccessible, the Amazon rain forest for example, how're you actually going to get it and get it to one of these reactors?

Interviewee - Markus Antonietti

Well this is again not too difficult because I'm talking 120 cubic kilometres of biomass, but about 15 cubic kilometres are already part in farming cycles, so what I indeed propose is to treat the agricultural waste, so you harvest the grains, of course, but you would drop the straw, you harvest rapeseed, but you drop rapeseed straw, you harvest sugar of sugarcane, but you drop the canes and usually this type of waste is about 90% of the harvest.   So, think about it in sugar cane, there is a cubic kilometre of sugarcane leftovers in Brazil, which could be immediately treated, taking care of already 10% of the worldwide CO2 problem.   So, the answer is these machines have to be where biomass is agro-industrially cultivated.

Interviewer - Azi Khatiri

Markus Antonietti, the director of the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, with a vision of tackling climate change by recapturing the carbon from agricultural waste.   Now to most people, the words green chemistry may sound like a genuinely ethical way of looking after the environment.   Unfortunately recent reports are showing a decline in support for the green band wagon.   Chris Smith spoke to Richard Van Noorden to find out more.

Interviewee - Richard Van Noorden

Green chemistry is essentially making chemical processes and substances which are less hazardous to the environment and to humans. So it's a laudable aim, you think, everyone would be for that and since it was invented in 1990s, it was sometimes seen as a bit soft, but since then it has got into journals, it's got funding in the UK, it's been focussed on a set of 12 principles of green chemistry which really push things down to things like, use atom economy and try and make reactions as efficient as possible, try and make them easy to clean up.   So, you've really got things to focus on and now it seems green chemistry is a much more established field.   But with all this support has come researchers who seem to label their chemistry green without truly thinking about it.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

Because since they sound like quite laudable aims and so are you saying people are now subverting the green label to nefarious ends then?

Interviewee - Richard Van Noorden

Well I'm not saying necessarily nefarious, in fact, Istvan Horvath an European researcher in Hungary suggested that people might not be seeing their reaction as green, almost na?ve enough thinking about it properly, because all they are doing is, they're just looking at one area of a process, say for example, they are saying water is really green solvent, is water is not toxic, if it leaks, never mind, but if you're, for example, using water in a reaction that happens to use organic molecules as a catalyst, what you're left with at the end of the process may be water contaminated with organic molecules which could be as hard as energy intensive to clean up as organic molecules themselves, you could have used them all along, you know, as in organic solvents.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

So, you say it's actually worse off for having tried to be green.   Is that what you are saying?

Interviewee - Richard Van Noorden

Well a recent paper published in Angewandte Chemie suggests that we may indeed, in this instance, be worse off.   Essentially, the point is that you've got to think a lot more carefully about this than just saying, oh! I have replaced a nasty solvents, now things are much better" and Ken Seddon who works at Queens University, Belfast, he suggested to me that green chemistry publications have peaked and on the decline, he thinks that the researchers are rather afraid to frame their work in green chemistry terms, because they think the terms have become so devalued by everyone saying "Ah! my work is green" and not framing a work as green means that you're not thinking about the whole reaction process, you are not saying "I am making this bit of it green, but I need to acknowledge that I should have thought about what's happening at the end of the process, what's happening at the beginning of the process?"

Interviewer - Chris Smith

Is it not driven by market forces, anywhere there Richard? So if a process is cheaper to do it a certain way, isn't industry going to do that anyway? And therefore to make it worth someone's, while to do something in a green way, you've got to have quite a lot of incentives, I would think?

Interviewee - Richard Van Noorden

Well, industries have always been doing green chemistry because it is economically good to reduce waste, but we are talking about academia, coming up with new ideas that I believe, is sky science.   They, trying to push into industry and if academics aren't thinking seriously enough about whether that chemistry is green, that's not going to help industry and it's not going to help the academic image of green chemistry as a serious subject.

Interviewer - Azi Khatiri

Well let's hope efficient and environmentally clean research prevails whatever the labels may be.   Now Afghanistan has been on the news often for well, bad news, but we never hear about how the country is improving or how international initiatives are lending expertise on funding to help build infrastructure for research.   Well, here's a bit of good news because earlier this week, Chris Smith spoke to Michael Watts, the Deputy Leader of the British Geological Survey Project in Afghanistan who is off to do just that.

Interviewee - Michael Watts

I'm heading off to Afghanistan in a few days working on a project funded by the Department for International Development, which is funding a 3-year project for the British Geological Survey to undertake the institutional strengthening of the Afghanistan Geological Survey which involves capacity building, transfer of skills, rehabilitation of the Afghan Geological Survey.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

Is Afghanistan very rich in geological deposits and minerals that could be exploited then?   Is that a potential wealth earner for the country?

Interviewee - Michael Watts

Afghanistan has potentially a bright future in terms of its mineral wealth.   There are known deposits of variety of metals, gold, silver, copper, zinc, semi-precious stones such as lapis, emeralds, rubies, there are also hydrocarbons, coal, natural gas, and oil, so yes, it is abundant in natural resources.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

So, then what is the major problem facing Afghanistan then now?   They just don't have the skills to get to that material and therefore realize the value of it?

Interviewee - Michael Watts

Yes, in some respects. They have the skills in exploiting the mineral resources, some of the techniques are quite outdated such as quarrying of marble they will use a dynamite and they may end up losing a large portion of the marble deposit.   So the survey will come in advising the ways of extracting such minerals, but the survey is also involved in attracting investors into the country, other Afghanistan investors or international investors.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

So where do you come in?

Interviewee - Michael Watts

Well, the British Geological Survey - our remit is to rehabilitate the staff of the survey.   We're doing that firstly by transfer of skills, so providing broad coverage of English language training, computer training and basic geology.   We're setting up a suite of laboratories providing hands-on training; so far we have about 4 or 5 laboratories and this summer we are about to bring on stream the last laboratory that is planned for this project, but we generally take a pretty pragmatic approach owing to the quite difficult conditions over there.   The power supply, water supply is very unreliable.   The actual knowledge base and technical skills base is quite low amongst the Afghan employees, partly because the survey hasn't been fully functioning for a number of years.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

So what will the mission that you're going to embark on pretty shortly actually involve?   Because you've got some of the stuff there already, but what are you actually going to be doing first and foremost when your get there and is it going to plan out as you anticipate?

Interviewee - Michael Watts

Well that's one of the exciting things about the project where it is caught unpredictable, may have to be ready for sort of anything really, initially I am one of the rotating deputy project leaders, so initially I'll be taking on and looking after the running of the project out there, halfway through I'll sought to my main task of setting up the laboratories and really trying to set up a plan for the future so that they have a sustainable future, whereby the Afghans can take over the running of the laboratories and eventually the survey itself beyond the end of our project, which will finish at the end of this September.

Interviewer - Chris Smith

Are you apprehensive? 

Interviewee - Michael Watts

Apprehensive about going yes but that sort of happens every time.   I mean this will be my fifth trip and you can't help to see what is on the news and family and friends asking you what it's like out there, but actually on the ground, it is not quite as bad as the news might sound and as long as you're sensible, without taking any risks, and follow strict protocol that we have, it's been perfectly fine in the past, but obviously you can't take that for granted.

Interviewer - Azi Khatiri

Michael Watts from the British Geological Survey, who has left for Afghanistan since that interview and we wish him and all those involved, every success with the project.   Staying with news from abroad, last month Chemistry World's editor Mark Peplow travelled to China to find out more about the role that chemistry is playing in the country's booming economy.   In the first of two reports Mark talks to some of the investors who are hoping to fuel China's future.

Interviewer - Mark Peplow

I am in Beijing for the ACHEMASIA Asia Conference, biggest get-together for the chemical, pharmaceutical, and bio-tech industries in China.   There are about 20,000 scientists and business people here from 27 different countries.   The sheer scale of this event tells you a great deal about the amazing developments in chemistry in this country.   Interestingly, when you look down the program for the conference, you see a real emphasis on biofuels, renewable energy, clean coal technology, environmental monitoring and so on.   There's also a lot of talk about collaboration with Europe.   One example of that interest comes from an university spin-out company called Bioliq based in Karlsruhe in Germany.   They are finding ways to turn waste plant materials into liquid fuels and simple chemicals that normally come from oil.   I spoke to Rainer Korber.

Interviewee - Rainer Korber

If you don't want to change everything what's on this road, cars, engine's running, you need oil in some way and that means a carbon source.

Interviewer - Mark Peplow

So what you are talking about is taking out waste materials like straw for example and turning that into a form that can be easily transported, yes.

Interviewee - Rainer Korber

We can turn this in the gasifier into hydrogen and carbon monoxide.   And for chemists this is a ground syngas where you can build up a lot of chemical products, which at this time, are to find out of crude oil.

Interviewer - Mark Peplow

In a country like Germany can there ever be enough waste biomass to actually make any impression on the amount of petrol that you need to run all the cars in Germany for example?

Interv