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The Chemistry Between Us
- Oregon State University Press
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91 The Chemistry Between Us As a boy, I subscribed to a monthly mailing called “THINGS of Science.” Each time the blue cardboard box landed in our mailbox, I’d eagerly turn back the copper clips and lift the top to see what was inside. I hoped it would contain something to do with plants,bugs,or shells,rather than some boring experiment in chemistry or physics.Likewise,I neglected our home chemistry set in favor of chasing butterflies. Inanimate stuff just didn’t ring my bells with the same sweet timbre as the living.So even though my high school biology class with the football coach,Mr.Buchkowski,was no great shakes, chemistry came as a definite step down.Take the didactic drone of Mr. Blubaugh, he of the obvious nickname; add my narcoleptic afternoons amid the acrid smells from something nasty on the Bunsen burner;and you had a red-faced chemistry teacher in full roar.“Wake up, Pyle!” A couple of years later,as a would-be zoology major at the University of Washington, I was again imprisoned in chemistry class when I could have been out birdwatching on the campus marsh.I often forsook the sour reek of Bagley Hall for the arboretum,and the result almost scotched my college career.I consoled myself for the rotten grades by concluding that chemistry is balderdash.At least I’d learned my birds. In the soundtrack of my childhood,“Better LivingThrough Chemistry” was a frequent mantra.After all, we were the leisured and lucky recipients of countless postwar chemical boons: nylon, Scotch tape, and Melmac, to name just a few.No one,it seemed,doubted the rosy future both promised by and chock full of lots of lovely chemicals.Until Rachel Carson.When I read Silent Spring, I learned for the first time how very ironic the slogan— “Better Living Through Chemistry”—really was. The lawn where I’d passed countless childhood hours was free of weedkillers, except for my brother and me,digging dandelions for a nickel a peach-can-full.No insect spray either; the grass hopped with tawny-edged skipper butterflies as well as kids.But Rachel told another story,one I would come to learn firsthand, TheTangled Bank:Writings from Orion 92 as Denver lawns became skipper-free biocide sponges under the influence of ChemLawn,Monsanto,and Ortho:places where turning kids out to play should be considered a form of child abuse. But chemicals themselves aren’t responsible for what we do with them. They are,in fact,the basis of all life,and everything else as well.By dodging my chemistry classes, I’d undercut my education. A little late, I realized that natural history is much more fascinating when one knows something of the underlying chemical processes. Learning how insects take in plant compounds to render themselves distasteful to birds helped me to see this. Plants and insects coevolving to the advantage of each include the ageold dance of white butterflies and mustard glucosinolates; the partnership between cinnabar moths and the pyrrolizadine alkaloids borne by their tansy ragwort hosts; and the well-known relationship between monarch butterflies and milkweeds with their cardiac glycocides. Experiments proving that birds learn to avoid unpalatable monarchs gave rise to the whole field of chemical ecology,eternally and unforgettably symbolized by Lincoln Brower’s iconic photograph of the barfing bluejay in the February 1969 Scientific American. Chemistry, I realized at last, could be fun. Then I discovered that the substance of the land itself provides another natural link—chemistry made manifest in plants and butterflies that occur only on certain substrates. Rare orchids and blues that may be found only on chalk grasslands in England, for example, or cobra lilies and skippers restricted to serpentine outcrops in northern California, and others that have learned to thrive on toxic nickel deposits in Washington’s Wenatchee Mountains.This is indeed a world made equally of chemo and bios. The fact is, as the Greek philosophers well knew, mineral and organism are merely ends of a common chemical continuum. A more recent chemistry lesson struck closer to home. In August, my wife,Thea, abruptly learned that she had ovarian cancer. Since then, she’s been receiving a compound of platinum in a vein near her heart every three weeks, because platinum was once accidentally observed to prevent the growth of cancer cells. Coincidentally, the day before her first infusion, I too received the same element: two crowns and an...