Chemical Education Today edited by
Cheryl Baldwin Frech University of Central Oklahoma Edmond, OK 73034-5209
ReAction!: Chemistry in the Movies by Mark A. Griep and Marjorie L. Mikasen Oxford University Press: New York, 2009. 352 pp. ISBN 019532692X (cloth). $49.95. reviewed by Robert M. de Groot
All of us have watched movies that include science and scientists and many of us ascribe our motivation to pursue science as a career to a movie or even a particular character in a movie. Did you know that in the movie Clambake (1967) Elvis Presley plays the role of a chemist? There are many examples where chemistry is part of the narrative of films. Many films are works of fiction that present ideas very differently from how scientists understand the natural world and they can be a source of amusement for the scientifically minded viewer. Fantasy films often make use of artistic license to immerse the viewer in a totally different world apart from what we consider “reality”. These may be big budget films such as Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), or even comedies such as Flubber, the 1997 Disney remake of the classic Absent Minded Professor (1961). Luckily for us, a book that celebrates the magic of the movies coupled with deep connections to chemistry has emerged. ReAction!: Chemistry in the Movies by Mark Griep and Marjorie Mikasen leads the reader on a fascinating and engaging study of the themes intertwining chemistry with movies. It is a must-have book for chemistry enthusiasts, educators, or anyone who wants to take a deeper look at how science is portrayed through this medium. The first five chapters discuss the “dark side” in which individuals (e.g., chemists, “mad scientists”) and chemical companies are the bad guys causing harm to people or the environment. The last five chapters of the book discuss the “bright side” of chemistry. Chemists are described as occasionally bumbling, sometimes eccentric, and more than often socially awkward creatures. They are also described as heroes who collaborate to make the discoveries that ultimately benefit society. Griep and Mikasen guide the reader to understand what scientific issues, challenges, or controversies are being addressed in the films considered. The book also provides a wonderful historical perspective of the development of both the movies and the chemistry and chemists portrayed in them. For example, the authors address the misconception that chemistry is typically portrayed in a negative light in films. In the 1200 films considered in this study, they found that chemistry is portrayed equally as good or bad. They point out that it is important that the bad is included because it sheds light on the fact that chemists are humans, complete with foibles, and that chemistry is a human enterprise. Irrespective of the correctness of the facts in the films considered in this study, the authors focus on the issues the filmmakers were trying to get the audience to consider, especially if the film was produced in a time when a topic was especially controversial, such as nuclear power and the release of the China Syndrome (1979). It is interesting to note that the accident at Three Mile Island nuclear power plant happened 12 days after the release of the film. 1020
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Griep and Mikasen offer many great suggestions for using chemistry-themed films or parts of films in classrooms. Apollo 13 (1995) is an example of a film that provides many powerful lessons. While on their way to the Moon, an oxygen fuel-cell tank exploded, cutting electrical power and the astronaut's air supply. The film shows the crew interacting with mission specialists back on Earth to rig solutions so they can return safely to Earth. October Sky (1999), based on the book Rocket Boys, tells the story of a coal miner's son who was inspired by the Sputnik launch to build and test model rockets while in high school. Another example is Madame Curie (1943) a biographical film about Marie Curie and her husband Pierre Curie, as they undergo hardship to isolate radium from pitchblende rock, learning about radioactivity. ReAction!: Chemistry in the Movies is a must-have book for science educators who want to enhance their instruction and provide very salient connections to current events. I found the book challenging to read from cover to cover because after reading the introduction and getting a sense of the organization of the book I found myself excited to jump from place to place looking for my favorite movie or theme. It appears that Griep and Mikasen took this into consideration because I found it very easy to jump around and explore the book freely. While ReAction! is interesting and easy to navigate, readers should be aware that this book is an in-depth and scholarly examination of the topic and not just a simple catalog. One advantage of thoroughly reading this book is that one acquires the tools to critically examine the use of chemistry in films not considered in the book. After completing ReAction!, I put what I learned to the test when I saw Iron Man II (2010). Once you pick up ReAction!: Chemistry in the Movies you will be motivated to venture to your local theater, or, if you prefer, your own laboratory pull out the popcorn popper, fire up the entertainment system, and do some experimenting at the movies. Robert M. de Groot is a member of the Program Development and Promotion Subcommittee of the ACS Committee on Community Activities;
[email protected]. DOI: 10.1021/ed100783m Published on Web 08/03/2010
Food Bites: The Science of the Foods We Eat by Richard W. Hartel and AnnaKate Hartel Copernicus Books, Springer Science þ Business Media, LLC: New York, NY, 2008. 190 pp. ISBN 978-0387758442 (hardback). $22.95. reviewed by Steven K. Showalter
The book Food Bites: The Science of the Foods We Eat, is a series of feature columns, most of which appeared in the Capital Times, a small newspaper in Madison, WI, that was converted to primarily an online format in 2008. The authors are Richard W. and AnnaKate Hartel, a father-and-daughter team. Professor Hartel is a researcher at the University of Wisconsin in the food
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science department and has written at least one textbook and coauthored another regarding food chemistry. Ms. Hartel was a college student at Northland College at the time this book was published. The title of the book is appropriate: while not meaty enough to provide a full meal, this book certainly provides some tasty, bite-sized tidbits. The intended audience is a member of the nonscientific public who has primarily read recipes and cookbooks in relation to food science. The book is not a highly technical discussion of food science and would likely be only of minor interest to most chemists. The text is easy to read due to its brevity. Sixty chapters discuss various topics. Chemistry, microbiology, physics and engineering are all represented in the discussions of food science. Other chapters deal with the safety of foods, general health, quality control, and large batch processing. A few chapters deal with discourses on food-related history or technology, such as the discussions regarding refrigeration or cake mixes. Seven new articles (by my count) not originally published in the Capital Times have been inserted to facilitate the flow of the book. Some other specific food topics include: moisture content in cereal; particle size importance in ice cream; nutrition of tomatoes; bacterial safety of eggnog; formulating spreadable butter; consistency in chocolate; and the importance of quality starting materials in beer. The chapters are short, averaging two to three pages each. A few articles seemed to be no more than advertisements for specific food products (e.g., Ben and Jerry's, Oreos, Exploding Pops, etc.) with little to no relationship to food science. I was able to complete the book in a few sittings, whereas a colleague was able to read it in its entirety on a recent plane flight. A number of interesting informational morsels are scattered throughout the text. My favorites were the history of Lucky Charms cereal, several articles explaining the science of butter, and the methods for manufacturing guacamole that will not turn brown in air. Food Bites is an interesting read, but it is not likely to be used as a reference. I would wait for it to come out in paperback or look for discounts online rather than pay the full hardback price. I would not recommend that this text be used by itself as a teaching resource. It would be an appropriate suggestion to an undergraduate or high school student who has expressed a desire to better understand food science but is not sure where to start. Because the book favors no single discipline, it offers a broader cross-section of food science than a more in-depth text would. This selection could serve as a gateway to more substantial books. Steven K. Showalter works for Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM 87185;
[email protected]. DOI: 10.1021/ed100701k Published on Web 08/23/2010
Black Robes, White Coats: The Puzzle of Judicial Policymaking and Scientific Evidence by Rebecca C. Harris Rutgers University Press: Rutgers, New Jersey, 2008. 208 pp. ISBN 978-0-8135-4369-7 (paper); ISBN 978-0-8135-4368-0 (hardback). $24.95. reviewed by Dan Sykes
Judicial decisions to admit or deny a particular science in a legal proceeding are based on one of three admissibility r 2010 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
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standards: relevancy (Federal Rule of Evidence 702), Frye, or Daubert. In United States v. Frye ( 1923), the court ruled that expert testimony is admissible if the methodology behind the science is generally accepted by the relevant scientific community. In the United States Supreme Court case of Daubert v. Merrill Dow Pharmaceuticals ( 1993), the court ruled that judges should no longer rely on the general acceptance principle but must assess the reliability and relevance of expert scientific testimony for themselves using four established criteria. The Daubert standard provides for greater judicial discretion in such decisions. Currently, 14 states use Frye, and 30 states have adopted Daubert, while the remaining states use the relevancy or a hybrid standard. The premise of the book Black Robes, White Coats is that a diverse set of standards and a broad spectrum of discretionary powers give rise to a greater variance in judicial decisions concerning the admissibility of scientific knowledge. As a consequence, judicial “gatekeeping” decisions may correlate with a number of attitudinal indicators such as political preference and geographic location. The possibility of teasing out such tantalizing statistical correlations stirs visions of partisan infighting, intrigue, and courtroom drama. It is within this context that the author attempts to puzzle together appellate court decisions regarding DNA profiling, polygraphs, and trauma syndrome. A caveat bearing on the statistical significance of the aboveassumed causal dependencies is the assumption that decisions are made within a nonevolving scientific framework. If the nature of the science has changed, and therefore so have the arguments pursuant to its admissibility, then attitudinal indicators bear little direct influence on the judicial outcomes. Correlation does not imply causation. Unfortunately, this is exactly the case regarding DNA admissibility from 1989 to 2003, the time frame relevant to the author's discussion. Initial challenges to DNA targeted the novelty of the technique and issues of reliability; these challenges then evolved to include procedures for estimating the probability of a random match and, finally, qualityassurance controls. The nature of the challenges advanced in tandem with the maturation and sophistication of the technique. The science behind the modern polygraph, which is that lies stated by a person can be detected by certain measurable physiological changes in that person, has changed little since its invention in 1921. Proponents of the technique believe a properly administered polygraph can reliably identify guilt or confirm the veracity of an individual's statement. Critics argue that the results are not standardized and their interpretation involves a high degree of subjectivity. Because of the static scientific framework and subjectivity of the technique, a statistical assessment of appellate cases involving polygraph evidence may uncover potential links between judicial “gatekeeping” decisions and attitudinal indicators. Unfortunately, of the 165 appellate cases involving polygraph evidence, only 28 decisions ruled polygraph evidence admissible. Clearly, appellate judges have consistently and overwhelmingly ruled against the admissibility of polygraph evidence. Unless the cases involved an equally lopsided distribution of political or geographic affiliations or all members of a minority affiliation came to a similar decision, the available records do not support a link between judicial decisions and bias. Finally, the most interesting chapter of the book covers syndrome evidence. The author is able to correlate attitudinal indicators to judicial decisions regarding battered woman syndrome (BWS) and rape trauma syndrome (RTS). However,
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the small number of cases (40 for BWS and 31 for RTS) requires some caution when evaluating the statistical correlations. The book does not contain scientific information. It also does not present information from an ethics-based perspective. For these reasons, it is not an appropriate classroom textbook. It is best to consider the book as a personal read. The chapters covering judicial decisions regarding DNA, polygraph, and trauma syndrome are identical in format. While this lends an organized structure to the book, the reader may lose interest with the repetitive nature of the discussions. A better approach would have been to drop the DNA and polygraph sections and to focus the discussion on trauma syndrome, the most interesting and compelling topic of the book. Dan Sykes is in the Department of Chemistry, Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802;
[email protected]. DOI: 10.1021/ed100736s Published on Web 08/09/2010
Genetic Witness: Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profiling by Jay D. Aronson Rutgers University Press: Rutgers, New Jersey, 2007. 304 pp. ISBN 978-0-8135-4188-4 (paper); ISBN 978-0-8135-4187-7 (hardback). $24.95. reviewed by Dan Sykes
The scientific community is a conservative body, typically cautious about accepting revolutionary ideas that have not been subjected to substantial peer review, lack robust quality-assurance controls, and offer few safeguards against error with initial interpretations based on assumption rather than empirical evidence. Over time, in the Kuhnian sense, such ideas are tested and discarded by the community of scientists or evolve into true paradigm shifts. Although the development of DNA profiling owes its birth to revolutionary advances in molecular biology, the paradigm shift occurred within our legal institutions when DNA profiling rapidly challenged fingerprinting as the gold standard in the justice system. Jay Aronson, author of Genetic Witness: Science, Law, and Controversy in the Making of DNA Profiling, suggests that the meteoric rise of DNA profiling in forensic cases has been fraught with controversy and plagued with errors, and that the adversarial legal process has been the prime motivating force behind all subsequent developments and improvements in the technique since its introduction. While the legal system has certainly been a driving force in the advancement of forensic DNA as applied to criminal cases, one may also argue that technological advancements are driven by accuracy and cost. The depth of past problems, either controversial or error-based, pales in comparison to the positive impact the vast majority of forensic DNA work has had on both the legal process and society. Genetic Witness provides a detailed review of the important legal cases challenging the reliability and admissibility of DNA profiling. Aronson frames the controversy over DNA profiling as 1022
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a casualty of overzealous claims of an error-free method conducted under strict quality-control measures by private corporations under intense competition for market share. The subsequent oversight and control by a closed-culture Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) only served to intensify the controversy. The provocative tone of the book is intended to generate concern among the public, given the power of the technique, its susceptibility to such influences, and an absence of independent means of verification. Beginning with the first admissibility hearing in the United States, Florida v. Tommy Lee Andrews ( 1987), Aronson describes the judicial decisions during the “DNA Wars” in the context of pitched battles between the prosecution and defense attorneys over legal standards of admissibility (e.g., Frye and Daubert) and the reliability and general acceptance of novel science in the scientific community (and, in some cases, the scientific illiteracy of the judiciary). This is a coming-of-age story that chronicles the increasing sophistication of defense attorneys, namely, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, to challenge DNA evidence in the courtroom in the face of overwhelming odds. The first successful challenge of DNA admissibility came in the case of New York v. Joseph Castro ( 1989). Lifecodes Corporation generated DNA profiles of blood samples from the case using three restricted-fragment length polymorphism loci and a sex determination marker. The key evidence was a bloodstain on the defendant's watch, which Lifecodes matched to the victim with a probability of random match of 1 in 289,200,000. With the assistance of expert witness Eric Lander (MIT), the defense was able to question the reliability of the DNA results. After reviewing the raw data, the defense proved that Lifecodes used a contaminated DXYS14 probe; that Lifecodes would have reported no match if they had adhered to their published protocols for bandmatching; and that their male sexdeterminant control was mistaken to be female in origin. Finally, the defense showed that the reference data Lifecodes used to generate their statistical probability value did not conform to Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium but exhibited substantial substructure. Although DNA evidence was ruled inadmissible in the Castro case, the decision generally left intact the validity of DNA testing and was based solely on Lifecodes' inability in this instance to obtain reliable results with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty. The decisive battle in the DNA Wars was the pretrial admissibility hearing for United States v. Yee ( 1990). The central conflict centered on the FBI's procedure for estimating the probability of a random match, which the defense claimed to be scientifically untenable (at best) and fraudulent (at worst). The debates between academic scientists employed by both the prosecution and defense spilled out not only into the mainstream news and print media publications but also into the academic literature (e.g., Science; see ref 1). Unfortunately, a full discussion of the defense's claims and the prosecution's rebuttals are beyond the scope of this review, but at the conclusion of the admissibility hearing, the magistrate ruled in favor of the prosecution, stating that the reliability of the FBI's probability estimates reflected the views of the scientific community. The decision in the Yee case and a subsequent report from the National Research Council in 1996, The Evaluation of Forensic DNA Evidence, effectively ended the legal debate over the validity of the FBI's method of estimating allele frequencies and calculating the probabilities of random matches. It was upon
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this stage that the “final battle”, California v. Orenthal James Simpson ( 1995), was played out. Although the typing performed by the Los Angeles Police Department's DNA laboratory used a relatively new technique involving short tandem repeats (STR) as genetic markers and the amplification of these loci using polymerase chain reaction (PCR), the defense chose not to challenge the scientific merits of the technique but rather focused on the sensitivity of the technique, the increased likelihood of contamination, and the general incompetence of the LAPD investigators and laboratory staff. In this context, the LAPD contributed more to the defense's case than to the prosecution's. Today, the use of STRs as genetic markers, the number of loci employed (13, although 15 are commonly found in commercial kits, plus one sex determination marker), and larger reference databases render past objections to the FBI's RFLP, DQ-alpha, and polymarker protocols obsolete (note: the “6-loci protocol” was a single-nucleotide polymorph-based assay). However, significant challenges remain. The Simpson case highlighted issues surrounding error rates and questionable practices associated with laboratory protocols and technicians. Aronson cites recent high-profile cases of fraud and ineptitude within the Houston and Virginia Crime Laboratories and at the FBI to support his call for more robust and transparent quality assurance measures and the establishment of an external review board. Genetic Witness is a tribute to Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. Aronson indicates that the contributions of Scheck
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and Neufeld and the nature of the adversarial legal process are clearly responsible for guiding DNA profiling down the evolutionary path from a novel scientific method of questionable legal standing to one with significant scientific and forensic merit, even if critical issues remain. Aronson admirably describes the key scientific concepts and principles (such as Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium and restricted fragment length polymorphism) in basic terms. As such, the book is accessible to the nonscientific community. For educational purposes, the book would be of value in courses that discuss science, society, and ethics. In such a context, though, an instructor may wish to temper the author's alarmist tone by introducing transcripts of some of the relevant cases and balance the “problems” with the successes and the value of the approach. Literature Cited 1. Roberts, L. Fight Erupts Over DNA Fingerprinting. Science 1991, 254, 1721.
Dan Sykes is in the Department of Chemistry, Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802; dgs12@ psu.edu. DOI: 10.1021/ed100737p Published on Web 08/09/2010
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