Genie in the Bottle, The: 64 All New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life

by Dr. Joe Schwarcz

Overview

The Genie in the Bottle makes science downright fun. Dr. Joe Schwarcz blends quirky anecdotes about everyday chemistry with engaging tales from the history of science. Get a different twist on licorice and travel to the dark side of the sun. Control stinky feet and bend spoons and minds. Learn about the latest on chocolate research, flax, ginkgo biloba, magnesium, and blueberries. Read about the ups of helium and the downs of drain cleaners. Find out why bug juice is used to color ice cream, how spies used secret inks, and how acetone changed the course of history. It's all there! "Dr. Joe" also solves the mystery of the exploding shrimp and, finally, he lets us in on the secret of the genie in the bottle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770903296
Publisher:	ECW Press
Publication date:	05/01/2001
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Dr. Joe Schwarcz is a professor of chemistry and the Director of the Office for Chemistry and Society at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He hosts a weekly phone-in radio show, is a regular on Canadian television, gives numerous public lectures, and writes columns for the Montreal Gazette. He has received many honours, including the prestigious American Chemical Society’s Grady-Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public.

Read an Excerpt

The Genie in the Bottle

64 All-New Commentaries on the Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life

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By Joseph A. Schwarcz

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2001 ECW Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-329-6

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CHAPTER 1

HEALTH MATTERS

Surviving the Rat Race

I think I was about twelve years old when I attended my first university lecture. No, I was not a child prodigy. And I certainly did not go willingly. My parents dragged me to McGill University to listen to a talk given by Dr. Hans Selye, who was at that time already a recognized world authority on stress. I'm not sure why my parents were bent on attending this event, but I suspect that it was because, like them, the good doctor was Hungarian. At least he had a Hungarian name — Selye was actually an Austrian who had been educated in Prague, Paris, and Rome, but Hungarians tend to insist that if you have a Hungarian name, then you're Hungarian.

Memory is a strange thing. I couldn't tell you what Dr. Selye's lecture was about, but I vividly remember one story that he told in the course of it. It was about meeting a drunk who was mildly abusive. Selye had a decision to make. He could either get into a physical confrontation with the chap, or ignore him and walk away. A fight would have elevated his blood pressure (I remember this, because as he said it he waved a blood pressure cuff around wildly) and increased his pulse rate, effects that he decided were best avoided. Then Selye described another situation, in which he was mugged and threatened on the street. This time there was no turning the other cheek — action was required. His pulse raced, his blood pressure soared, and he beat his attacker off. This, I must admit, was a touch difficult to believe, because Selye hobbled as a result (I later learned) of two hip operations.

I didn't get the point of his story at the time. In fact I didn't get it until about twenty-five years later, when I read Selye's classic work The Stress of Life. By then I'd discovered that Selye was probably the world's leading authority on what was being called "biological stress syndrome." Actually, he was more than an authority; he was the originator of the term. At McGill University, during the 1930s, Selye had carried out a series of experiments on rats, injecting them with a variety of toxins. While the rats manifested different reactions depending on which toxin Selye had used, they also shared a number of symptoms irrespective of the nature of the toxin. The rats' adrenal cortexes enlarged, their spleens and thymus glands shrank, and bleeding ulcers developed in their guts. In other words, they reacted to the stress. Selye then went on to show that he could produce the same reactions by subjecting the rats to demanding physical or psychological conditions. Stress, alone, was capable of triggering chemical reactions in the body.

It didn't take Selye long to uncover exactly what was going on. Under stress, the adrenal gland pumped out adrenaline and cortisol, which then caused the physical symptoms. And this happened not only in rats but also in humans. Stress, it seemed, could raise our blood pressure, make us sweat, and force our hearts to beat faster. If we had underlying heart disease, it could even kill us. But "could" was Selye's key word. Stress didn't have to have negative effects on our bodies — not if we could adapt ourselves to it. The way in which we handled an adverse situation, not the situation itself, was critical. And this is where the story of the drunk comes in. As Selye maintained, we can choose how we will react to a stressful situation: get angry and provoke a potentially dangerous physiological response; or simply walk away. We often find ourselves confronted with such a choice. You find a parking ticket on your windshield. Do you rant and rave and then pay the ticket, or do you calmly accept the fact that you were negligent and then pay the ticket? In either case the financial penalty is the same, but the health penalty may be quite different.

Of course, we don't always have a choice. That's why our bodies have evolved the ability to secrete adrenaline and cortisol. Sometimes we need a sudden burst of energy, a boost to the heart's pumping capacity. Sometimes we have to flee; and sometimes we're obliged to fight, as Selye was when he faced the mugger. Decide what is worth fighting for and what is not, was Selye's message, because it may be a matter of life or death.

Selye's basic assertion was that inappropriate negative emotions can be physically destructive. If that is so, then what can positive emotions do? In 1964 that very question popped into the mind of Norman Cousins. The well-known writer and editor had developed a form of arthritis that attacks the body's connective tissue. Ankylosing spondylitis is a terrible disease that, as it progresses, usually immobilizes its victims by welding together joints, particularly those in the spine. Could positive responses to emotion, like laughter, be of any help in battling his ailment, Cousins wondered? In an effort to find out, he decided to undergo "laughter therapy." He rented movies starring the Marx Brothers and Abbott and Costello (yes, some people find them funny) and began to laugh his way back to health. Within eight days Cousins noticed some improvement. Four months later he was back at work on his way to conquering the disease. Cousins recounted his remarkable escapade in his book Anatomy of an Illness.

Was Norman Cousins really cured by laughter, or was he just one of the lucky few who recover from ankylosing spondylitis? That's a difficult question to answer, but many no doubt tried to follow in his footsteps and laugh themselves to health, only to succumb to their disease. And these people didn't write books about their experiences. Cousins's self-cure may be questionable, but his contribution to science is undeniable. He sensitized the scientific community to our need to study body-mind relationships seriously, and his efforts have led to some fascinating observations.

A study conducted at Stanford University Medical Center found that breast cancer patients enrolled in support groups where they shared feelings, learned stress-reduction techniques, and always had access to a good listener, were less depressed, experienced less pain, and enjoyed a more positive outlook. They also survived twice as long. If these results had been obtained with a new medication, pharmaceutical companies would have revved up their publicity machines. Yet, even so, the findings have made their mark. Wonderful self-help groups, like Gilda's Club (named after comedienne Gilda Radner, who died of cancer), have sprung up, easing the burden of cancer patients.

Researchers at Texas A&M University discovered that mood, blood pressure, and surgery recovery time can be influenced by art — but not just any kind of art. Patients who had Picasso reproductions in their rooms fared worse than those with blank walls, while some of those who gazed at Monet's water lilies recovered more quickly. I think Hans Selye must have loved beautiful paintings, too. After all, he was himself an artist of sorts. He carved part of the cortisol molecule into the cement outside his window when he was living on Milton Street near McGill. It's still there — a silent testimonial to the man my parents dragged me to see on that stressful day so long ago.

Thalidomide: A Bitter Lesson

On August 2, 1962 Dr. Frances Kelsey, a McGill University graduate, stood proudly as President Kennedy hung the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service around her neck. What had Dr. Kelsey done to deserve this honor? She had spared thousands of children from being born with disfigurements ranging from seal-like flippers instead of hands or arms to distorted heads with no ears. Kelsey, working for the Food and Drug Administration, almost single-handedly prevented the U.S. sale of a drug that in other countries would ultimately cause at least eight thousand children to be born with severe birth defects. The drug was thalidomide.

In 1957 a brand new medication was introduced in Europe, and its manufacturers made some amazing claims. The wonder drug, they said, would cure insomnia with none of the side effects or dangers of barbiturates. It was so safe that you couldn't even commit suicide by taking a handful of the pills. And, to the delight of many pregnant women, the tranquilizer seemed ideal for the treatment of morning sickness. In Germany, Great Britain, and Canada thousands of pregnant women took thalidomide without a second thought. But not in the United States. There, the William S. Merrel Company, thalidomide's American licensee, ran into a feisty roadblock in the person of Frances Kelsey. Dr. Kelsey was the FDA officer responsible for reviewing Merrel's drug-marketing application. As she read through the application and the mountains of submitted data she became bothered by the fact that the drug's sleep-inducing effect, which was so evident in people, had not been evident in many of the test animals. Yet the safety data was virtually all based on animal studies. Questions rose in Kelsey's mind. If animals reacted differently to thalidomide, then was the drug behaving differently in animals? And, if so, were the animal safety studies relevant?

There was another troublesome point. The writer of a letter to a British medical journal had claimed that some patients on thalidomide experienced a tingling sensation in the fingers. Kelsey wondered what this could mean in a pregnant woman. Could the fetus perhaps be affected in some way? No, Merrel insisted, they had studied the drug's effects on pregnant rats and even pregnant women. Indeed, they had. But the problem was that they didn't study the pregnant women in their first trimesters. And that was exactly when, as it later turned out, thalidomide wreaked havoc with the developing fetus. The rats were not susceptible to thalidomide's effects; the human liver, unlike that of a rat, produces an enzyme that converts thalidomide into its dangerous form. Kelsey had no knowledge of this, but she was concerned enough about the documentation to insist on more data, which irritated Merrel officials insisted was unnecessary. As the legal and technical wrangling between Kelsey and Merrel dragged on, a letter written by an Australian obstetrician and published in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet rendered the whole question moot.

The obstetrician, Dr. William McBride, had noted that in his practice an unusual number of babies were being born with deformities. These deformities were unlike anything he'd ever seen. The babies suffered from phocomelia, a terrible condition whose name derives from the Greek words for limb and seal. It was a very apt name, because the newborns had little flippers instead of limbs. Checking his records McBride realized that the tragedy had only befallen babies whose mothers had been prescribed thalidomide for morning sickness. By the time his note appeared in The Lancet some eight thousand children had been similarly affected in Europe and Canada, and no one had made the connection to thalidomide. But now the cat was out of the bag. The drug was quickly removed from the market and Merrel withdrew its drug application. Frances Kelsey's resolve in the face of pressure and insults from Merrel had saved thousands of American children from disfigurement.

William McBride, justifiably, became an Australian hero. All of a sudden he was a celebrity to whom people looked for advice on all kinds of issues. He became Man of the Year, Father of the Year, and the head of his own research institution. But in 1987 the walls of that institution came tumbling down on McBride. After so successfully establishing the birth-defect-inducing, or teratogenic, effect of thalidomide, McBride launched a research program to examine the teratogenic potential of other medications. He decided to investigate scopolamine, because it and various related compounds were being touted as effective medications for morning sickness. McBride's scopolamine tests on rabbits produced deformed fetuses, and the doctor published a paper with his coresearchers warning of another potential disaster. It appeared that the Australian knight in shining armor had struck down another villain.

But this new revelation shocked scientists — among them the coauthors of McBride's paper. They maintained that McBride had not actually consulted them when writing the paper — and for a very good reason. They would have objected to the findings it contained. McBride had altered the data to implicate scopolamine as a teratogen. An alert medical journalist exposed the affair, which resulted in the longest and most expensive professional disciplinary hearing in world history. McBride was found guilty of scientific fraud. He claimed that at worst he was guilty of sloppy science, and that he had been made a scapegoat by the multinational drug companies, whose officials were worried about exposure, and by his medical colleagues, who were jealous of his fame. Evidently, the fame that the thalidomide revelation had conferred upon Dr. McBride was not adequate to satisfy his ego. He wanted more, and he shoved his principles aside to get it.

Some good did come of this tragic affair, however. In 1992 the U.S. Congress introduced legislation requiring far more rigorous testing of drugs before they go on the market. Medications must now be tested in at least two species of pregnant animals. Obviously, though, no matter what extensive testing may show, pregnant women should only take medication when it's absolutely necessary. Many substances cross through the placenta from the mother's bloodstream into the baby's.

We often hold up thalidomide as the ultimate example of what may occur when we fail to test drugs rigorously enough. Advocates of "natural" medicine use the thalidomide saga in their campaign to heap muck on mainstream, scientific medicine, forgetting that numerous natural substances can also have serious toxic effects. Thalidomide has become the villain. Too bad. Recent research indicates that it could be an effective treatment for a variety of conditions.

Since thalidomide can inhibit the growth of blood vessels, it is called an angiogenesis inhibitor. This is why it is so dangerous in the first trimester of a pregnancy. The blood vessels needed for limb development just do not grow. Obviously, this is undesirable; but for doctors dealing with a tumor that must develop a supply of blood vessels in order to grow, thalidomide might be just the drug they need. Similarly, in one type of macular degeneration, a terrible eye disease characterized by uncontrolled blood-vessel growth and bleeding behind the retina, thalidomide may prove to be very helpful. Then there is leprosy. One of this disease's terrible complications is the appearance of painful lesions that appear on the arms, face, and legs. Thalidomide is an effective treatment. It may even play a role in the treatment of arthritis, lupus, Crohn's disease, and multiple sclerosis, all of which are characterized by an increase in the blood of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF), a chemical produced by the white blood cells. TNF may be responsible for some of the symptoms of these conditions, and thalidomide inhibits its production. One day, perhaps, we'll see some world leader bestowing a medal upon the researcher responsible for establishing the healing abilities of thalidomide.

The Dark Side of the Sun

Do you know what happens to orphaned baby elephants in Kenya? Their ears, which normally look like huge flat fans, lose their rigidity and the tips fold over. This happens because the proteins that form the molecular framework of the ears are degraded by the sun. Normally, baby elephants walk underneath adult elephants and are shaded from the sun, but the orphans have to fend for themselves. So in elephant orphanages — and, yes, there are such things in Kenya — workers apply large amounts of sunscreen to the babies' ears. If you would like to picture an even more bizarre scene, imagine those workers spreading blankets over the backs of the little pachyderms to protect them from sunburn. Is there a message for us here somewhere? Yes, there is: even if we don't have big floppy ears or make a habit of wandering around the Kenyan countryside we still need sun protection. Just ask any dermatologist. Or, better yet, watch one. I did just that when an old high school friend came to town.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Genie in the Bottle by Joseph A. Schwarcz. Copyright © 2001 ECW Press. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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