Professional vs Liberal Education

In yesterday’s post, I mused about several aspects of David Labaree’s book, A Perfect Mess, on the unique features of the U.S. higher education system. Today’s post focuses on Chapter 4 (“Mutual Subversion”) discussing the interesting tension and dance between the liberal and the professional aspects. Before getting into the weeds, here’s Labaree’s summary of these two motifs:

 

“The dominant motif is that over the years professional education has become dominant in colleges and universities, in the process subverting the earlier function of providing liberal education. The more muted motif is that… liberal education has gradually pushed back against professional education, in the process quietly subverting it… these two motifs weave together into… mutual subversion, in which the professional has come to dominate the goals of higher education while the liberal has come to dominate its content.” [italics are mine]

 

There’s a tension between public good and private good. As discussed in yesterday’s post, if one subscribes to the “belief that education exists in order to provide society with the job skills it needs and to provide individual with the job opportunities they want”, then it is no surprise that professional concerns have become the dominant goal. The road to upward mobility was to professionalize. The new gatekeeper to the guild of the professionals is a university-level credential. As employers increasingly demand a university degree to get one’s foot in the door, whether or not the training or content of that degree is relevant, it seems that almost everyone (except perhaps some of the academics themselves) – students, parents, employers, politicians, university leaders, journalists – are banging on the drum that colleges need to do a better job preparing students to be such professionals.

 

In the age of the Internet, with science and technology continuing to dominate industry (or at least that’s the widespread view of most folks), the professional becomes associated with subject matter that, at first glance, seems easier to connect to a job. For professional degrees (medicine, law, engineering, accounting, computer science, and many others), this link seems clear. For the natural sciences (biology, chemistry, physics) and some of the social sciences (psychology, economics) the link is reasonably easy to make. For others, and especially the humanities, the link seems less obvious in both the political and public eye. Since the humanities are most often associated with a liberal arts education, we in the university have a front row seat to witnessing the many and varied attempts by academics in the humanities to make the liberal arts ‘relevant’ to professional concerns and success in life. (Here are some book examples.)

  

Historically, the addition of land-grant colleges by the states, originally emphasizing “vocational education and providing practical solutions to public problems” into the messy system highlights this slant towards the professional over the liberal. Community colleges, formerly ‘junior’ colleges were founded for similar reasons – to provide the manpower for blue-collar ‘semi-professional’ careers (the semi distinction being a way to stratify and protect one’s turf).

 

But when you turn your gaze on how the curriculum has evolved at community colleges and land-grant colleges (now full-fledged universities with a broader array of programs), interesting you see a shift away from the professional and towards the liberal or ‘academic’. For example, ‘normal’ schools were first set up to train elementary school teachers; soon these became teachers’ colleges, and then full-service colleges. The course content has veered away from the practical to the theoretical. Many of the oldest and most prestigious private universities today started out to train clergy. Many of them still have divinity schools which now focus primarily on theology in an academic sense; the ‘practical skills’ training of pastoral care has been relegated to newer and less prestigious entrants into the higher education scene. Similar narratives can be drawn for law schools and business schools.

 

Labaree intriguingly suggests that “the shift toward the professional and the vocational… has been more rhetorical than substantive. Maybe it is best understood as largely a marketing tool, which makes a university education seem more useful and relevant than it really is… liberal arts colleges after World War I started marketing their traditional liberal programs as places to the learn the practical skills needed for success in the white-collar workplace. We see colleges and universities doing the same today. They emphasize the usefulness of liberal learning – as training in business-relevant skills in communications, problem-solving, critical thinking, and entrepreneurship.”

 

These ‘skills’ are what liberal arts colleges (mine included) are heavily selling as to the value of their education. Schools at the top of the pinnacle do not need to beat on this drum, where it’s obvious that social advance by associating with the elite strata is a clear path to opening doors. But since all institutions are trying to move up (see my previous post highlighting Labaree’s four rules), the drum beats loud in most institutions. Here’s another intriguing suggestion from Labaree: “From this perspective, the aim of education is to prepare students to compete effectively in the contest for social positions, and that means a system that maintains maximum flexibility for students by providing an education that allows access to the broadest array of occupational possibilities.”

 

Good to keep one’s options open. Just in case. Especially when everything in life seems to be accelerating.

 

Why has liberal content continued to subvert the professional goal? Labaree thinks it’s because of the tension between a private good and a public good, and in particular that social mobility trumps social efficiency: “Lawmakers kept trying to push students into vocational colleges and students kept demanding and getting access to the liberal education and university structure they wanted, since these offered them the widest array of social opportunities [i.e., advancement].” Students (and their parents) think that the lower-prestige vocational programs are less likely to help them move up. So what if these entry-level vocational programs provide broad access to the clamoring masses? You might not get very far, at least if your goal is social mobility.

 

Credentialism is not a new thing. But it has risen acutely, and possibly for the worse, over the last few decades. So what if the content of professional education more and more resembles the modern liberal arts? If credentialism is the driving force, the content might not matter. Labaree emphasizes that this has “dramatically distorted the teaching and learning process, by focusing students’ attention on the extrinsic rewards that come from acquiring an academic credential and thus undermining the incentive to learn… What we end up with… is an increasingly liberal form of education… drained of liberal content by the same vocational purposes that brought about this expansion in the first place.” [author’s italics] Mutual subversion indeed. And it's no wonder that students freak out even more than usual if they think their credential might not look so good.

 

The chapter concludes with a depressing note quoting historian Laurence Veysey: “It would only slightly caricature the situation to conclude that the most important function of the American professor lay in posing requirements sufficiently difficult to give college graduates a sense of pride, yet not so demanding as to deny the degree to anyone who pledged four years of his parent’s resources and his own time in residence at an academic institution.” Ugh. We’re stuck in a system. And if there’s one thing systems are good at, it is entrenching themselves.

A Perfect Mess

The landscape of higher education in the U.S. is a strange hybrid beast. So many institutions of different shapes and sizes; some in a burgeoning metropolis and some seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Expensive and cheap. Rich and poor. Highly stratified. Seemingly market-driven and offering flexibility, yet drawn towards a liberal arts core in aspiration. How did it become the envy of the world? While I’ve heard its story told in many ways, I find that David Labaree’s book cuts through the cacophony, highlighting the salient points and key issues without getting bogged down into too much marginalia. It is appropriately titled A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education.

 

With little government support, and usually with a goal to further specific parochial interests of a sect or religious group, a motley crew of small colleges began to sprout often in far flung outposts eager to portray a fresh bucolic beginning. Academic excellence or “higher” learning was not the key driving force. Landowners thought a college would increase land value, provide economic benefits, and increase local political clout. Thanks to the 1819 court ruling disallowing New Hampshire to “meddle in the affairs” of Dartmouth College after granting it a state charter, college-founding activity becomes a frenzy.

 

Quoting Labaree: “church officials and civic leaders around the country scrambled to get a state charter for a college, establish a board of trustees made up of local notables, and install a president. The latter (usually a clergyman) would rent a local building, hire a small and modestly accomplished faculty, and serve as the CEO of a marginal education enterprise, which sought to draw tuition-paying students from the area… the result was the birth of a large number of small, parochial, and weakly funded institutions… most of these colleges faced a difficult struggle to survive…”

 

But survive and thrive some of them did, and the period between 1880-1910 marks a crucial period for the genesis of the hybrid U.S. university from three disparate pieces: undergraduate liberal arts colleges, land-grant “public” state institutions, and the German research university model. The “winners” in the early competition were poised for expansion. They had proved adaptable. They threaded the needle of being both practical and popular. And the time was right with an apprenticeship model of work disappearing, and a rising middle class seeking to secure “management” roles in newly formed and growing corporations of industrial scale.

 

Grafting the graduate-level research model into the U.S. university gave it the prestige and academic credibility that were previously lacking, but it was crucial to retain the large undergraduate base to support this enterprise. Keeping the base happy was important. Selling the possibility to parents that social advantage would be passed to their children through university education was key. And of course, getting donations from alumni was crucial for continued operations and growth. Labaree writes: “colleges and universities invented most of the familiar elements… that made attending college attractive to so many students (or copied them from peers): fraternities and sororities football, comfortable dormitories, and grassy campuses adorned with medieval quadrangles in a faux gothic style. It was a mix that said: this is a place where you can meet the right people, acquire the right knowledge and skills, walk away with a useful credential, enjoy social life in a middle-class style, and do all this in a setting adorned with newly created social traditions and imported adornments form the great [European] universities.”

 

So well sold was this dream that we’re still selling it today. A college education is your new ticket to upward mobility. And if you don’t have one, you will be increasingly left behind. And did the prestigious institutions open the floodgates to the masses for their hope of a better tomorrow? Well, no. That won’t help them maintain their competitive advantage at the top of the heap. As the pinnacle of U.S. higher education rises, newer institutions prop up the base. Labaree provides a clear explanation for this state of affairs: it comes from the “basic tension between democratic politics, with its willingness to constrain liberty in order to maximize social equality, and liberal markets, with their willingness to tolerate inequality in order to maximize liberty.”

 

This accommodation leads to stratification. Quoting Labaree again: “We can make universities both accessible and elite by creating a pyramid of institutions in which access is inclusive at the bottom and exclusive at the top. Such a system simultaneously extends opportunity and protects privilege. It offers everyone both the possibility of getting ahead through higher education and the probability of not getting ahead very far. It creates a structure in which universities are formally equal but functionally quite different, where those institutions that are most accessible provide the least social benefit, and those that are the least accessible open the most doors.”

 

Labaree provides four basic rules constraining how universities and colleges operate:

 

Rule 1: Age trumps youth… Before competitors had entered the field, the oldest schools had already established a pattern of training the country’s leaders, locked up access to the wealthiest families, accumulated substantial endowments…

 

Rule 2: The strongest rewards go to those at the top of the system… every college below the top has a strong incentive to move up the ladder… Despite long odds, the possible payoff is big enough that everyone stays focused on the tier above…

 

Rule 3: It pays to imitate your betters… [although it] has rarely produced the desired results… it’s the only game in town. Even if you don’t move up in the rankings, you at least help reassure your school’s various constituencies that they are associated with something that looks like and feels like a real university.

 

Rule 4: It’s most prudent to expand the system by creating new colleges rather than increasing enrollments at existing colleges.

 

And thus, along with Higher Ed, we also have Lower Ed, and everything in between. We’re all trying to move up; my institution is no exception. Increased research expectations, even in undergraduate-focused liberal arts colleges are part of the prestige piece in moving up. By involving undergraduates in one-on-one mentored research experiences, we’re selling a “high-impact practice”, now a much-overused word in higher ed. Compared to my experience as an undergraduate, my students enjoy much nicer living spaces, better food, a beautiful well-manicured campus, and the many other trappings that entice the feeling they’re getting their money’s worth.

 

All this is baked into selling the dream of upward mobility to potential students. Labaree has much more to say about this that I’ve found interesting, but this blog post is already overly long. Next post, I’ll discuss what he has to say about the tension between liberal and professional education. It’s messy. It’s not perfect. But it’s interesting.

The Evolution of Hobbits

I mentioned in my last blog post that I might be descended from Tolkien-esque Hobbits in my love of mushrooms. But what about the homo floresiensis “hobbits” that may have occupied the Malayan archipelago tens of thousands of years ago? Might I be one of their descendants?

 

I can explore such a scenario in Phil Eklund’s boardgame Origins: How We Became Human. In a previous post, I outlined the game basics. Today’s post is a session report of one such game from the point of view of the Hobbit player; think of it as “replaying the tape” to see how human history might have evolved.

 

In Eklund’s notes, the game begins circa 120,000 years ago with an estimate of 120 game turns representing millennia. This game only took 37 turns – the game moves quicker with experienced players and there’s not as much wallowing around doing nothing in seemingly “dark ages”. As mentioned in my previous post, Eklund’s is based on the idea that early primates relied on instincts; encephalization led to a bicameral age; this gave way to an age of faith and the rise of major religions; finally the Renaissance moves mankind into an age of reason. I will mark these eras in my account below from the perspective of the Hobbit sages. I also apologize for my poor picture-taking skills (my hands shake!). Without further ado, here we go!

 

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Once upon a time, maybe a hundred millennia ago, when the Age of Instinct ruled…

 

Turn #1: Hobbits imitate warning cries. The “lookout” becomes an established profession in early society.

 

Turn #2: Rituals and the making of figurines are imitated from peoples in the west.

 

Turn #3: Hear stories of meat storage techniques in the permafrost but have not yet experienced such cold. Learn novel behavior through the encephalization of Broca’s area in the brain. Rumors abound of a white-skinned warlike tribe sweeping in from the west.

 

Turn #4: Learn wood-carving from northmen (encephalization of the limbic area) and develop copper age technology. Totemism leads to encephalization of the neocortex and development of language skills. The dog and water buffalo are domesticated but this also brings zoonotic disease!

 

Turn #5: Development of flakes and choppers established the new profession of butcher. News arrives of creatures going extinct in the north and the disappearance of another ancient species (homo erectus) who were northern neighbors.

 

Turn #6: The priestess becomes an important role in society. Migrations north into China begin.

 

Turn #7: The thrusting spear is invented for hunting and males in the society become dominant demanding sex for supplying food.

 

Turn #8: A new fad takes hold: cave art!

 

Turn #9: In China, attempts to domesticate rice fail. Arrival of whiteskin tribes from the north and west allow imitating bone points and learning how to make boats. This allows expansion towards northern Australia.

 

Turn #10: More failures in rice domestication. Imitation of mammoth bone dwellings from the newcomers. The concept of anthromorphism is developed leading to further language skills and encephalization of Wernicke’s area, entering Era II, the Bicameral Age.

 

We’re perhaps at roughly 20,000 B.C…

 

Turn #11: A dry desert climate sweeps through the globe. To the Hobbit descendants, this makes much of Australia and the Gobi desert in Asia uninhabitable. After learning the maritime technology of sails and rudder from the whiteskins, the first crossing of the Bering strait into the New World is achieved!

 

Turn #12: A new Golden Age of Obedience is ushered in. Culturally, body paint becomes a new marker in societal norms. The Camelops in North America is too ferocious to be domesticated and goes extinct. The golden age is shattered when tax riots sweep through bringing a new Dark Age. [Hobbit descendants are the first to enter Era III, the Age of Faith, much earlier than the other groups.]

 

Turn #13: The volcano Kikai erupts near Japan devastating the communities in that area. Diptheria spreads and infects the tribes in China. More tax riots cause a thinning and dispersal of the population.

 

Turn #14: News of gold deposits, other riches, and the building of pyramids in East Africa, trickles in. But for the tribes in China and the Malay archipelago, things continue to be bleak. Food sharing becomes important in these dark times, and there is no news from the Americas.

 

Turn #15: The dark times continue with more food sharing.

 

Turn #16: Imitate status clothing from East Africa.

 

Turn #17: News of new developments in Mesopotamia: the Alphabet and the Code of Hammurabi. From these bringers of foreign news, learn to make baskets – weaving becomes a professional trade. The Chinese tribal relatives begin to grow in strength.

 

Turn #18: Hear of growing populations in South Africa and migration of a previously unknown people group into the Indian Ocean and West Asia. Chinese tribes expand northeast to the Bering Strait.

 

Turn #19: Hear of West Asian cities falling to invaders from the Caucasus who have invented the battering ram. Quickly learn such technology and enter the Bronze Age. Seond migration into the Americas.

 

Turn #20: The Caucasus invaders enter China. Meanwhile new foreign migrants arrive from Indian Ocean reaching Malaya and establishing tin mines. Make a large raid into Indochina and develop chariot burials as a custom. Chinese tribes flee towards the Bering Straits in the face of the invaders. American migrants move east and south searching for greener pastures.

 

2,000 B.C. thereabouts…?

 

Turn #21: Bubonic plague sweeps through West Asia bringing devastation. Capital city in Flores suffers raids from Javan pirates even while weaving becomes more widespread. American tribes migrate south into Mexico.

 

Turn #22: Racism sweeps through west and southeast Asia resulting in population dispersion; news of the destruction of Samarkand arrives with an ill foreboding. Human effigies come into vogue. A third wave of migrants crosses the Bering strait displaced by foreigners entering and establishing territory in northeast Asia.

 

Turn #23: Remaining Chinese tribes migrate to Borneo. More raids. Rule by a God-King is established in the Americas. The ceramics kiln is invented leading to a new honored profession: the glazier. Silver mines are established in central America.

 

Turn #24: Significant global warming takes place leading to widespread tropical weather. Flores capital abandoned. Attention turns to the remaining descendants in the Americas where mead-drinking prestige cults take hold and the temple administrator becomes a position of power. Armed population buildup on the west coast attempts to slow foreigners arriving from across the Pacific Ocean.

 

Turn #25: Temple administrators gain more of a foothold spreading globally across all cultures. Biofuel is successfully extracted off the Baja coast. Windmill technology is developed by the Hobbit descendants ahead of any other groups. Invaders arrive from Russia leading to war. Maize is cultivated although the climate is unsuitable for large scale production. Islam is exported to Malaya where it takes root.

 

Turn #26: Swayed by heroic legends, some leave the Americas hearing of booming opportunities in Hawaii. Malaria spreads across the Americas. Buddhism is exported across East Asia. Pythagorean mathematics developed. The population continues to increase leading to migrations into Canada (with hay technology) and into South America.

 

Turn #27: A measles epidemic sweeps across Europe. The Hobbit descendants enter a Golden Age of Feudalism. A sizable metropolis is established to support prospecting for oil in Venezuela.

 

Turn #28: A second wave returns to Asia looking for opportunities and the attraction to Buddhism and “higher” culture. Learn iron smelting from allies who migrated from southeast Asia to Alaska establishing trading links.

 

Turn #29: A third wave for “brain drain” leaves for Asia. Pottery becomes popular. The dragon kiln is invented. Squash is cultivated in Argentina and new cities are established on the east coast of South America.

 

Turn #30: A fourth wave of “brain drain”. News comes back of a wave of divorce among former allies and there is no more news out of Malaya. However the Americas continue to thrive with the building of the Royal Road, the elevation of couriers and stone masons, and the building of monumental ziggurats. An Ice Age sets in and the Canadian colonies are lost.

 

200 A.D., maybe...

 

Turn #31: Manure fertilization becomes widespread. Specialized farming takes root. But the rise of a Dictatorship leads to the population melting into the jungles to escape the oppressive new “government”. [Hobbit descendants enter Era IV, the Age of Reason.]

 

Turn #32: A more permanent feudal system takes hold across the Americas. Slaves are brought in to increase production.

 

Turn #33: Toys are invented and fuels growth of Argentina.

 

Turn #34: Oil is successfully produced in large quantities in Venezuela. Rail technology is invented. Drugs and anaesthesia are discovered. Trading monopolies begin. Things are looking bright!

 

Turn #35: Hear news of oil flowing in the Middle East. Spearhead the formation of oil companies and OPEC. Rio starts to boom!

 

Turn #36: The United Nations is formed with leadership from Australasia. Tambora erupts! Meanwhile, there is huge growth in Mexico and sports becomes huge business and entertainment. The Americas move into a Golden Age of Justice. Guest workers from Asia return home to join in the bright prospects of further economic development.

 

Turn #37: A flu pandemic spreads throughout Asia, but antibiotics and vaccines are quickly developed. Out of Asia, the Monsanto process leads to industrial-scale agriculture. The stock market is established. Fast food and suburban sprawl take hold. Media conglomerates grow. There are advances in electricity and modern physics. Krakatoa erupts!

 

And here we are today! [At this point the game ended with the Neanderthal descendants winning with 36 points after playing a flurry of Era IV cards. The Hobbit descendants are in second place with 25 points.]

 

 

Of Mushrooms and Puff Pastry

I’ve almost completed reading Nose Dive, the compendium describing molecules that give rise to the diverse smells that we humans experience. Given Harold McGee’s expertise in the chemistry of food, I was not surprised to read plenty of examples in these areas. Today I will highlight just two little bits related to foods I enjoy. I love eating mushrooms (perhaps I have some Hobbit genes) and I love the smell of buttery puff pastry. In homage to chapter titles in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, today’s blog post is a play on “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit” where chef Samwise Gamgee plays a starring role; there’s also “A Shortcut to Mushrooms” so let’s get to it!

 

The smell of mushrooms is brought to you by the number eight. Fungi produce a range of eight-carbon volatiles with names such as octanol, octanal, octanol, octenal, octanone, octenone, (note the tiny name differences) and well, you get the idea. I’ll now quote McGee: “The most common and characteristically mushroomy molecule, sometimes called the mushroom alcohol is an octenol. It’s toxic to microbes and repels the slugs that commonly prowl the forest floor.” Since I’m a chemist, let’s get very specific. Technically this is (R)-1-octen-3-ol. This specific name tells you the location of the double bond, the alcohol, and which stereoisomer you’re dealing with.

 

While this octenol is present in a wide range of mushrooms, specific varieties have specific other smells. The typical white/brown mushroom includes octanone and several benzyl derivatives. The straw mushroom also has octanol, octadienol, and interestingly, limonene, which is often associated with citrusy smells. The shiitake mushroom has octanone, but when it is dried, several sulfurous compounds emerge including the very interesting lenthionine and several other di-, tri-, and tetra-sulfur containing compounds. I’ve been cooking with these varieties for a long time, but about five years ago, I discovered the joy of king oyster mushrooms (the big ones!) which when cooked release sotolon, a lactone associated with the smell of fenugreek or curry. I think of it as “meaty”, far too vague a term for a pro like McGee.

 

Oddly, I’m not a big fan of truffles. I will eat them when present in a meal, but I don’t think they taste spectacular, nor will I go out of my way to get them. Truffles stay below the surface. They don’t make stalks and caps like other “fruiting” mushrooms that sprout up so that their “seed” can be dispersed. Instead they release strong volatiles, plenty of stinky (to us) sulfides to attract other creatures to dig them up. I’ve heard someone describe the smell as “hog’s heaven” which may explain why pigs are good at digging up truffles.

 

But let’s get to a smell that I particularly enjoy – the wafting buttery aromas of puff pastry! Puff pastry is brought to you by the numbers ten and four. The standard puff pastry made with margarine releases some ten-carbon aldehydes such as epoxy decenal and decadienal. Other volatiles include nine-carbon nonenal, and two smaller ring structures: strawberry smelling furaneol, and 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline often associated with freshly baked bread and fragrant rices. Buttery puff pastry has all these but also includes four-carbon butyric acid (and its derivatives) and the key molecule diacetyl – which as a chemist I would call butanedione or dioxobutanone.

 

I also enjoy butter cookies. From Nose Dive, I learned that the Germanic word “cookie” means “little cake”. What do you add to the butter? Sugar, eggs, flour. Now you have something more complex allowing for “more extensive caramelization reactions and browning reactions… [and from egg yolk] long fragmental fat chains and related molecules.” I also enjoy eggs and eat them regularly. But that’s another story!

Nose Dive

Welcome to the wide world of smells – the ‘osmocosm’. That’s the word coined by Harold McGee (famed author of On Food and Cooking) as he explores the cosmos of scents in his new book, Nose Dive. And yes, molecules are the stars of this story! There’s more than enough information to make a chemist’s mouth water, or should it be, nose twitch?

 

Nose Dive is more of a compendium. Like McGee’s aforementioned famous book, you don’t have to read it linearly (although I’m doing so) and you’re welcome to dip in here and there, or take a deep dive! There are five parts to the six-hundred-page tome. Part 1 begins with the simplest smells, the backstory being the Big Bang beginning of our universe. Part 2 discusses animal and animalistic bodily odors. I’m smack in the middle of Part 3, which comprises slightly over a third of the tome, on plants. Part 4 covers other smells of the lithosphere and the hydrosphere. Part 5, titled “chosen smells” will discuss cooked and cured/fermented foods.

 

As an origin-of-life researcher, I am familiar with many of the molecules mentioned in Part 1. But I hadn’t thought about their smell until prompted by McGee. Four small molecules he highlights that humans can smell are H₂S (“eggy, sulfurous”), SO₂ (“irritating, sulfurous”), NH₃ (associated with “household cleaning products, overripe cheeses and salamis, underripe animal manures, and urine”), and O₃ (named ozone “by a German chemist from the Greek root for smell” and associated with “lightning strikes, power-line arcing or prolonged use of high-voltage laser printers”).

 

I find it hard to describe smells because I don’t quite have the vocabulary for it. As a computational chemist who spends little time in a ‘wet lab’, this is clearly not my forte. (I have an aroma wheel pasted to an office filing cabinet to help me improve.) And it turns out that how one describes smells can be very personal and subjective depending on one’s prior experience. McGee has a great story about tribespeople who enjoy the taste of Amazonian ants, as told to him by Brazilian chef Alex Atala. Upon tasting the ant samples, McGee thought they tasted like lemongrass and ginger, tastes associated with Asian food. Atala went back to the cook who had made the ant broth presenting both lemongrass and ginger (that she had never encountered before), and she thought they tasted like ants! McGee refers back to this story throughout his book because it illustrates how we experience smells.

 

The really smelly stuff are the thiols, molecules that contain carbon-sulfur bonds. CH₃SH is associated with rotting cabbage, and humans are very sensitive to its scent. One of my organic chemistry colleagues works with thiols in his lab. I make it a point never to go into his lab. Some smells can stick with you. I think it’s both funny and marvelous that H₂S, COS, and organosulfur compounds likely played an important role in the chemistry of the origin of life. (For more info, look up Christian De Duve’s ‘thioester world’ hypotheses.) The beginning of life was a big stink!

 

My current interest in the organic molecules that may have contributed to the evolution of a proto-metabolism involve alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, and carboxylic acids. These all contain carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; and in particular tend to be of the more ‘oxidized’ variety (although not in the very highest oxidation states). These small molecules often range from sharp vinegarish scents to cheesy and rancid notes, and pungent or ethereal wafts. Interestingly, formic acid comes from formica meaning ant! The larger versions of these molecules begin to introduce descriptors such as “fresh, green-apple, citrusy, waxy, soapy” and the smell of goat. Trivia I learned: the six-, eight- and ten-carbon simple carboxylic acids were originally known as caproic, caprylic, and capric acid respectively. The root word is capermeaning goat!

 

In Part 2, one chapter is devoted to the smells of the human body. What we call ‘bad breath’ comes from volatiles emitted from “microbial metabolism of mouth proteins”. This includes the stinky CH₃SH but also a number of nitrogen-containing compounds that have their characteristic stenches. These are described as fishy, spermous, and putrid. When I teach chemistry for non-science majors I often use putrescine and cadaverine as examples of ‘rotting’ smells. (No, I don’t bring them into the classroom, but I do draw their chemical structures.) But I hadn’t used spermine and spermidine as examples to show their close relation to their putrid cousins because I hadn’t looked up the structure until McGee mentioned it. The smells of life and death are intertwined.

 

Part 3 has been eye-opening. I’m amazed by the range and diversity of volatile compounds emitted by plants. There are many reasons of course. Plants, being relatively immobile compared to their animal counterparts, utilize chemical signals to attract pollinators and ward off pests that try to eat them, among other things. Having spent most of my time studying the more ‘oxidized’ compounds in metabolism, it was eye-opening to see mostly low-oxidation state ‘reduced’ compounds being emitted by plants. There are fruity esters (and lactones) that I discuss in my class; I also talk about isoprene and its relationship to rubber (both natural and synthetic) but I hadn’t considered the range of terpenoids and benzoins. Wow, there are a lot of them, they have very interesting structures, and such a diverse range of scents! It’s amazing what we food-cooking humans have done by utilizing many of these.

 

I had not thought of smells as having a visible component or affecting climate, and McGee illustrates this with some nice factoids. I’ll quote him here. “Both isoprene and terpenoids have another property that makes their initially invisible tides visible, as the haze that gives the world’s various Blue and Smoky mountains their names. As they react with other chemicals in the atmosphere, their by-products form clusters, some of which attract water molecules and develop into water droplets or ice crystals. These suspended particles, or aerosols, both absorb and scatter light – which is why they’re visible as haze – and thus deflect some of the sun’s energy from reaching the leaves… these isoprene and terpenoid aerosols encourage the formation of clouds… and so have significant effects on local climate and possibly global climate as well.”

 

In reading about flowers, I didn’t know that humans have been breeding the scent out of commercial flowers. Here’s McGee again: “Our love for flowers and our ability to produce them at will have conspired to drain them of both significance and smell. The modern global flower industry is the product of growing wealth and city markets for cut flowers, the professionalization of gardening and plant breeding, commercial flower shows, and plant-collecting expeditions. Its business is driven by the competitive breeding of visually striking new varieties that have a long vase life. This program has often meant a steep decline in floral scents: in part because volatile and pigment molecules share biochemical resources, so more color means less scent, in part because some scent volatiles are also plant hormones that shorten vase life. And in today’s largely deodorized world, buyers often prefer scentless flowers for their unobtrusiveness.”

 

There’s so much more that can be said about Nose Dive, and I’m not quite halfway through the tome. Yet I already have enough ideas if I ever teach a ‘Chemistry of Smell’ course. My department has recently discussed expanding the options and themes of our non-majors chemistry courses. In the past I’ve injected different themes when I teach the generically-named ‘Chemistry and Society’ course but these are often in dabs and smears and sprinkles. When I had an Infographic project several years ago, a significant number of the students chose to do things related to the cosmetics and perfumery industry. Certainly there’s interest in this sort of chemistry! I think many of them would enjoy a Nose Dive chemistry course.

Frantic Start

Ten minutes to the start of my 8am class. Zoom server site not found. Check my internet. It’s working fine. Maybe the LMS access link is broken. Use direct Zoom link for my institution. No luck. Try parent Zoom login site. Nothing. Dash a quick e-mail to I.T. services.

 

Four minutes to the start of class. Dash a quick e-mail to students telling them to take the quiz on the LMS. Start preparing for how to teach the day’s material asynchronously.

 

8:02am. One student makes it into Zoom class and sends me an e-mail. I try to get in but this doesn’t work the first time. Try a couple of other options. Eventually I make it in. A second student has arrived. It’s now 8:05am. I dash a quick e-mail to the class telling them that Zoom class is back on track. I start seeing a few others pop in, and I ask them to contact any of their other classmates (by text) to let them know.

 

8:10am. We’re finally ready to begin. I’m somewhat flustered, but manage my way through class in what’s clearly not the smoothest session. We’re learning the calculations for how to make buffer solutions. Thankfully, much of the groundwork was done in the previous class, and we’re mainly doing applications. My students bear with me, and I think we get through okay. I suppress the desire to rush but instead cut out a few non-essential parts and write a little less on the board. Phew!

 

Not a great way to start the day, and it reminded me that the limits of technology can strike at any moment. It could be an internet connection that stops working. It could be a particular server that goes down. Or a bandwidth problem. It could even be a loss of electricity. Or a device that has decided to croak or hang or misbehave. My students, with all their classes on Zoom, have experienced this several times over. I, on the other hand, have not for the most part. That’s because I teach my classes from my office with a stable ethernet (and I can use wifi as a backup), our campus has backup generators (should power fail, and the science building is high priority!), and my office desktop almost always behaves well. This reminded me how fortunate I am.

 

But I’m looking forward to when I no longer have to use Zoom. My campus is one among a growing number that will be requiring students to get vaccinations for the fall semester. We the faculty have been told that we’re expected to teach in-person. I hope there isn’t a summer Covid spike in my area. I’m not sure how I feel about teaching while masked and looking at the faces of my masked students, maybe feeling a little inhibited about in-person interactions. But I think it will be better than Zoom. As we’ve heard aplenty, we’re in the new normal.

 

So many parts have to run smoothly behind-the-scenes for an operation such as Zoom classes to run smoothly. It’s only when something doesn’t work that we perceive a glimpse of the complexity and how many things can go wrong. It’s amazing that it all works most of the time. Like the human body. It’s amazing how many things could go wrong, but most days I take it for granted that things will work well, and chug along happily. But as I age and take notice of the wear and tear, I’m thankful for how this living mass of cells keeps going. For now. Sometimes the wake-up call of a frantic start is a good reminder to be thankful.