Enthralling Odors

It's not my intention to carry the comment by my fellow Estonian Jaan Pesti to more volatile levels, but we all have heard lecture titles and seen T-shirts that say "Chemistry Stinks" (C&EN, Nov. 27, 2006, page 2). In fact, many of us were completely enthralled by the odors we experienced in the qualitative organic lab and could, without NMR or high-resolution mass spectrometry, identify many reasonably volatile compounds handed to us as unknowns with just a whiff past the nose.

The acknowledgement in the cited paper to the hog raiser for providing a sample of liquid swine manure also prompts my reaction: In today's literature, we do not see innovative and intriguing phrases describing what made an experiment memorable or identifying an obscure location for the generation of a great idea. As an example of the former, I cite the following: "Evans boldly put 50 atm of ethylene ... in a cell with 25 atm of O₂. The apparatus subsequently blew up, but luckily not before he obtained the spectra shown in Figure 8" (Chem. Rev. 1969, 69, 639).

By the way, for anyone raised on a farm, any kind of manure smell is an unnoticeable breeze.

Victor Snieckus
Kingston, Ontario