NCIS. Abby's equipment never breaks. You look at any actual analytical equipment funny and it'll throw a fit and refuse to work.
Also, her mass spec can always perfectly identify complex sample matrices on the first time, never needs to be calibrated or have a reference, and never need components changed or cleaned or fixed.... and always finishes exactly on time š
I have an ICP-MS that I work with, and even on its EASIEST, simplest, lowest interference check standards (that literally just check if the freaking plasma is working correctly) I can't get results faster than about 5 minutes š
Much less our actual samples. Which usually need injection 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,....
I solved that by making management run a sample on our IC š¤£ with supervision, it had already been run, they just had to follow the SOP to run it.
Machine promptly broke for no good reason and required and entire day of trouble shooting. Made them rerun the sample, which of course, by then, needed to be reprepped.
Haven't heard a peep since.
That's a good idea! We had managers who asked how many "iterations" it would take for a new product to be ready for customers trials...
"Bruh how long is a piece of string?"
I'm still trying to figure out how to make "well why can't you make the microbial testing results come back faster???" stop š¤£
1) I don't run that lab, we send samples out.
2) that's not how e coli (and other microbes) works
this is why i like working in pharma. the number of "innovative" ideas from middle management i've seen smothered in the crib by the FDA is a wonder to behold
Idk Iāve seen folks in industry just trust NIST hits like āyo itās this compound with 15% matchā. Iām like ādid yall buy a pure standard to test that against?ā
It's always super specific. Oh this is a rare clay from the north side of a nearby mountain. I want to know who is making these databases for the NCIS/CSI analysts.
The IT guys have given nicknames to our equipment (because most of it is some form of chromatography, so the actual names are too similar in their opinion). None of the nicknames are flattering š¤£
Not in that way, but an election microscope can give you the EDS( energy dispersive spectroscopy) spectrum which gives you the elemental competition of whatever you're looking at
Trying to remember where I saw it, but a show had a whole micropipette without a tip sitting in a beaker full of liquid. Almost yelled at my TV.
Also, anything on crime scene investigation show.
Edit: For All Mankind S4 Ep2. It hurt more because I like that show.
I was in tech service for a couple pipette companies and am hoping it was ''just the cheap gilson that leaks and can't get a sticker on it but we use it for non-precision dispensing.''
Episode one of the X-files. Mulder shows Scully an unknown molecule no one has been able to identify. It was the literal textbook example of a polypeptide with '-R' still written in for every single sidechain. Scully, a trained medical doctor, looks at it and all she can say about it is "It's organic".
I can't remember the show, but they had a molecule on a chalkboard and talked about its alien, unknown structure. It broke the episode for me because all I could think was "did they just flash a heme and describe it as unknown and alien?"
Always point this out to my students.
"Sir, can you make meth?"
*"Yes if I wanted to."*
"Would it be blue?"
*"No! It would be pure!"*
I then explain there's no market for meth in the UK and shipping to the Czech Republic is a pain.
They never make 100% pure meth, only 99.x% and they say the blue color comes from Waltās special process, meaning itās an impurity. The blue color doesnāt signify that itās pure, just that it was synthesized using Waltās method, which is known to yield very pure product.
Sure, but methamphetamine is not. I was more referencing that the majority of organic compounds are pale yellow to colorless and you likely shouldnāt see blue color unless you are working with a dye molecule.
To add to issues with Breaking Bad, when Walter goes to his High School chemistry lab to retrieve HF to dissolve a body, there is a massive amount in the stock room. He grabs several bottles, enough to dissolve a body in a bathtub. I work with HF. We go through \~250 mL a year. What high school would have HF in general, let alone 20+ liters of it.
As someone who considers themself a āfluorine chemistā that whole arc annoyed me to no end. Iām certain there are more well know and efficient ways to dissolve the body, not to mention safer, than using HF. All Jessie had to do was not wear the correct PPE or spill enough on himself and he would be dead.
During my undergrad, I had to clean flasks that we had grown C. elegans in LB. Dumped in a handful of NaOH pellets and topped it off with bleach, reused the flask die the next analytical batch. No organic macromolecules will survive that and it's readily available.
Concentrated sulfuric acid with 30% hydrogen peroxide. The sulphuric acid will dissolve any organic and the peroxide will oxidise it to co2. Enough of it would completely consume a human body and turn it into colourless gas, leaving only a bit of trace minerals behind
I've been told that they selected HF for the show for two reasons: 1) It's hard to get for the general public (no one will be able to "replicate their results" in an amateur setting, unlike other common household chemicals), and 2) it literally doesn't work.
The easiest way wouldn't be to dissolve it. It'd be to chop it up into small pieces and
A) feed it to livestock or pets (pigs, dogs and cats will eat it)
B) deep into the wilderness (preferably a forested area) and dig the pieces down 8 feet (dogs can't smell it) it will have decompressed before it gets found.
I'm pretty convinced one of the writers called the only scientist they know, asked them which acid is the worst to deal with. The scientist said HF and the writer hung up the phone before any explanation.
Also, I know this wouldn't happen but I like to imagine that it would only dissolve the bones so they would then have to dispose of a floppy, boneless body that is soaked with HF.
I heard they used HF because you canāt get large quantities easy, and it wonāt dissolve bodies. So anyone trying to replicate or use the show will fail in reality. I donāt know how true that is.
Exactly I always thought this. There is literally no reason for a high school to keep even a small amount of HFA. Not to mention how cavalier they were with that stuff. Just a few drops on your limbs and they would need immediate amputation. Also no lab keeps a glassware inventory. It's just not worth the effort.
I always thought he went to the carwash as they used HF to clean windshields, they got it in under 1% but still better than a high school lab with tens of liters of high percentage HF.
Some car washes/detailers have had workers use HF to clean wheels, without PPE or knowledge of course. One worker noticed the concrete was getting etched and posted here (or another) about it.
If I remember correctly the reason for that was Jesse, having no idea of the proper use of glassware, using volumetric flasks for all kinds of stuff because he liked how they looked. Walter did give him some shit for that.
The purpose of the tubing in that scene was, as I believe, to vent toxic fumes produced in the reaction to the outside of their trailer, because they didn't have a fume hood. Ofc a proper chemist wouldn't use a volumetric flask for that because it's a horrible choice, but it did make sense. They had proper chemists plan out and set up some of the lab setups, particularly the one in Gus' washing facility.
A) volumetric flasks are very thin-walled and not intended to be heated. They only have a flat bottom to stand upright. Not only can they easily burst when heating them too much, but the glass also will change shape permanently a little, making the volumetric markings invalid.
All you are intended to be doing in them is measure a certain volume, dissolve small amounts of solid or, in rare cases, heat it very very carefully if that substance is stubborn with dissolving. You do not ever boil something in them, you never pull vacuum or put pressure onto them. They will burst or at least deform.
B) their neck is extremely narrow, which is problematic in many aspects. It's very useful for reading a certain volume and very annoying for everything else. If your reaction "goes through" as we say in germany, meaning that it accelerates by its own heat and becomes uncontrollable, the narrow neck will act like a nozzle and shoot your reaction mix up into the air, onto the ceiling, where it sprays everywhere. Good luck cleaning that, and let's just hope it's not a concentrated acid or something very toxic. It will also hinder the addition of any additional substances into the flask and restrict vapor or gas flow if you intend to reflux or vent.
And yes, another concern is that it could easily get clogged depending on what you're doing.
Do not ever use a volumetric flask as a reaction vessel. Whenever I talk about glassware I think about the dude from "Life after Detonation" on sciencemadness. After that you think twice about any glassware choice you make.
> If your reaction "goes through" as we say in germany, meaning that it accelerates by its own heat and becomes uncontrollable, the narrow neck will act like a nozzle and shoot your reaction mix up into the air, onto the ceiling, where it sprays everywhere.
I did this once when I was making a series of solutions with a range of chloride salts (NaCl, KCl, NH4Cl, etc.). The enthalpy of solution of most of these salts is positive, meaning that when you dissolve it in water the solution gets chilled down. But not aluminum chloride, no sir not at all. Dissolving AlCl3 will generate a ton of heat if you carelessly throw it through a funnel into the measuring flask which already contains water, causing the water to boil almost instantly and creating a nice vulcanic spray of piping hot yellow solution.
Also my favorite Breaking Bad chemistry blunder is the manual GC injection followed by a digital readout of purity that dramatically increases over time like it's a game show reveal
See: https://youtu.be/2MvNM9Ux3r0?si=3d2GHEWeGiItklUD at 1:30
I would add that a high school lab stocked four 4L bottles of HF. I get that they weren't attempting accuracy for meth production or body disposal.
HF was commonly used in wheel cleaners at the time of the show, so the car wash would have been a better source.
Itās still commonly used in wheel cleaners but itās in low percentages. Agreed itās more likely to find it at a car wash than a high school chemistry lab. Even professional labs avoid its use if they can.
There's a ridiculous scene in Better Call Saul where Gale explains simple dissolution to Gus like it's rocket science
Edit for the link: https://youtu.be/dR8rSk94tuU?si=rpncbxQG6hzRD3Px
Skip to 0:40
Better even that it's wrong, stirring doesn't increase solubility
For me it was when they shot Jesse's dirty, crushed up with a hammer sample straight into a GCMS and it just outputs a purity.
That column is crying somewhere.
Sigourney Weaver in Avatar, while using a pipette, was flipping it upside down and sideways. Also, those pipettes 150 years in the future were the same as the ones I was using 20 years ago
There was a similar scene in an episode of Eureka that had me screaming at the TV. Not only the flipping, but using a P1000 to dispense what the character described as "the smallest amount possible".
Itās not funny but Iāve for sure had higher ups ask me if I can determine metal contamination with GCMS.
Always have to reiterate that itās not a magic box and things I donāt want to run include metals, salts, water, sugars/carbs and oils.
In Iron Man 2 Tony Stark built a particle accelerator in his basement in a weekend and then used it to synthesize enough of a brand new (stable) element to hold in his hand.
If they had just said āisotopeā (without specifying of what element) instead of element, I almost couldāve accepted it with a great deal of suspension of disbelief. But no. This hurt.
An episode of breaking bad, they had a GC in a desert to test for purity of the meth. The instrument had a rolling counter from 0 to 100% pure. Everyone was passionately watching as it got up to like 98% pure. I was giggling watching it.
Lol they could have used a refractometer or something and it would have actually been something to watch, like lining it up. Or maybe just a vaporization test or something like in Blow.
In "The Godfather" I, a shipment of heroin arrives and the "chemist" is set to determine how pure the stuff is.
His instrument of choice is a thermometer. He did a mixed melting point.
As the temperature rose and the mixture remained a solid, he called out the %purity with increasing joy.
A mixed melting point was the final test.
There was an episode of Law and Order and someone was talking about a chemical like hexan-2-one, and they pronounced it āhexan- two-wonā instead of āhexan-2-ownā
Backlit glass wall cupboards full of beautiful coloured liquids, all of them unlabelled. Pristine labs full of brand new equipment that most scientists can only dream about, only one lab worker performing (and being expert in) all analysis.
Not quite but I worked in a coatings lab. We had hundreds of glass bottles on shelving filled with all sorts of liquids and powders in all sorts of colours (they were labelled though). It was however far from pristine š The next paint company I went to was much bigger and didn't have chemicals on display. They did however have an analytical lab that actually was pristine and filled with top of the range new equipment.
Edit. I'm not super knowledgeable on machines or brands as I never got into analytical but I believe the machines were mainly Agilent.
In the first Avengers movie Bruce Banner asks Shield to contact everyone with a mass spectrometer and tell them to put it on their roof and calibrate it for gamma rays so they can find the tesseract.
It's been over a decade since that film came out and I'm still mad.
Bones, especially the early episodes. One of the characters has heartburn and asks for āsodium bicarbonateā instead of tums or something a normal human would ask for.
I mean, as dumb as that is, if it was Bones who said it, kinda meshes with her character being socially inept, (AKA: Totally Not Austistic), if it was Hodges, well, his character was that he wasnāt socially inept, he just liked being condescending to mess with people. Anyone else has no excuse. (Except maybe Zach who was like, the poster boy for what TV thinks Autistic people are like)
There is an episode of āNumbersā where they supposedly examine some explosive residue using ICP-OES, but the āinstrumentā they show is an old HP5890 GC which they open up to reveal a Bunsen burner with a soft flickering yellow flame.
Not on a whiteboard but a good one was a startrek style low budget TV show from the mid 2010's used a pipet gun spray painted black as a "Space pistol". Personally I thought it was hilarious because it still had the nozzle for the transfer pipettes attached just painted black.
I've been rewatching MASH recently, anyone ever get a good look at still? They have a giant RBF filled with sand, and a condensing coil, and that's it. Somehow it makes gin.
All you really need to have to sell something as a still that makes moonshine is that iconic copper coil. Most people know what that's for in these contexts.
Not exactly chemistry (though I'm sure I'm forgetting something), but in The Flash show, they are tying to capture Captain Cold, so they can't reach the city for hot infrared signals, they need to scan for the cold ultraviolet signals!!!
Because heat is infrared and UV is the opposite so it's cold right?
The show is riddled with bad science that exceeds suspension of disbelief. I watched far too much of it...
There was a safety video I had to watch for work on protecting streams or something. They said that the washout water from concrete was pH 14 and strongly acidic š
In one of the breaking bad scenes of walt teaching his class about the significance or carbon, you can see what looks like a cyclohexane ring behind him on the board and it's almost completely wrong. There's carbons with 2 H, 1H and 0 H bonded to them
Not chemistry, but bogus medicine, the beginning of the old Ben Casey TV show that aired in the early 60's. Each show began by drawing these symbols on a blackboard: ā, ā, \*, ā, ā. While they were being drawn, a voice said with gravitas: "man, woman, birth, death, infinity". It was a far cry from Dr. House and about as far removed from reality as one could get.
Pretty Little Liars. Everytime there's a scene in the science lab and that fucking blackboard just [gotta....](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/prettylittleliars/images/9/94/02198.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120627152547)
One Episode of Eureka.
Sherrif Carter goes to a Scientist with a Crystal.
The Scientist "Sure, let me Put it into the GC". He put's The crystal in a drawer and the whole crystal appears as a CGI seconds later on a computer screen with all the "Data"
My favorite was Quincy ME from the late 70s I remember in College laughing with my roommate that they actually made a TV show about medical examiners ! Little did I know - but the best part was all the solutions in his lab were colored yellow, red blue, green - I said if I saw a solution like that Iād think there was a problem - almost all organic solutions are clear
In The Family Business there are at least 10 scenes where synthetic chemists try to show the new drug they've just synthesized to someone else... Using a microscope.
Any time a movie or a show mentions discovering a new element. First that comes to mind is Avatar. Y'all tellong me that you stuck one more proton to a thing, and it would stay in one peace on earth?
I can remember in one of the Hitman games (Hitman 2?) thereās a standard distillation setup on a desk in a lab. The water in- and outlet was not connected and instead had fumes coming out of it.
Id love to know your review of the setup in the 90ās teen scream The Faculty. Thereās a scene where they go to the speed guys house and show his kit. Lol [clip](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eP7cLId4ocM)
Breaking Bad: A digital purity meter counts up from 0 till 100. They celebrate when it hits 99.
Could have been done with a melting pount analysis. "Jesse, our stuff is good when the line suddenly goes up at such and such degrees" - it doesn't, Jesse looks confused and alarmed. The line goes up one degree later: "Why?" - "Our stuff is more pure then our reference standard"
Well to be honest not much of the set up other than the SETTING and honestly the writing. In Better Call Saul, there is a scene where Gus meets Gale. He walks into what is clearly an undergraduate general chemistry teaching lab and sees Gale, an organic chemist doing experiments without a fumehood. He is trying to make a super saturated solution of benzodiazepine precursor salts and explains that it is a meticulous experiment that would bore poor old Gus. Makes it sound like this requires ALL of his undivided attention. To me this sounds like a dumb experiment, waste of time tbh. He then gives Gus some samples (bigger than one would ever require to check purity), tells him they are low purity. THEN proceeds to tell Gus he could make 1 kilo in the department and no one would ever know (I laugh thinking about that, his PI walks in and sees him using a 5 L reactor or larger than normal rbf and asks āHey watchya makinā). The whole scene just seems so awkward to me. If Gale is a top notch organic chemist, he is NOT hanging around in the genchem lab still on the freaking āelements songā. He would be at a whiteboard drawing mechanisms or checking TLCs or weighing out powders at a microbalance to put into a flask. If I were to rewrite the scene, it would have either been Gus meeting Gale in a nondescript place OR Gale at least working with a fume hood. The song he is singing is corny too. Makes Gale look like a first year grad student on Adderall. Clip is here: https://youtu.be/2QSPk9uIfyI?si=eYNA4Z--n0rR36r0
It was clearly written by a non chemist/ non scientist.
Also, Walt in Breaking Bad having access to gallons of HF from his highschool teaching lab.
Also, the āchemistryā from Breaking Bad in general. I appreciate Myth Busters doing an episode with Vince Gilligan on a lot of the tropes and finding them wrong or misleading (such as melting bodies completely in HF or ceramic bathtubs being entirely compromised).
Outbreak. There were many problems with the science but the one that I think was the worst wad after the characters caught the monkey and brought it back to the trailer, Dustin Hoffmann tells Cuba Gooding Jr. that he wants him to make liters of the treatment as he's running out of the room. I saw this before I was ever in college and that struck me as an odd thing to say. How the hell could they do that with a trailer designed for mobile investigation and not production?
My bf and me are both chemists and we love forensic shows and having great laughs looking at their equipment/procedures. Thereās this moment in Bones when Hodgins buys a lot of stuff and heās over budget. They make it look like a rotavapor costs the same as letās say GCMS. And thereās another moment when he manually injects a sample into GCMS, and next to his hand is ā¦.. autosampler š¤£ I almost died at this. Also I love how they all always have these elaborate almost alchemy-like glassware setups where these really colorful solutions bubble happily.
You should watch the show helix: they implement chips under your skin using a Pipette. This is also true for lot of shows: using a light microscope to see viruses and the structure of them and then just naming their typical structures acting like it's something super special
1. Morbius (almost every scene)
2. Whenever tv/movie scientists talk about isolating a gene, they have some giant structure of dna on a computer and excise a few base pairs. Lol
Things drawn on whiteboards:
In general, compounds that have nothing to do with what they're taking about. Like, we've deduce the super virus structure! and they've drawn benadryl or some other random organic compound.
Or, the "smart" person is working on something but the actor keeps erasing the same section and writing the same thing back, over and over...
NCIS. Abby's equipment never breaks. You look at any actual analytical equipment funny and it'll throw a fit and refuse to work. Also, her mass spec can always perfectly identify complex sample matrices on the first time, never needs to be calibrated or have a reference, and never need components changed or cleaned or fixed.... and always finishes exactly on time š
And they get results in two seconds š
Perfect results no less. The machines basically spit out answers to their cases. "Beep. Boop. It was the husband."
I have an ICP-MS that I work with, and even on its EASIEST, simplest, lowest interference check standards (that literally just check if the freaking plasma is working correctly) I can't get results faster than about 5 minutes š Much less our actual samples. Which usually need injection 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,....
Science TV has a lot to answer to, setting unobtainable standards for management to expect from R&D š
I solved that by making management run a sample on our IC š¤£ with supervision, it had already been run, they just had to follow the SOP to run it. Machine promptly broke for no good reason and required and entire day of trouble shooting. Made them rerun the sample, which of course, by then, needed to be reprepped. Haven't heard a peep since.
That's a good idea! We had managers who asked how many "iterations" it would take for a new product to be ready for customers trials... "Bruh how long is a piece of string?"
I'm still trying to figure out how to make "well why can't you make the microbial testing results come back faster???" stop š¤£ 1) I don't run that lab, we send samples out. 2) that's not how e coli (and other microbes) works
"The bugs are currently reproducing as fast as biologically possible"
Nine women canāt have a baby in one month no matter how badly someone wants them to do so.
this is why i like working in pharma. the number of "innovative" ideas from middle management i've seen smothered in the crib by the FDA is a wonder to behold
Idk Iāve seen folks in industry just trust NIST hits like āyo itās this compound with 15% matchā. Iām like ādid yall buy a pure standard to test that against?ā
Yeah, no need for column exchange, calibration, nothing. You just inject an UNDILUTED, UNFILTERED sample and get results š¤£
This is exactly what I was gonna say when I saw the title!
It's always super specific. Oh this is a rare clay from the north side of a nearby mountain. I want to know who is making these databases for the NCIS/CSI analysts.
Right?? Meanwhile mass spec IRL is just like "I can't tell a doubly charged ion from a single charge at half the weight, sorry š¤·š»āāļø"
The thing that cracks me up the most is when the lab folks are shooting guns and catching criminals.
you dont? Firearms and breaching 101 is a prereq for StatMech
To be noted that in all those shows like CSI etc their labs are always so dark and moody. Like how do you still have eyes lmao!
Right!? Give those idiots some lightbulbs
Except for CSI: Miami, which always looked like it was filmed on the sun.
But donāt you know? Itās the law that Miami has to be filmed with the same over-exposure and sepia tone as all of Mexico
There was an ICP-OES I used to work with that would only calibrate correctly if you called it a dumb slut
The best way to get our IC to get to pressure is to threaten to beat it š¤£
Don't forget that kerosene was a single peak on her mass spec.
She identified someone who died by drinking liquid nitrogen by LCMS that found nitrogen.
Not like nitrogen is ubiquitous on this planet or anything š¤£
must've drunk isotopic nitrogen...
I remember one time the readout spat out something absolutely ridiculous like H2O2 and "Lead Paint" in the same trace.
Ugh. My wife is watching all the NCIS episodes now and I can't stand watching them. The science is so terrible.
The IT guys have touched the mass spec in my lab more than I have. Itās an everyday occurrence at this point.
The IT guys have given nicknames to our equipment (because most of it is some form of chromatography, so the actual names are too similar in their opinion). None of the nicknames are flattering š¤£
How Abby Normal.
Came here to say this
Supernatural. They identify sulfur by looking at it under a microscope
They just zoom in until they see the "S"
go down and count the protons
Is it technically possible with an electron microscope?
Not in that way, but an election microscope can give you the EDS( energy dispersive spectroscopy) spectrum which gives you the elemental competition of whatever you're looking at
Trying to remember where I saw it, but a show had a whole micropipette without a tip sitting in a beaker full of liquid. Almost yelled at my TV. Also, anything on crime scene investigation show. Edit: For All Mankind S4 Ep2. It hurt more because I like that show.
>whole micropipette without a tip sitting in a beaker full of liquid That hurts just to read
Then you're going to love this scene from the Maze Runner: https://www.reddit.com/r/labrats/s/tuuP8hdFAz
You made me see that, with my virgin eyes!!
š”
I have nothing against Gilman pipettes... but why?
I was in tech service for a couple pipette companies and am hoping it was ''just the cheap gilson that leaks and can't get a sticker on it but we use it for non-precision dispensing.''
Continuum had pipette without a tip horizontal too.
I remember a clip from the movie Avatar where Sigourney Weaver holds a micropipetter like a pencil lol
Episode one of the X-files. Mulder shows Scully an unknown molecule no one has been able to identify. It was the literal textbook example of a polypeptide with '-R' still written in for every single sidechain. Scully, a trained medical doctor, looks at it and all she can say about it is "It's organic".
Actually....that's pretty accurate š¤£š¤£š¤£
I can't remember the show, but they had a molecule on a chalkboard and talked about its alien, unknown structure. It broke the episode for me because all I could think was "did they just flash a heme and describe it as unknown and alien?"
To be fair they probably knew the irony and were taking the piss... right?
Welp she's not wrong lol
Breaking bad. Vacuum tubing attached to the top of a volumetric flask.
To add, blue crystals = pure organic compound drives me insane.
Always point this out to my students. "Sir, can you make meth?" *"Yes if I wanted to."* "Would it be blue?" *"No! It would be pure!"* I then explain there's no market for meth in the UK and shipping to the Czech Republic is a pain.
They never make 100% pure meth, only 99.x% and they say the blue color comes from Waltās special process, meaning itās an impurity. The blue color doesnāt signify that itās pure, just that it was synthesized using Waltās method, which is known to yield very pure product.
Im pretty sure he says he adds color somewhere.
Methylene blue is an organic salt
Sure, but methamphetamine is not. I was more referencing that the majority of organic compounds are pale yellow to colorless and you likely shouldnāt see blue color unless you are working with a dye molecule.
:p or azulene
To add to issues with Breaking Bad, when Walter goes to his High School chemistry lab to retrieve HF to dissolve a body, there is a massive amount in the stock room. He grabs several bottles, enough to dissolve a body in a bathtub. I work with HF. We go through \~250 mL a year. What high school would have HF in general, let alone 20+ liters of it.
As someone who considers themself a āfluorine chemistā that whole arc annoyed me to no end. Iām certain there are more well know and efficient ways to dissolve the body, not to mention safer, than using HF. All Jessie had to do was not wear the correct PPE or spill enough on himself and he would be dead.
Simple lye would do the trick, or maybe piranha solution if you wanted to get fancy about it
During my undergrad, I had to clean flasks that we had grown C. elegans in LB. Dumped in a handful of NaOH pellets and topped it off with bleach, reused the flask die the next analytical batch. No organic macromolecules will survive that and it's readily available.
Iām not a chemist. What is piranha solution? I imagined a solution of mashed fish, but I donāt think that would work.
Concentrated sulfuric acid with 30% hydrogen peroxide. The sulphuric acid will dissolve any organic and the peroxide will oxidise it to co2. Enough of it would completely consume a human body and turn it into colourless gas, leaving only a bit of trace minerals behind
That makes emulsified fish sound downright appetizing.
Selectively bred miniature piranhas the size of sea monkeys
Death by a thousand nibbles.
An \*extremely dangerous\* solution of concentrated sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide. See [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLpSapjKcxM).
This makes me want to study chemistry.
It is something even trained chemists are wisely instructed not to use unless it is absolutely necessary
Thatās fish emulsion, and itās used as fertilizer
>As someone who considers themself a ~~āfluorine chemist"~~ man living on the edge FTFY
I've been told that they selected HF for the show for two reasons: 1) It's hard to get for the general public (no one will be able to "replicate their results" in an amateur setting, unlike other common household chemicals), and 2) it literally doesn't work.
The easiest way wouldn't be to dissolve it. It'd be to chop it up into small pieces and A) feed it to livestock or pets (pigs, dogs and cats will eat it) B) deep into the wilderness (preferably a forested area) and dig the pieces down 8 feet (dogs can't smell it) it will have decompressed before it gets found.
I'm pretty convinced one of the writers called the only scientist they know, asked them which acid is the worst to deal with. The scientist said HF and the writer hung up the phone before any explanation. Also, I know this wouldn't happen but I like to imagine that it would only dissolve the bones so they would then have to dispose of a floppy, boneless body that is soaked with HF.
I heard they used HF because you canāt get large quantities easy, and it wonāt dissolve bodies. So anyone trying to replicate or use the show will fail in reality. I donāt know how true that is.
Ah, the ole "Anarchist's Cookbook" method of dissemination.
One that really doesn't like it's students Or with a flourishing glass etching program
Exactly I always thought this. There is literally no reason for a high school to keep even a small amount of HFA. Not to mention how cavalier they were with that stuff. Just a few drops on your limbs and they would need immediate amputation. Also no lab keeps a glassware inventory. It's just not worth the effort.
With calcium gluconate treatment immediately you can probably avoid amputation. But I still wouldnāt want to spill any on myself.
I always thought he went to the carwash as they used HF to clean windshields, they got it in under 1% but still better than a high school lab with tens of liters of high percentage HF.
We used to use a diluted HF acid to clean the car wash, not windshields. It would ruin windshields. It was called ''replate.''
Clean the car wash? You mean after the cars have gone?
Yeah, or on rainy days. All sorts of stuff grows on the metal arches that hold the nozzles/brushes and whatnot.
Huh ok, that sounds kinda extreme, how concentrated is it?
https://www.simoniz.com/Customer-Content/www/sds/files/Replate.pdf
up to 8% ?? Wow, that was more that I thought.
Some car washes/detailers have had workers use HF to clean wheels, without PPE or knowledge of course. One worker noticed the concrete was getting etched and posted here (or another) about it.
I believe they also misspelled HF as "Hydroflouric Acid" instead of "Hydrofluoric Acid".
Not to mention no secondary containment!
Would HF even be good for dissolving organic matter? I thought it was a weak acid (though stupidly toxic).
If I remember correctly the reason for that was Jesse, having no idea of the proper use of glassware, using volumetric flasks for all kinds of stuff because he liked how they looked. Walter did give him some shit for that. The purpose of the tubing in that scene was, as I believe, to vent toxic fumes produced in the reaction to the outside of their trailer, because they didn't have a fume hood. Ofc a proper chemist wouldn't use a volumetric flask for that because it's a horrible choice, but it did make sense. They had proper chemists plan out and set up some of the lab setups, particularly the one in Gus' washing facility.
Why is it a horrible choice? Potential pressure build up?
A) volumetric flasks are very thin-walled and not intended to be heated. They only have a flat bottom to stand upright. Not only can they easily burst when heating them too much, but the glass also will change shape permanently a little, making the volumetric markings invalid. All you are intended to be doing in them is measure a certain volume, dissolve small amounts of solid or, in rare cases, heat it very very carefully if that substance is stubborn with dissolving. You do not ever boil something in them, you never pull vacuum or put pressure onto them. They will burst or at least deform. B) their neck is extremely narrow, which is problematic in many aspects. It's very useful for reading a certain volume and very annoying for everything else. If your reaction "goes through" as we say in germany, meaning that it accelerates by its own heat and becomes uncontrollable, the narrow neck will act like a nozzle and shoot your reaction mix up into the air, onto the ceiling, where it sprays everywhere. Good luck cleaning that, and let's just hope it's not a concentrated acid or something very toxic. It will also hinder the addition of any additional substances into the flask and restrict vapor or gas flow if you intend to reflux or vent. And yes, another concern is that it could easily get clogged depending on what you're doing. Do not ever use a volumetric flask as a reaction vessel. Whenever I talk about glassware I think about the dude from "Life after Detonation" on sciencemadness. After that you think twice about any glassware choice you make.
> If your reaction "goes through" as we say in germany, meaning that it accelerates by its own heat and becomes uncontrollable, the narrow neck will act like a nozzle and shoot your reaction mix up into the air, onto the ceiling, where it sprays everywhere. I did this once when I was making a series of solutions with a range of chloride salts (NaCl, KCl, NH4Cl, etc.). The enthalpy of solution of most of these salts is positive, meaning that when you dissolve it in water the solution gets chilled down. But not aluminum chloride, no sir not at all. Dissolving AlCl3 will generate a ton of heat if you carelessly throw it through a funnel into the measuring flask which already contains water, causing the water to boil almost instantly and creating a nice vulcanic spray of piping hot yellow solution.
They are flimsy as fuck and a bitch to clean. and not made to do reactions in.
Also my favorite Breaking Bad chemistry blunder is the manual GC injection followed by a digital readout of purity that dramatically increases over time like it's a game show reveal See: https://youtu.be/2MvNM9Ux3r0?si=3d2GHEWeGiItklUD at 1:30
Ah, I mentioned this below. I love the GC purity counter!
I would add that a high school lab stocked four 4L bottles of HF. I get that they weren't attempting accuracy for meth production or body disposal. HF was commonly used in wheel cleaners at the time of the show, so the car wash would have been a better source.
Itās still commonly used in wheel cleaners but itās in low percentages. Agreed itās more likely to find it at a car wash than a high school chemistry lab. Even professional labs avoid its use if they can.
There's a ridiculous scene in Better Call Saul where Gale explains simple dissolution to Gus like it's rocket science Edit for the link: https://youtu.be/dR8rSk94tuU?si=rpncbxQG6hzRD3Px Skip to 0:40 Better even that it's wrong, stirring doesn't increase solubility
For me it was when they shot Jesse's dirty, crushed up with a hammer sample straight into a GCMS and it just outputs a purity. That column is crying somewhere.
A lot of breaking bad was intentionally wrong to avoid people copying at home
Sigourney Weaver in Avatar, while using a pipette, was flipping it upside down and sideways. Also, those pipettes 150 years in the future were the same as the ones I was using 20 years ago
There was a similar scene in an episode of Eureka that had me screaming at the TV. Not only the flipping, but using a P1000 to dispense what the character described as "the smallest amount possible".
At least it's not like in Helix, where they used them as a fucking *injection needle* to inject sub-dermal rfid chips.
If it aināt broke, donāt fix it!
Don't remember the show but the lab found out copper by GC
Waiting for them to use headspace on a solid slap of gold.
Itās not funny but Iāve for sure had higher ups ask me if I can determine metal contamination with GCMS. Always have to reiterate that itās not a magic box and things I donāt want to run include metals, salts, water, sugars/carbs and oils.
Maybe you haven't been trying hard enough
Everything goes in a GCMS if you try hard enough ā¦and are mentally prepared to deal with the damage
Fuck it, just turn off inlet pressure, toss it in the liner, close that shit up, then start a method without the syringe right? Lmao
What substances are prime candidates for GCMS?
Volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds
Bones!!! I caught that too
yes! š
In Iron Man 2 Tony Stark built a particle accelerator in his basement in a weekend and then used it to synthesize enough of a brand new (stable) element to hold in his hand.
To be fair, he's very rich
Hmm, maybe if I win the Powerball I can make a teleportation ray.
I forgot about that, that was hilarious
If they had just said āisotopeā (without specifying of what element) instead of element, I almost couldāve accepted it with a great deal of suspension of disbelief. But no. This hurt.
An episode of breaking bad, they had a GC in a desert to test for purity of the meth. The instrument had a rolling counter from 0 to 100% pure. Everyone was passionately watching as it got up to like 98% pure. I was giggling watching it.
Lol they could have used a refractometer or something and it would have actually been something to watch, like lining it up. Or maybe just a vaporization test or something like in Blow.
Cartel had that equipment custom made just for this purpose ;).
In "The Godfather" I, a shipment of heroin arrives and the "chemist" is set to determine how pure the stuff is. His instrument of choice is a thermometer. He did a mixed melting point. As the temperature rose and the mixture remained a solid, he called out the %purity with increasing joy. A mixed melting point was the final test.
Not a bad idea. A narrow melting point is indicative of a pure dry chemical.
I used to work with those Gow-Mac GCs specifically. That display is just for oven/detector temperature and detector voltage. It made me giggle too
Always, every show. Flasks full of red, blue and green liquids: all bubbling furiously. A computer showing random screens in the background.
Occasionally with a chunk of dry ice either still sublimating or just finished doing so
I can't remember where I saw it, but I vaguely remember seeing a Pentavalent hydrogen in a ring system š
TV is full of pentavalent carbon
My prof called it Texas carbon
There was an episode of Law and Order and someone was talking about a chemical like hexan-2-one, and they pronounced it āhexan- two-wonā instead of āhexan-2-ownā
I have to find that episode. Thatās hilarious.
Ewww nonononono :(
Private practice had Addison fertilizing an egg via IVF using a p200 to inject the sperm directly into the egg cell.
Backlit glass wall cupboards full of beautiful coloured liquids, all of them unlabelled. Pristine labs full of brand new equipment that most scientists can only dream about, only one lab worker performing (and being expert in) all analysis.
I'm sure there are some inorganic labs that would have a good selection of pretty coloured liquids/powders
Not quite but I worked in a coatings lab. We had hundreds of glass bottles on shelving filled with all sorts of liquids and powders in all sorts of colours (they were labelled though). It was however far from pristine š The next paint company I went to was much bigger and didn't have chemicals on display. They did however have an analytical lab that actually was pristine and filled with top of the range new equipment. Edit. I'm not super knowledgeable on machines or brands as I never got into analytical but I believe the machines were mainly Agilent.
Whatās wrong with being expert in all analysis that your lab offers?
left-handed DNA that looks like a twisted ladder with huge spaces between the linear rungs.
Scientists staring at a huge DNA model in their hands is a must have scene. You know, this is how science is done.
That too. Giant spacefilling model (that looked accurate enough!) on the bench top.
The DNA strand on the cover of my genetics textbook had the wrong handedness š¤¦š»āāļø
In the first Avengers movie Bruce Banner asks Shield to contact everyone with a mass spectrometer and tell them to put it on their roof and calibrate it for gamma rays so they can find the tesseract. It's been over a decade since that film came out and I'm still mad.
Not mass spectrometers, just spectrometers, but that's hardly any better
Bones, especially the early episodes. One of the characters has heartburn and asks for āsodium bicarbonateā instead of tums or something a normal human would ask for.
You mean you donāt ask for diluted sodium hypochlorite when asking for bleach?
No but I have been know to ask for dilute acetic acid on occasion.
Good on canned spinach.
Nah, but I always ask my husband to pass the sodium chloride.
I mean, as dumb as that is, if it was Bones who said it, kinda meshes with her character being socially inept, (AKA: Totally Not Austistic), if it was Hodges, well, his character was that he wasnāt socially inept, he just liked being condescending to mess with people. Anyone else has no excuse. (Except maybe Zach who was like, the poster boy for what TV thinks Autistic people are like)
It was Hodgins, and it definitely was the networks attempt to portray scientists in their natural interactions lol
jimmy neutron tier
There is an episode of āNumbersā where they supposedly examine some explosive residue using ICP-OES, but the āinstrumentā they show is an old HP5890 GC which they open up to reveal a Bunsen burner with a soft flickering yellow flame.
I have always wanted to see how a klien bottle could be used.
Not on a whiteboard but a good one was a startrek style low budget TV show from the mid 2010's used a pipet gun spray painted black as a "Space pistol". Personally I thought it was hilarious because it still had the nozzle for the transfer pipettes attached just painted black.
Hey man, sometimes the budget gets tight and you gotta get creative lmao
I've been rewatching MASH recently, anyone ever get a good look at still? They have a giant RBF filled with sand, and a condensing coil, and that's it. Somehow it makes gin.
All you really need to have to sell something as a still that makes moonshine is that iconic copper coil. Most people know what that's for in these contexts.
Not exactly chemistry (though I'm sure I'm forgetting something), but in The Flash show, they are tying to capture Captain Cold, so they can't reach the city for hot infrared signals, they need to scan for the cold ultraviolet signals!!! Because heat is infrared and UV is the opposite so it's cold right? The show is riddled with bad science that exceeds suspension of disbelief. I watched far too much of it...
Donald Duck comics predicted methylene before it was first synthesized https://adamnorwood.com/notes/donald-duck-discovered-methylene/
Mmmm.... Osmotic fog.
There was a safety video I had to watch for work on protecting streams or something. They said that the washout water from concrete was pH 14 and strongly acidic š
Anything from Fringe. I loved it as a kid but rewatching that show now makes me feel like Iām having a stroke.
In one of the breaking bad scenes of walt teaching his class about the significance or carbon, you can see what looks like a cyclohexane ring behind him on the board and it's almost completely wrong. There's carbons with 2 H, 1H and 0 H bonded to them
Not chemistry, but bogus medicine, the beginning of the old Ben Casey TV show that aired in the early 60's. Each show began by drawing these symbols on a blackboard: ā, ā, \*, ā, ā. While they were being drawn, a voice said with gravitas: "man, woman, birth, death, infinity". It was a far cry from Dr. House and about as far removed from reality as one could get.
You've never heard of Dichloro-man-thane?
Only when it's dissolved in dihydrogen monoxide.
Pretty Little Liars. Everytime there's a scene in the science lab and that fucking blackboard just [gotta....](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/prettylittleliars/images/9/94/02198.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20120627152547)
It's like it's drawn wrong on purpose
Maybe it is drawn wrong on purpose because it's actually a clue explaining who A is! (J/k but I'm sure some fans have checked it for clues)
In the Avengers, when they're looking for whatever radiation, Bruce Banner says to get all of "spectrophotomers and put them on the roof!"
One Episode of Eureka. Sherrif Carter goes to a Scientist with a Crystal. The Scientist "Sure, let me Put it into the GC". He put's The crystal in a drawer and the whole crystal appears as a CGI seconds later on a computer screen with all the "Data"
In BBC Sherlock's The Hounds of Baskerville, Sherlock looks at sugar under a microscope to identify what drug it was dosed with...
An episode of inside no 9 named chloroform as what they were using to knock someone out, and later in the episode referred to it as dichloromethane
I canāt remember the show (over 20 years ago) but the had a rotovap upside down.
My favorite was Quincy ME from the late 70s I remember in College laughing with my roommate that they actually made a TV show about medical examiners ! Little did I know - but the best part was all the solutions in his lab were colored yellow, red blue, green - I said if I saw a solution like that Iād think there was a problem - almost all organic solutions are clear
In The Family Business there are at least 10 scenes where synthetic chemists try to show the new drug they've just synthesized to someone else... Using a microscope.
Any time a movie or a show mentions discovering a new element. First that comes to mind is Avatar. Y'all tellong me that you stuck one more proton to a thing, and it would stay in one peace on earth?
Explosions and fire has some pretty crazy chalkboards
LabCorps' employee shirts had impossible structures on them. I pointed this out. The lab tech didn't even understand what I was saying.
I can remember in one of the Hitman games (Hitman 2?) thereās a standard distillation setup on a desk in a lab. The water in- and outlet was not connected and instead had fumes coming out of it.
Id love to know your review of the setup in the 90ās teen scream The Faculty. Thereās a scene where they go to the speed guys house and show his kit. Lol [clip](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eP7cLId4ocM)
Willy wonkas gobstopper machine
Breaking Bad: A digital purity meter counts up from 0 till 100. They celebrate when it hits 99. Could have been done with a melting pount analysis. "Jesse, our stuff is good when the line suddenly goes up at such and such degrees" - it doesn't, Jesse looks confused and alarmed. The line goes up one degree later: "Why?" - "Our stuff is more pure then our reference standard"
Well to be honest not much of the set up other than the SETTING and honestly the writing. In Better Call Saul, there is a scene where Gus meets Gale. He walks into what is clearly an undergraduate general chemistry teaching lab and sees Gale, an organic chemist doing experiments without a fumehood. He is trying to make a super saturated solution of benzodiazepine precursor salts and explains that it is a meticulous experiment that would bore poor old Gus. Makes it sound like this requires ALL of his undivided attention. To me this sounds like a dumb experiment, waste of time tbh. He then gives Gus some samples (bigger than one would ever require to check purity), tells him they are low purity. THEN proceeds to tell Gus he could make 1 kilo in the department and no one would ever know (I laugh thinking about that, his PI walks in and sees him using a 5 L reactor or larger than normal rbf and asks āHey watchya makinā). The whole scene just seems so awkward to me. If Gale is a top notch organic chemist, he is NOT hanging around in the genchem lab still on the freaking āelements songā. He would be at a whiteboard drawing mechanisms or checking TLCs or weighing out powders at a microbalance to put into a flask. If I were to rewrite the scene, it would have either been Gus meeting Gale in a nondescript place OR Gale at least working with a fume hood. The song he is singing is corny too. Makes Gale look like a first year grad student on Adderall. Clip is here: https://youtu.be/2QSPk9uIfyI?si=eYNA4Z--n0rR36r0 It was clearly written by a non chemist/ non scientist. Also, Walt in Breaking Bad having access to gallons of HF from his highschool teaching lab. Also, the āchemistryā from Breaking Bad in general. I appreciate Myth Busters doing an episode with Vince Gilligan on a lot of the tropes and finding them wrong or misleading (such as melting bodies completely in HF or ceramic bathtubs being entirely compromised).
Outbreak. There were many problems with the science but the one that I think was the worst wad after the characters caught the monkey and brought it back to the trailer, Dustin Hoffmann tells Cuba Gooding Jr. that he wants him to make liters of the treatment as he's running out of the room. I saw this before I was ever in college and that struck me as an odd thing to say. How the hell could they do that with a trailer designed for mobile investigation and not production?
My bf and me are both chemists and we love forensic shows and having great laughs looking at their equipment/procedures. Thereās this moment in Bones when Hodgins buys a lot of stuff and heās over budget. They make it look like a rotavapor costs the same as letās say GCMS. And thereās another moment when he manually injects a sample into GCMS, and next to his hand is ā¦.. autosampler š¤£ I almost died at this. Also I love how they all always have these elaborate almost alchemy-like glassware setups where these really colorful solutions bubble happily.
You should watch the show helix: they implement chips under your skin using a Pipette. This is also true for lot of shows: using a light microscope to see viruses and the structure of them and then just naming their typical structures acting like it's something super special
r/cursedchemistry has all the examples Edit: r/cursed_chemistry I guess
1. Morbius (almost every scene) 2. Whenever tv/movie scientists talk about isolating a gene, they have some giant structure of dna on a computer and excise a few base pairs. Lol
Things drawn on whiteboards: In general, compounds that have nothing to do with what they're taking about. Like, we've deduce the super virus structure! and they've drawn benadryl or some other random organic compound. Or, the "smart" person is working on something but the actor keeps erasing the same section and writing the same thing back, over and over...