LETTERS
New sources for old fuels
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N "A NEW SOURCE," ALEXANDER H. TUL-
lo updates readers on the availability of petrochemical feedstock from the "thick oil" of Alberta's tar sands (C&EN, Aug. 25, page 16). The pool from which these products are derived, 178 billion barrels, is two-thirds of the entire proven reserves of the world's largest petroleum source, Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, the author notes that conventional and synthetic crude derived from the tar sands rose to 402 million bbl per year or 1.2 million bbl per day, at a cost of 43% of current market prices for crude. These facts stimulate several follow-up questions: What capital investment would be needed to double this production? How long would that project take? Tullo does not address the status of petroleum feedstock from U.S.-based heavy reserves, that is, oil shale. Could these reserves, in Vice President Dick Cheney's backyard, provide an additional 2 million bbl per day of conventional oil and synthetic crude by 2010? These two sources, tar sands and oil shale, far exceed any oil that could be extracted from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Reducing our reliance on long, tenuous supply lines to the Middle East should help dampen fluctuations in crude prices and thus pump prices for gasoline. Investment in extraction and cracking technology for these North American "thick oil" resources should be a priority for major oil companies and the Department of Energy DAVID S. FRANK
Springfield, N.J.
Science's limits
R
ICK M U L L I N , I N H I S REVIEW OF
"Galileo's Mistake" by Wade Rowland (C&EN, Oct. 13, page 108), states the book's viewpoint as "How can the recent century, which gave us fascism, weapons of mass destruction, and environmental degradation, be considered an enlightened age?" The answer is that it has indeed been an enlightened period in the sciences, but scientific enlightenment has not brought with it concomitant social or ethical enlightenment. This does not make the scientific method invalid; it simply shows its limitations. What perceptive person has ever suggested that all would be well if "we just leave it to science"? As an example of the limitations of science, consider perhaps the greatest evil in2
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flicted on the world recently: the actions of appallingly successful suicide bombers, which have changed the parameters of human conflict. These actions are hardly new Nearly 100 years ago, George Bernard Shaw pointed out in the preface to "Major Barbara": 'And Society with all its prisons ... is powerless in the face of the anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle [using]... cheap and devastating explosives." I respectfully suggest that society is not powerless in these matters, but science does not yet have all the answers. SIDNEY TOBY
Somerset, N.J.
Fueling the CO2 fire
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WRITE TO CONGRATULATE BETTE HILE-
man for an excellent Insights article on carbon dioxide problems (C&EN, Oct. 20, page 22). Without further study, it is easy to see that several things currently dissipating tax dollars are simply dumb. Clean coal, with or without sequestration, is an oxymoron. Coal use maximizes the damage to Earth's surface; maximizes the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of energy; and emits a maximum amount of other dangerous substances, such as mercury, selenium, sulfur, arsenic, and so on. We need to terminate the use of coal and all other fossil fuels to produce energy as soon as possible. These minerals should be conserved for higher value use as chemicals. There have been a lot of thoughtless statements regarding the utility of sequestration of carbon dioxide. The concept is meretricious. With close examination, sequestration is simply sweeping the problem under the carpet to plague a future generation. We already are committed to burdening the future with high-level nuclear waste; let us not add sequestered carbon dioxide to their problems. I would ask Hileman to reconsider her support for the Kyoto treaty Those that produced the treaty might possibly have wanted to do something meaningful, but they failed. Even if everyone obeyed all aspects of the treaty the long-term effect on global warming would be small. Some of the ideas incorporated are dumb, like planting trees to reduce the carbon buildup. Most trees only hold carbon out of the atmospheric cycle for, at the most, a few hundred years. With Earth's population projected to increase to 10 billion, we will have little spare land on which we can just allow trees to grow in isolation. In addition, to my mind, trading carbon dioxide emission rights between nations
(the right to pollute the atmosphere) should be seen as immoral. The Kyoto treaty appears to have been created to maximize the appearance of action while at the same time limiting actual activity It is simply a sop for the politicians to use to fool the public, and whatever their motivation, the U.S. Senate was correct in rejecting the treaty Although some readers of C&EN owe their careers to the fossil fuel industry and are frightened by the implications that this industry will dramatically shrink over the next 30 to 50 years, they should recognize that industries come and go, just like people. Today, there is limited employment for makers of millstones, horse-drawn carriages, railroad steam engines, electronic Continued onpage 6 HOW TO REACH US CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS LETTERS TO THE EDITOR • Our e-mail address is
[email protected]. • Our fax number is (202) 872-8727. • Or you can send your letter to: C&EN Editor-in-Chief 1155—16th St., N.W. Washington, DC 20036 • Letters should generally be 400 words or fewer and should include the writer's full name, address, and home telephone; letters may be edited for purposes of clarity and space. SUBSCRIPTIONS • Send all new and renewal subscriptions and requests for subscription rates to ACS, Dept. L-0011, Columbus, OH 43268-0011. • Changes of address, claims for missing issues, subscription orders, status of records, and accounts should be directed to Manager, Member & Subscriber Services, ACS, P.O. Box 3337, Columbus, OH 43210; telephone (800) 333-9511 or (614) 447-3776; or send an e-mail to
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LETTERS continuedfrompage 2 vacuum tubes, and 7-inch computer disks. LAURENCE WILLIAMS
^M + xeuJ MSÏ
[S] = xem MSÎ
ω
Ή + β ] =°Λ XEUJ MSÏ
Alliance, Ohio
rameters on the right-hand side of the equation. R. BRUCE MARTIN
Charlottesville, Va.
It occurred to me that while the meaning of the constants and {S} in these equations is clear, what is the meaning of the inHAT A RARE AND REFRESHING Op verted velocity, °A? It has become portunity to see algebraic equa necessary to define a new concept in kitions in Ron Dagani's intriguing netics, the reaction immobility This is a article on the Lineweaver-Burk equation measure ofhow close a reaction step comes (C&EN, June 16, page 26). As a chemist, to stopping altogether. The greater the imI am one of many, no doubt, who delights mobility, the closer the molecular process in seeing the mathematical expression of approaches extreme torpor. Experiments properties of chemical systems in printare currently under way in my lab to test just as I am drawn to watching the this new concept. progress of a chemical reaction using mo It is quite apparent that Dagani's article lecular structures. After all, both types of gave me much food for thought, and my relationships are simply symbolic repre curiosity led me inevitably to the Internet sentations of certain properties of mo to learn more about M & M and L & Β. lecular species undergoing change. What Such is the seductive power of this surely a pity that mathematical equations are infinite source of knowledge, that it called generally shunned in scientific publica me to walk through many green pastures of tions that aim for the general, albeit tech chemistry and from which I have only nical, reader. recently returned to write this letter of Your magazine, for example, has only appreciation. one instance of math in the past 12 issues MICHAEL P. HENRY (Dagani's article). Real chemical equations La Habra, Calif. or sets of them appear only once in each is sue on average. There are dozens of mo HE ARTICLE FEATURING THE MOST lecular structures to be found, of course, citedJACS paper, by Lineweaver and each one staring rather woodenly out at Burk, that proposes that enzyme ki the reader. But there is something elegant, netic data be plotted in a double recipro self-confident, and persuasive about a com cal plot of 1/Vversus 1/{S], fails to mention plete, balanced chemical or mathematical a very serious shortcoming of such plots. equation. At their best, they are models of In many applications to enzyme kinetics, the weighting is proportional to the fourth creative design, serving as urgent and effi power of the velocity, so that for a 10-fold cient channels of communication. range in velocity the weighting at the dilute The Lineweaver-Burk equation in the end of the double reciprocal plot is 10 4 above article is one such lovely arrange times greater than at the other. Therefore, ment of symbols on a flat surface. It lies unweighted Lineweaver-Burk plots should across the column like a long, languid cat, never be used. while the Michaelis-Menten precursor is coiled, potent, full of smug simplicity Yet In a paper they wrote with a statistician, these surface differences between the two Lineweaver and Burk did suitably weight equations mask their true similarity And the data that otherwise would have been weighted 39,000 times greater at one end it may not have been necessary to perform of the double reciprocal plot \J.Am. Chem. any algebraic operations to covert one in Soc, 56,225 (1934)}. It is safer to construct to the other. a Hanes (or Scott) plot of {S}/V versus [S], I have heard it said that Lineweaver got where unequal weighting still occurs but is the idea while discussing the M-M equa less serious. (The Hanes plot actually pre tion with Burk across his desk. He saw the dates the Lineweaver-Burk plot.) These equation upside down and it was immedi features are elaborated in the article "Dis ately clear how the variables could be sep advantages of Double Reciprocal Plots" arated to give a linear relationship involv by R. B. Martin \J. Chem. Educ, 74,1238 ing reaction kinetics and substrate (1997)]. concentration. With the general accessibility of com puters, the most appropriate way to treat CORRECTION data is by nonlinear least squares that fit • Nov. 3, page 11: The scale bar in the results to an equation with only the the micrograph should read 2 nm, not most error-prone observable (velocity) on the left and all other variables and pa
The equation game
Marketing pharma
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AGREE WITH PANKAJ V. PARANJPE AND
Steven B. Sands in that the risk and cost associated with discovering new drugs should be rewarded (C&EN, Oct. 20, page 4). For pharmaceutical companies to dras tically reduce R&D spending would be bad both for long-term business and for our health. However, what is the rationale for the amount of money that drug companies spend on sales and marketing? Most of the big pharma companies spend much more on sales and marketing than on pure R&D. According to the consumer health care or ganization Families USA, in 2001 the nine U.S. publicly traded companies that make most of our drugs spent a combined $45 billion on sales/marketmg/aqministration and only $19 billion on R&D. We are sur rounded by ads οηΤ\ζ in magazines, on the radio, etcetera, that try to convince us why we need a specific drug, when we should be relying on our doctors. But we cannot even always rely on our doctors being neutral be cause of the pressure and influence of the drug companies. We all know that many doctors are offered "incentives" for pre scribing specific drugs; what is really sad is how the drug companies justify these as "honorariums" or "clinical studies." I know the value of research and devel opment; it is what I've done to earn a liv ing since before my junior year in college. But it makes no sense to hear a big phar ma company demand a high price tag for needed drugs on the basis of "R&D," when that is not even close to being the main al location of the profits. If drug companies were really concerned about the cost of health, there are plenty of other places to cut back besides R&D, such as marketing and the seven- and eightfigure executive salaries. JOEY ESPINOSA
Greenville, S.C.
Good versus bad science
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T WAS INTERESTING T O READ T H E I N -
sightful perspective by Stephen K. Ritter on cold fusion, although it baffled me (C&EN, Aug. 25, page 33). Cold fusion has long been considered a case of what we Continued on page 42 HTTP://WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
COVER STORY subtle than that. % u need to guide the reactants down a particular reaction coordinate, and this coordinate treads through a many-dimensional hyperspace. I agree you will get a reaction when a robot arm pushes the molecules together, but most of the time it won't be the reaction you want. You argue that "if particular conditions will yield the wrong product, one must either choose different conditions (different positions, reactants, adjacent groups) or choose another synthetic target." But in all of your writings, I have never seen a convincing argument that this list of conditions and synthetic targets that will actually work reliably with mechanosynthesis can be anything but a very, very short hst. Chemistry of the complexity, richness, and precision needed to come anywhere close to making a molecular assembler—let alone a self-replicating assembler— cannot be done simply by mushing two molecular objects together. ^ïbu need more control. There are too many atoms involved to handle in such a clumsy way To control these atoms you need some sort of molecular chaperone that can also serve as a catalyst. \ b u need a fairly large group of other atoms arranged in a com-
plex, articulated, three-dimensional way to activate the substrate and bring in the reactant, and massage the two until they react in just the desired way. You need something very much like an enzyme. In your open letter to me you wrote, "Like enzymes and ribosomes, proposed assemblers neither have nor need these 'Smalley fingers.' " I thought for a while that you really did get it, and you realized that on the end of your robotic assembler arm you need an enzymelike tool. That is why I led you in my reply into a room to talk about real chemistry with real enzymes, trying to get you to realize t h e limitations of this approach. Any such system will need a liquid medium. For the enzymes we know about, that liquid will have to be water, and the types of things that can be synthesized with water around cannot be much broader than the meat and bone of biology
"Chemistry of the complexity, richness, and precision needed to come anywhere close to making a molecular assembler cannot be done simply by mushing two molecular objects together."
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know as pathological science, pseudoscience, or voodoo science. Ritter is right in highlighting the properties of these claims: phenomena possessing a plausible rationale but completely irreproducible or with capricious effects ascribed to artifacts or human errors. As scientists, we must love to debunk mythology and pseudoscience. However, we should be aware of the fact that phenomena regarded in the past as magic or miracles (electricity or magnetism in the Middle Ages) have now become an essential part of conventional science. At present, cold fusion could either be an honest mistake or an illusion. Scientific truths are best-guesses given all the available evidence, or they are potential errors as yet unmasked. The line between science and pseudoscience may cerU2
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But, no, you don't get it. You are still in a pretend world where atoms go where you want because your computer program directs them to go there. Y)u assume there is a way a robotic manipulator arm can do that in a vacuum, and somehow we will work out a way to have this whole thing actually be able to make another copy of
tainly be thin. While the search for extraterrestrial (even intelligent) life is a domain of astrobiology, speculations about alien civilizations, extrasensory perception, or astrological information constitute favorite parcels of pseudoscience. But many scientific topics can also be extremely perplexing and involve phenomena not easily understood. Quantum mechanics is probably the most salient paradigm of this. The superposition principle, the tunnel effect, and entanglement sound like science fiction. Still, there is a logical background, at least from a mathematical viewpoint, behind these phenomena, of which we have indirect experimental evidence. Again, reproducibility is the distinctive point between good and pathological science. At this stage, however, Ritter's parallelisms between pseudoscience and religion are rather unfortunate. A fair dialogue between science and faith should be en-
itself. I have given you reasons why such an assembler cannot be built, and will not operate, using the principles you suggest. I consider that your failure to provide a working strategy indicates that you implicitly concur— even as you explicitly deny—that the idea cannot work. A few weeks ago I gave a talk on nanotechnology and energy titled "Be a Scientist, Save the World" to about 7 0 0 middle and high school students in the Spring Branch ISD, a large public school system here in the Houston area. Leading up to my visit, the students were asked to write an essay on "Why I Am a Nanogeek." Hundreds responded, and I had the privilege of reading the top 30 essays, picking my favorite five. Of the essays I read, nearly half assumed that selfreplicating nanobots were possible, and most were deeply worried about what would happen in their future as these nanobots spread around the world. I did what I could to allay their fears, but there is no question that many of these youngsters have been told a bedtime story that is deeply troubling. Yon and people around you have scared our children. I don't expect you to stop, but I hope others in the chemical community will join with me in turning on the light, and showing our children that, while our future in the real world will be challenging and there are real risks, there will be no such monster as the self-replicating mechanical nanobot of your dreams. Sincerely, R I C K SMALLEY
couraged. Faith, unlike science, is based on personal experiences that need not be reproducible—faith cannot be refuted, as it would be difficult or impossible to state the conditions under which a personal belief could be empirically falsifiable. In stark contrast, pseudoscience harnesses mass media and scientific ignorance of large sections of society Probably, education is the only recipe to overcome its effects. Carl Sagan once said, "It is suicidal to create a society dependent on science and technology in which hardly anybody knows anything about science and technology" It was amazing to see in the same C&EN issue how Elizabeth K. Wilson admirably reviewed Roger Highfield's "The Science of Harry Potter" (page 44). There is too much pseudoscience and only a glimpse of true science in this book. PEDRO CINTAS
Badajoz, Spain HTTP://WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
