Michelle Francl's Reading List

"A few years ago I attended a workshop at the Vatican Observatory on water in the solar system, and started to wonder exactly how old the water in my tea cup was. Was it here from earth’s formation, or did it crash land on a craggy ball of dust sometime later? I wrote “A brief history of water in the universe” for Nature Chemistry, and in doing the research for that, encountered Philip Ball’s biography of water. Some years ago I had assigned Ball’s Designing the Molecular World to my introductory chemistry course along with the more usual thousand-page textbook, in part because I wanted them to appreciate the beauty and excitement of chemical research. H2O didn’t disappoint me. Ball talks about tough scientific topics in ways that are both accurate and truly accessible. Water is such an iconic molecule, and such a ubiquitous one. It’s in the clouds and the oceans; it runs in our veins, and is tucked into the inner spaces of our cellular machinery. Ball tells its story with sharp science and thought provoking imagery. One image that has really stuck with me is that we shouldn’t think of clouds as discrete entities, like cotton puffs floating above the earth, but rather see them as processes, like waterfalls, ever changing. The chapter on weird water wanders through not just the odder stories (and fictions) about water, but has something deeper to say about the line between science and pseudoscience that we would all do well to heed in this era of “fake news”."

"I don’t know if I agree that Goldsmith suppresses all of the anger a twenty-first century feminist might feel about the way Marie Curie was treated by the broader scientific community. In describing the manoeuvring around Curie’s Nobel prize, for example, Goldsmith notes “a vicious sexism ripped away all pretense that Marie Curie might be accepted as an equal”, and proceeds to detail with a cold clarity all the ways in which Curie’s contributions were diminished. It isn’t a casual cultural sexism that Goldsmith describes, but a determined attempt to cast Marie as an assistant and muse, rather than as a scientist in her own right, by those with direct evidence to the contrary. I read Eve Curie’s biography of her mother as an impressionable nine year-old, which left me with a romanticized view of her genius and a deep desire to become a scientist, like Marie. To me, the strength of Goldsmith’s biography of Marie Curie is how it so clearly characterizes the depth of her obsession with her scholarly work in the face of almost unimaginable difficulties, from her struggles to afford her education in Paris to the loss of her beloved Pierre. Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is that Goldsmith does not gloss over Curie’s struggles with debilitating depression, one episode of which kept her from going to Stockholm to receive her first Nobel prize, and which occurred at intervals throughout her life. Nor does she downplay Curie’s flagrant disregard of the hazards of working with radioactive materials. I’m still inspired by Curie, but now as much by her persistence through her mental illness as by her discoveries."

"Sam Kean brings the periodic table to life with the stories you didn’t hear in high school chemistry but will wish you did. Kean explains why tin screams when you bend it and what that has to do with Robert Scott’s disastrous trip to the South Pole (spoiler, it’s a phase change, like the melting of ice) and how cesium is used as an atomic clock. Every page is an adventure, showcasing the breadth of properties and behaviors of the elements. I’ve been a chemist for forty years and this book really captures what I love about chemistry – both its surprises and its predictability. Along the way, Kean clues you in to the mysteries of the periodic table, where it came from and how it is organized. As to the title, if you make a spoon from pure gallium, it looks and feels much like a stainless steel spoon, but if you use it to stir your tea, it will seem to vanish before your eyes. It is literally melting, gallium’s melting point is only 86°F (30°C) and if you pour out the tea you’ll find a pool of silvery liquid gallium at the bottom. There’s a cool video of it online! Sam Kean uses the story of the disappearing spoon to launch the story of the bitter clash between Dmitri Mendeleev, who is credited with developing the periodic table, and Paul Lacoq de Boisbaudran, who discovered gallium."

"I straight-up love mystery novels —particularly ones that turn on the details of physical evidence. Deborah Blum’s book reminds me that molecules are powerful witnesses, if only we have the skills to interrogate them, and sometimes they are killers. The Poisoner’s Handbook is organized around the career of Charles Norris, a pathologist and the medical examiner for New York City in the early twentieth century, and Alexander Gettler, a chemist with expertise in toxicology, but the molecules and the methods Norris and Gettler use to detect them are the primary characters. The tales are gritty, and Blum doesn’t stint on the gory details. The stories of cyanide poisoning are not for the weak-stomached or faint of heart. My favorite vignettes are where the chemistry doesn’t convict the obvious suspect. Frank Travia, accused in late 1926 of killing his girlfriend, and then dismembering her body to dispose of it, insisted that he’d woken up to find her dead on the floor. The case went to trial, but Norris and Gettler were able to show that the real culprit was carbon monoxide from Travia’s stove. As Blum so vividly puts it, “Carbon monoxide is a kind of chemical thug. It suffocates its victims by simply muscling oxygen out of the way.” “Carbon monoxide is a kind of chemical thug. It suffocates its victims by simply muscling oxygen out of the way.” Blum’s last story is the most captivating. Imagine a tasteless, odorless poison that easily dissolves in coffee or tea, kills its victims with less than a third of an ounce, and unlike carbon monoxide or cyanide poisoning leaves no gross evidence on autopsy. Could a poisoner using thallium get away with murder? No, Blum reassures us: the clue is in the name of the element. William Crookes discovered thallium when he observed a bright spring green color in a flame test of contaminated sulfuric acid. Gettler would burn samples of victim’s tissues and look for that characteristic green. The incident that Blum recounts that most horrified me was not a murder at all. Crookes apparently ingested thallium in an attempt to prove to his rival for the discovery, Claude-August Lamy, that it was safe, at least in low doses, and thereby discredit Lamy."

"To start, Andy Brunning points out that not everyone’s does—only people who can break down asparagusic acid, a chemical that is found only in asparagus, will notice the effect. The products of that breakdown are simple sulfur molecules, including methyl mercaptan, the same compound that is added to natural gas to give it a smell to alert people to leaks. Sulfur compounds are notoriously smelly. Even in incredibly tiny amounts, humans can detect their odors at the parts per billion level, so it doesn’t take much asparagus to be able to detect these compounds in your urine. The focus Brunning has on molecular structure through this book is very much in tune with my own research on molecular shape and behavior. Brunning takes us on a molecular tour of what we eat and drink, breaking down the structures of molecules and their reactions to explain why bacon tastes so good and brussel sprouts so awful, at least to those whose are genetically predisposed to tasting the bitter thiocyanates in the latter. He uses bold graphics to show what the molecules look like, giving us a taste of how chemists see the world. Tucked into each vignette is an easily digestible chemistry lesson, from what techniques are used to identify those smelly molecules in urine (gas chromatography) to the quantum mechanics behind why a gin and tonic will glow under a black light (the quinine in the tonic). Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This book reminds us that humans are small chemical factories, taking in raw materials, turning them into energy and building materials and producing wastes, some of them smellier or more colorful than others.(What beets can do to your wee is startling). But Brunning also reminds us that we use molecules for pleasure—from the way the menthol in mint binds to the receptors for “cool” in the mouth, tricking us into thinking we’re eating something cold, to the sharp bitterness of the phenylindanes that give a mid-afternoon espresso its extra kick. If you want more of this straightforward explanation of the chemistry we encounter in everyday life, Brunning has a fabulous and growing collection of these graphic explainers on his website, Compound Interest . It’s one of my favorite spots to send friends and family who ask about chemistry in the news."