Careers in Chemistry

Today I'm looking forward to giving a talk to undergrads about careers in science illustration as part of the Chem Club's Careers in Chemistry series. This drawing is part of my "handy tips for any career" slide.

Expanding Horizons

This weekend a colleague and I will participate in Expanding Your Horizons, a program that encourages young women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. We are running an activity for 11-16 year olds that involves grinding up spinach leaves, extracting the organic molecules, and separating different colored pigment molecules using thin-layer chromatography. We made this handout to show them what they'll be looking at. This is how I imagine it going down. We explain to them that spinach is green because of all of these colorful molecules that are made by spinach plants. They say, "Wow! We see colors because of chemistry? That's awesome. But my physics teacher says that seeing colors is optics and that has to do with physics." "Nope," we say, "Your teacher doesn't know what he or she is talking about. Chemistry is all that matters." "Oh, okay. So do molecules like these make strawberries red, and blueberries blue?" "You bet!" We say. They get excited. The wheels start turning. One of them says, "If molecules make them look a certain way, are there molecules that make them taste a certain way, and feel a certain way?" "Yes, and yes." We say. Another one says, "Are there molecules in my t-shirt that make it this color?" "Yes, synthetic dyes are molecules!". Them: "Is chemistry everywhere?!?!"  Us: "It's everywhere!!!"  Them: "YOU ARE BLOWING OUR MINDS HOW CAN WE LEARN MORE?!?!?!?"   Us: "STUDY CHEMISTRY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Or, something like that.

Modesty prevails and we close in on the finish line

Here's an update to the Jan 31st and Feb 16th posts. Slowly but surely I am managing to eke out enough time to finish up the final illustration asap. Most of this was done in airports, in the air, and at a Day's Inn in San Francisco where we stayed while visiting our new and unfathomably adorable 2-week old niece. Now I just need to finalize and clean it up. We are sooooo close to having the book out.

Low-budget animation on making salt

Untitled from Mary O'Reilly on Vimeo.

I made this quick animation for my chemistry students this week as a lead-in to talking about the Born-Haber cycle, which describes how much energy needs to be put in and how much is released when sodium chloride is made from sodium metal and chlorine gas. The YouTube video I showed of it actually happening is way cooler. I didn't bother trying to compete with that.

 

Wrapping up the week with icons

This week one of my biotech clients tasked me with replacing some icons for their website. They are rollover buttons to trigger the banner images I already made for them, which describe their cancer therapeutics, gold nanoparticle, and stem cell reagents programs. My only instructions were to make them a little more relevant than the ones they have now: a globe with an arrow around it, a desktop computer, and a magnifying glass.

Seeking subtlety in silicon

Today I've just started to digitize the sketch I posted on Jan. 31, since we've decided to go with this illustration for the chapter on selected elements in the chemistry poetry book. I'll stick fairly close to the sketch, but I am going to attempt to tone down the augmentation and make Sili's companion look a little less like she just left the Playboy mansion.

Let them have color!

This particular client is not a fan of color. I think that if there were glasses available that allowed the viewer to see the world in grayscale, she would be first in line to purchase a pair. In black. She was, in fact, the inspiration for the series of eucalyptus tree paintings I did. But her students have spoken, and they want color. So after a very long week I was really looking forward to sitting down and playing around with this. The website has a maroon and gold theme, based on the school colors, so I took the maroon and incorporated its split complement colors in various permutations. For some reason I thought it would be more fun to present some options in this Warhol screenprint-inspired format. If Marilyn Monroe were a cysteine-reactive protein.

Mmmm.... self-promotion

I am putting a full-page ad in the Association of Medical Illustrators' Medical Illustration Source Book, where many of the science illustrators that I admire also advertise. This morning I worked on the layout for it, but I am stuck. Little help, please?

Sili gets the last laugh

Okay, I know I said the chemistry poetry book was done. But now that we've gotten the proofs and realize that some little things will need to be changed, I am considering replacing one of the illustrations. This is just a rough sketch I did today to get some ideas down. The poem, written of course by Mala Radhakrishnan, is about an atom of Silicon named Sili, who is teased relentlessly in school because, being neither metal nor non-metal, he was having trouble fitting in.

"

Though like a metal (it was quite shiny),

Its conductivity was tiny.

Its band gap was too far from little,

And unlike metals, ’twas rather brittle.

 

It clutched electrons way too tightly,

So metals would tease it daily and nightly.

Yet nons would also jeer and nettle,

“You dress and look just like a metal!”


What pain ’cause it did not conform,

No box for it to check on forms.

Few others could know the lonely void

That it lived as a “metalloid.”

"

Of course, he eventually proves to be very useful indeed, and everyone loves him...

"

And nowadays, sili’s still lionized.

Its band gap equals a perfect size

To dope with nearby brothers and sisters

And make computers from transistors.

 

As if its utility has not yet impressed us,

It’s also in quartz and in glass and asbestos.

And silicon’s used in chemical plants

For lubricants and breast implants.

 

Sili, its fourteen electrons so strong,

Proved all of its skeptical peers to be wrong

When it managed to move all the way out to Cali

And founded its very own aptly-named valley.

"

With this illustration I tried to incorporate as many silicon-containing materials as I could, including a computer, a quartz watch, solar panels, a car, glass, bluetooth device, and some, shall we say, augmentation. (Obviously I'm talking about Sili's calves.)

Couldn't help but notice...

I have an illustration project right now that involves a model of the P-glycoprotein, a molecular pump that non-specifically transports small hydrophobic molecules out of cells. It's presumably there to keep toxins out of our cells, but it's also a pain in the neck when therapeutic drugs meant to be delivered to the cell are pumped out of it.  Anyway, I couldn't help but notice that a model of a similar ABC transporter, at a certain angle, looks decidedly bunny-like, so I just had to go with it.

You can make your own molecular bunny! The pdb accession code is 2HYD. I used the molecular visualization program VMD*. Get the surface model into this perspective and highlight residues 10 to 45 for the left ear, 155 to 190 for the right ear, 331 for the nose, 217 to 219 for the left eye, and 326 to 328 for the right eye. I won't lie to you. I made the mouth in photoshop. I don't expect anyone other than myself to waste perfectly good time to make this very creepy looking rabbit, but you just never know.

*Humphrey, W., Dalke, A. and Schulten, K., "VMD - Visual Molecular Dynamics" J. Molec. Graphics 1996, 14.1, 33-38.

Needlestack

Needing a break from making lecture slides now and then, I'm excited to have this project to work on. I first posted a rough(er) version of it here on December 14th. My very good friend has just embarked on her independent academic career in a top-ranked chemistry department, and of course needs some graphics for her website. In her lab they use fancy mass spectrometry techniques to identify enzymes in their active state within complex biological systems - the proverbial needle in the haystack. A needle in a haystack could be found with a strong enough magnet though. Their problem is much much harder.  It's more like finding a needle in a needlestack. Wait, no, that would be easy. How about finding a specific needle in a needlestack? There we go. Let's say they want to find the needle in the needlestack that only sews up toe holes on pink sweatsocks, for example, and of those, only the ones that are currently in business. So they throw in a holey pink sweatsock. They wait for the needle to start sewing, and then pull out the sock. In the illustration above, an enzyme's reactive cysteine (needle) has been trapped upon reacting with (sewing) an iodoacetimide (pink sock). In the interest of full disclosure, I personally have as much experience with activity-based protein profiling as I do with sewing (that being none), so I may not be the most qualified to make this analogy.

Mapping out Chemistry Lectures

Well, it's not chemistry poetry, but if I do my job well enough I should be increasing the market for it. I'm using Apple's Keynote to make these, but was inspired by the Prezi software, which allows you to navigate around a map like this and pan in and out to different locations. I haven't decided exactly how I'll present it, but the non-linearity of it helps me organize my thoughts. Deciding where to draw connections gets me to ask myself questions that I otherwise probably wouldn't. Now I think that "Periodic Table Organization" is taking up way too much real estate, and I should just toss it and put the "properties" node in the middle. Yeesh, that's going to get messy. Okay, back to it. Classes start in a week and a half.

The futility of advertising in my comments section

You may have noticed that people or computers have been using the comments sections of this sketch blog as spots for advertisement. I do appreciate the additional traffic that this could lead to. I imagine that shoppers searching for fur-lined moon boots or the fashions favored by Jon Gosselin of Jon & Kate Plus Eight fame might fortuitously stumble across my website. I imagine them exclaiming, "What's this now? You mean I can get high-quality scientific graphics from an illustrator with a dozen years of research experience? Well for goodness sake, get me to the contact page at once!" However, to be fair, I feel obligated to admit that my readership is actually quite small. To illustrate this, I made the following 3D infographic. This should make it clear that it isn't really worth the time it takes to place these ads here.

Chemistry Poetry Book is Finished!

In the past four days, I've left the apartment for a total of exactly one hour. After lunch yesterday, having hit the rather low point of eating the only thing I could find - Quaker Oats - out of the saucepan I made it in, I decided a trip to the store and a bit of fresh air would be good. The reason for my apparent seclusion is that Mala and I have been putting the finishing touches on the chemistry poetry book so we can send it off for publication soon. It is just amazing how long that can take. But now it's in good shape, and here is one more illustration. Please refrain from telling me if you see a mistake. The following is an excerpt from the poem (by Mala Radhakrishnan) that it illustrates. (Note: The poem never explicitly states which base she is, so I decided to make her lithium hydroxide, thus giving her a somewhat proportional head. Never mind that the indicator strip is nowhere near to scale...)

She looked in the mirror and stared at her face.
It just wasn’t easy being a base.
All that she wanted: a shoulder to cry on
And ways to remove her hydroxide ion.

...

Her molecular orbitals so unattractive,
Her hydroxide ion was not yet reactive.
All of her neighbors, they managed to hate her,
Except for her one friend, an indicator.

This friend would say, “It’s tough knowing you.
Wherever we go, you keep me so blue.

...

'Zyme 'Zine

Years ago while I was living in Cambridge, MA, a philosophy graduate student at Tufts told me that I should start a magazine about enzymes. “You could call it The ‘Zyme ‘Zine.” he said. He had an enormous handlebar moustache and his name was Gabriel Love, which made me think I should hear him out. I was reminded of the ‘zyme ‘zine idea while reading “Art of McSweeney’s”, a wonderful Christmas gift from my brother-in-law and sister-in-law.  But I was too busy to start a magazine then, and I’m too busy now.  I wish someone would do it though. It could be dedicated to the wonder of those amazing proteinaceous catalysts. I’ll volunteer to do the cover designs (see mock-up above), and I could submit a story about the enzyme that got me a Ph.D. – a glycosyltransferase with the unlikely habit of transferring two mannose residues with distinct linkage specificity.  McEnzyme's is not just a play on McSweeney's. McEnzyme is actually the name of a dog that belongs to a brilliant and famous enzymologist who recently asked me, “So this is what you’re doing with your life?”