28 I’ve been watching my reactions go nowhere and wishing there were someone I could turn to who would simultaneously point out my trivial stupid mistake and give me the answer to my woes. Someone like Dr. Gregory House, who could come in and be all like… “What are you, an idiot? Obviously you can’t do cross metathesis in molten platinum. Try dichloromethane with and a ruthenium wire connected to the left breast of a peacock. Your yields will be quantitative and cause orgasm in a small percentage of tart women.” and I would be like “Oooohh… Of course!” He would then tell me that I never needed a Schlenk line and I should go run an NMR of my sample with one leg of the NMR in a sonicator for better shimming of nuclei. OH THAT HOUSE! SO SMART!
Sadly, unlike in the fine television show, the problems I have are rarely so obvious and so moronic. The question thus presents itself… why don’t Chemistry grad students have their own TV show? Medical interns have the own quirky comedy staring Zach Braff but why cant WE, the generation of iconocalstisists, have a television show in which we irreverently mock respectable people in our own field?
Well, I’m fighting back. Let me introduce unto ye my vision: As you can see I simply ripped off the House season 2 DVD cover, simply replacing the images of those sexy medical persons with images of what graduate students actually look like. I see this:
House is a tenured faculty at the Harvard-Plainsburough Medical Sciences center and has a crack team of semi fluent graduate students assembled randomly from people that were turned away from the four or so groups one would apply to Harvard to join. (ouch) He’s naturally bitter because he was permanently crippled when that dreaded bottle of Hydrofluoric acid fell on his leg and dissolved his leg bone COMPLETELY. His only friend is Christopher Walsh… who is going to be portrayed as a nice and cordial man in this Television show that gets along with everyone.
I’m working on a pilot script here. Part two in about a month or so. You Hollywood types can go ahead and leave me an email and we can do lunch over a bowl of Raman in the Group Room.
BTW: A regular car audio is seldom preferred by pop music fans. They would like to go with something much more techno savvy like a cd changer.
Back to top
Much better than the original stuff!
Considering how fast and loose the show plays it with medical technology, you’d go insane with a chemistry version of it. For instance, all of your reactions would go to completion in less than 15 minutes. There’d be no need to isolate the product, as solvents and by products are just the result of sloppy thinking when you formulated the initial reaction. You’d have instant access to a fully integrated IR/MS/GC/LC/ICP/ToFSIMS/XPS/DSC/TGA/(insert whatever else you want) with an artificial intelligence program to instantly show you the complete 3-D structure and ALL crystalline forms that are possible.
You’d also have a bully cop on your tail wondering if all the USP grade ethanol you ordered was really used as solvent, or if you were stockpiling it with the intent to distribute.
you could do totally awesome crossovers with other pseudoshows like csi and law and order. imagine, chris noth and ice t coming in and busting gregory house, kicking out his stump so he falls onto a mysteriously green, shellbacked patient suffering from acute anchovitis while gary sinise races into the room with his permanent sneer and shouts “glory be unto thee, oh creators of us all! may our sacrifice at the altar of entertainment”
whatever. chemistry is fing boring. deal with it.
unLESS you stage the whole thing in south america so msr. house is commanding an elite force of coca producers at the head of a chain of devastatingly ruthless communist rebels. yeah. now that’d be hot. paris hilton hott.
Shouldn’t it be James La Clair’s face (hexacyclinol!) rather than Hugh Laurie’s? He also needs some dreadful affliction he barely weathers (other-abled legs are taken), like perpetually profusely sweating and farting from eating jalapeños on cottage cheese for lunch every day.
There must be a sizzling undercurrent of lust. All of House’s folk are hot for his booteé except for the English kid (who secretly gets it off-camera, though no reach-arounds). So now we arrive at the pivotal question: is the redhead gonna shave her pits or go sleeveless and fluffy? Of such is drama born.
You also require sim close-ups of Pd-mediated coupling, a Diels-Alder condensation, a degenerate [2.2.1]bicycloheptyl three-center carbenium ion… and maybe an episode wherein an over-temp fentanyl cook graphically rearranges into MPTP with hilarious results in a Liberal Arts required course.
A grad student must creatively, horribly die at the end of every episode, only to reappear each next one, like Aeon Flux and derivative Kenny. Pitch it to Fox. Their faux “The Daily Show” will go down in flames. Maybe also gradual revelation of the secret mad Japanese gland doctors who create grad students. Remember the rare mineral gradulite that transforms scientists into MBAs who get hired to impress their sick wills and perverted fetishes upon fungible scientists.
Can there be tits and explosions? I think we may have something if we can get some tits and explosions.
And I like this close up Diels-Alder thing. It’s got legs.
Sure there can be tits, but the sad truth is, this is set in a chemistry lab, so all the tits are going to be on fat guys.
I guess you could roll through a hot undergrad, a la Jenny Theis from my days in grad school.
If we’re talking close-up D-As, there had better be talk of the HOMO-LUMO gap, bitch.
Hi,
Remember that House (Hugh Laurie) was the idiot prince in Blackadder… not someone you would want around in a chem lab. (German sausage, anyone?)
Mark
Can’t believe you actually own a DVD of the orignial version. Given that we all watched MacGyver, we should be educated about what is definitely bullshit on TV.
My favorite chemistry related moment was on an early season of CSI. When the technician had shot an arsonist’s accelerant through a GC, he said it was Heptane-2-one, but pronounced Heptane-(2)-(1). That cracked me up.
especially when the name is 2-heptanone. CSI is full of bunk science. Their IR spectra print out with the molecule’s name Assuming a pure sample (which they never have) structure determination is (next to) impossible using IR.
Heptane-2-1…give that guy a job answering the phone at Aldrich. I don’t watch the show…do they get structures for new compounds just from IR, because IR is fine for identifying “known” unknowns.
I did see them once identify a polymer by GC/MS or LC/MS. And the read out the guy was holding was of an IR.
That might have been CSI: Miami.
I like when they inject the DNA into a big machine, and then the printout comes out and its a generic low res mass spec printout and then the guy says “this DNA matches so-and-so’s in our database”….
Oh, and the awesome music they play when the guy is doing generic micropipetting to make it seem cool. micropipetting is one of the most boring things to do in a lab.
When you make this TV show it needs thatmusic playing during all lab work. And we have to be able to buy the soundtrack to play in our labs while we do experiments..
Plus the squirting sound, when they pipette water from an open beaker into a not-sterlised vial, after cut off a piece of cotton bud onto a plain paper surface. Addiontially, they never balance the microcentrifuge. And so forth.
Have any of you ever considered setting up a CSI blog that points out the chemical inaccuracies (and also when they get stuff right)?
These shows don’t have that many errors. They take liberties with the rates these instruments run and the egregious overuse of neon lights.
Though, I would like to take this time to point out to Mr. Laurie that “more light” does not equal “more oxidation.” Thx.
This doesn’t look like a comment I would write…
There’s probably several devoted to this already, such as a comic book blog that regularly critiques the medical accuracy of ‘House’:
http://www.politedissent.com/house_pd.html
That’s the sort of thing that you could probably find in 20 minutes on a Google search.
But of course we’re not here to do your job for you, DOCTOR Halford.
Wouldn’t that mean you would have to watch the show religiously? And then bet that other people who watch the show religiously care about the science part to find a blog on the Internet that debunks their favorite show?
I haven’t seen the show, but from what I’ve heard here, it sounds totally awesome and I’d want to be the analytical chemist in the criminal lab if I was six years old (if I couldn’t get the detective job which is more risky anyways). Don’t ruin children’s’ dreams!
Uh oh. A typo.
The best one was when star trek used a plastic transfer pipette to pipette up some DNA into a “dna analyzer”. Given that they had a “DNA analyzer” which instantly read out DNA sequences, you’d think they’d have something more sophisticated than a polyurethane baster.
I just saw the episode of CSI Miami where heptane-2-one (aka 2-heptanone) is called, “heptane-2-1.” A quick search turned up this page and no others. Is Chemistry that dead?
Clearly, Google has its hand on the pulse of the social psyche. Unless I’m mistaken, 95% of the ways to read Dr. L’s post are really negative…
A colleague recently pointed out this banner ad on Reel Science (which, in the interest of full disclosure, I editor of):
http://www.biocompare.com/video/thermo/smi/
Wow…. I mean… what can you say about something like that?
That is a great find! I’ve recently worked on mass spec. metabolomic id and I could relate completely.
Mitch