NYT: "Mexican Cartels Lure Chemistry Students to Make Fentanyl"

Via the New York Times, this story: 

American law enforcement officials also said that many young chemists had been swept up in arrests at Mexican fentanyl labs in recent years. The arrested chemists told the authorities that they had been working on developing precursors and making the drug stronger, according to the officials.

A chemistry professor at a university in Sinaloa State said he knew that some students enrolled in chemistry classes just to become more familiar with skills needed to cook synthetic drugs. The professor, who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals, said he had identified students who fit that profile by their questions and reactions during his lectures.

“Sometimes when I am teaching them synthesis of pharmaceutical drugs, they openly ask me, ‘Hey, professor, when are you teaching us how to synthesize cocaine and other things?’” he said.

...But as the cartels gain greater control of the fentanyl supply chain, U.S. officials say, it will become more difficult for law enforcement in both countries to stop the industrialized production of synthetic opioids in Mexico.

The cartels “know we are now focused on the illicit trafficking of these precursor chemicals around the world,” said Todd Robinson, the State Department’s assistant secretary of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.

Those efforts are driving the cartels “to try to bring this thing in-house,” Mr. Robinson said. “The practical result of that is their ability to more easily and quickly transfer those drugs to the United States.”

That the cartel is hiring chemists and chemistry students isn't news, I suppose, but I do think it is interesting that they are attempting to recruit undergraduate students for this work (especially the practical and economic manufacture of fentanyl precursors.) The cartel seems to have a fairly sophisticated ability to perform chemical manufacturing in Mexico*, so it seems to me that they would not be so naive as to be hiring brand new students into such economically important work for them. My gut feeling tells me that the cartels are consulting more experienced chemists. 

*I can't find the link to the evidence that they've been using catalytic techniques to epimerize their discarded D-methylamphetamine to a mixture that can be re-resolved to the tartrate salt.

Retraction Watch: "Retractions begin for chemist found to have faked data in 42 papers"

Via Retraction Watch, this news: 

A nanotube researcher in Japan has earned 13 retractions, with more to come, after an extensive investigation by the country’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) revealed widespread misconduct in his work. 

AIST’s investigation found Naohiro Kameta, senior principal researcher at the Nanomaterials Research Institute located in AIST’s Ibaraki campus, fabricated and falsified dozens of studies. He was apparently dismissed from his role following the findings. 

The institute first learned of the problems in Kameta’s work in November 2022, according to a translated version of the investigation report. Initially, they looked into five papers, but eventually expanded their scrutiny to 61 articles on which Kameta was the lead or responsible author...

It would be really interesting to understand how the retraction and official governmental sanctions process works for serious scientific misconduct. 

A more potent meth?

An unusually chemistry-heavy article in The Atlantic about methamphetamine: 

Among the drawbacks of the P2P method is that it produces two kinds of methamphetamine. One is known as d-methamphetamine, which is the stuff that makes you high. The other is l-methamphetamine, which makes the heart race but does little to the brain; it is waste product. Most cooks would likely want to get rid of the l-meth if they knew what it was. But separating the two is tricky, beyond the skills of most clandestine chemists. And without doing so, the resulting drug is inferior to ephedrine-based meth. It makes your heart hammer without offering as potent a high.

Bozenko’s sample contained mostly d-methamphetamine. Someone had removed most of the l-meth. “I’ve taken down labs in several continents,” Bozenko told me years later. No one in the criminal world, as far as he and his colleagues knew, had ever figured out how to separate d-meth from l-meth before.

Would be interesting to know how exactly clandestine chemists are performing this resolution, but it looks like it's via the tartrate salt, which is pretty reasonable. This conclusion about this newer meth was interesting and a bit skepticism-inducing: 

Why is P2P meth producing such pronounced symptoms of mental illness in so many people? No one I spoke with knew for sure. One theory is that much of the meth contains residue of toxic chemicals used in its production, or other contaminants. Even traces of certain chemicals, in a relatively pure drug, might be devastating. The sheer number of users is up, too, and the abundance and low price of P2P meth may enable more continual use among them. That, combined with the drug’s potency today, might accelerate the mental deterioration that ephedrine-based meth can also produce, though usually over a period of months or years, not weeks. Meth and opioids (or other drugs) might also interact in particularly toxic ways. I don’t know of any study comparing the behavior of users—or rats for that matter—on meth made with ephedrine versus meth made with P2P. This now seems a crucial national question.

I'm pretty skeptical that there's a major chemical difference between ephedrine-based meth and P2P-based meth, but maybe I'm wrong. It seems to be that "more meth, cheaper" is probably the horses-not-zebras answer, even as there are other, tempting explanations (contaminants, etc). 

Former Eastman Chemist Convicted of Conspiracy to Commit Trade Secret Theft

From the Department of Justice on Thursday, this press release: 

A federal jury in Greeneville, Tennessee, convicted a U.S. citizen today of conspiracy to steal trade secrets, economic espionage and wire fraud.

Following a twelve-day trial, Dr. Xiaorong You, aka Shannon You, 59, of Lansing, Michigan, was convicted of conspiracy to commit trade secret theft, conspiracy to commit economic espionage, possession of stolen trade secrets, economic espionage, and wire fraud. You was originally indicted in February 2019 for trade secret offenses and wire fraud, and was charged in a superseding indictment with  economic espionage and conspiracy to commit economic espionage in August 2020.

According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, You stole valuable trade secrets related to formulations for bisphenol-A-free (BPA-free) coatings for the inside of beverage cans. You was granted access to the trade secrets while working at The Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta, Georgia, and Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, Tennessee. The stolen trade secrets belonged to major chemical and coating companies including Akzo-Nobel, BASF, Dow Chemical, PPG, Toyochem, Sherwin Williams, and Eastman Chemical Company, and cost nearly $120,000,000 to develop.

According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, You stole the trade secrets to set up a new BPA-free coating company in China. You and her Chinese corporate partner, Weihai Jinhong Group, received millions of dollars in Chinese government grants to support the new company (including a Thousand Talents Plan award). Documents related to You’s Thousand Talents Program application were admitted at trial; those documents, and other evidence presented at trial, showed the defendant’s intent to benefit not only Weihai Jinhong Group, but also the governments of China, the Chinese province of Shandong, and the Chinese city of Weihai, as well as her intent to benefit the Chinese Communist Party.

Here's the writeup of her 2019 indictment at C&EN (article by Melody Bomgardner): 

A federal grand jury has indicted an American materials scientist and a Chinese national for stealing trade secrets related to formulas for bisphenol A-free coatings. The technology was developed by several companies and a major customer as part of an effort to replace food and beverage can linings made with BPA-containing epoxies because of concerns about human health effects of BPA....

“Eastman takes protection of its intellectual property seriously and we have controls in place to help prevent and to detect theft of confidential information,” Eastman’s chief legal officer, David A. Goldman, tells C&EN. “Those controls worked in this case, and we have been cooperating with law enforcement in this matter for some time.”

You would have thought that there would be more coverage of the trial, but there really hasn't been, and so we don't have a sense as to the strength of the government's case, other than the fact that Dr. You was convicted. The "Money" aspect of Money Ideology Compromise Ego seems pretty strong here. Will be interesting to see what her sentence turns out to be. 

Good ol' abandonment of chemicals in Illinois

Via the inbox and elsewhere, this sad story in Illinois: 

Lawrence D. Rutledge, 57, of Belleville, Illinois, has been sentenced to five years of federal probation and ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $335,934.87 to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“U.S. EPA”) for clean-up expenses associated with his illegal storage of hazardous waste in St. Clair County, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, Steven D. Weinhoeft, announced today. 

Rutledge pleaded guilty to the charge in July.

In 1997, Rutledge started a business called Advanced Asymmetrics, Inc., to synthesize specialty chemicals for the pharmaceutical industry. The business was located inside a commercial building at 109 South Kossuth Street in Millstadt, Illinois, in close proximity to a residential area and a senior living home. Over time, Rutledge accumulated numerous containers of chemicals and chemical waste at the Millstadt facility. Sometime around 2011, Rutledge stopped paying the county property taxes on the Millstadt facility, and over the next few years, the electrical service and the water service (both water supply and sewer) to the facility were shut off. 

In August 2015, employees of the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (“Illinois EPA”) and the U.S. EPA entered the facility and discovered hundreds of containers with labels indicating the presence of acids, caustics, and other chemicals, as well as hazardous waste. Some of the metal containers had rusted, and crystallization had started to occur on metal surfaces. Some had even fallen over and broken open. Sodium cyanide, which is extremely toxic, was stored within one inch of a container containing acid, presenting the potential formation of cyanide gas. Investigators also discovered a container labelled as a shock-sensitive picric acid, which is highly explosive.

So it's pretty clear that Advanced Asymmetrics did not do well. It's my understanding and broad experience that it takes a lot to get criminally prosecuted by USEPA, so I imagine this is an egregious case. So here's my question for discussion: when companies go bust like this, what happens with the chemicals? Clearly, the organization is financially responsible, but what happens when the company doesn't have any cash? Who pays for Veolia to show up? 

Chemist gets 7 years for poisoning

From the inbox, via the Kingston Whig Standard: 

A researcher in Queen’s University’s chemistry department who admitted two months ago to dosing a fellow chemist with a compound principally used to induce cancers in lab animals was given the equivalent of a seven-year prison sentence on Tuesday. 

Twenty-six-year-old Zijie Wang pleaded guilty in Kingston’s Ontario Court of Justice in late October to administering a noxious substance to a post-doctoral fellow in his research group with intent to endanger the man’s life or cause bodily harm and a related charge of aggravated assault arising from the same circumstances. 

Justice Allan G. Letourneau — after a period of deliberation following sentencing submissions in early November from Wang’s lawyer, Brian Greenspan, and assistant Crown attorney Janet O’Brien — decided the Crown’s recommendation of seven years, minus pretrial custody was the more appropriate term. Accordingly, he gave Wang enhanced credit on the 250 days he’d already spent in pretrial custody, counting it as equivalent to 375 days already served, and sentenced him to a further 2,180 days in prison, or a week and a bit short of six years. 

Justice Letourneau, in his reasons for sentence, which he did not read in open court, was not satisfied that Wang “has sincere remorse.”

Read the whole thing here. It's awful.  

Queen's University poisoning court proceedings continue

From the inbox, another piece on the Queen's University poisoning case: 

He survived an attempted poisoning by his colleague in the chemistry lab at Queen’s University, now he waits, unsure if or when he’ll develop cancer as a result of his exposure to a dangerous chemical compound. 

The victim, a married father of two who, at the time of the attack, was a postdoctoral fellow at Queen’s, knows all about N-nitrosodimethylamine, or NDMA, the poison slipped into his food and drink in January. It’s a compound used to manifest cancer in lab rats that, in sufficient doses, can be deadly to humans. He lived through the agonizing nights of pain and vomiting, but his long-term fate remains clouded in doubt. 

“The tests have not detected cancer, but that doesn’t mean I’m out of harm’s way,” the victim, who asked not to be identified publicly, told a Kingston court on Friday. “The long-term psychological fear is singularly cruel.” 

The victim stood just a few feet from the man who admitted poisoning him and described the devastating fear and uncertainty he has suffered over the past 10 months. He said he recently developed lumps in his chest and is still awaiting new test results. Meanwhile, he can’t bear to tell his parents in China what has happened and he feels estranged from his old friends and his work in the lab.

If my labmate tried to poison me during grad school, I'd have a pretty hard time getting back to my research as well... 

Queen's University grad student poisoned labmate

From the inbox, via the National Post's Nick Faris: 

...Zijie Wang, a 26-year-old graduate student who worked elsewhere in the lab, admitted in a Kingston, Ont., courtroom on Thursday that he had poisoned the researcher in an attempt to harm him, the Kingston Whig-Standard reported. Wang was arrested that last Monday in January after the camera spotted him wearing gloves and wielding a pipette around the unnamed victim’s desk, court heard, the closing act in an apparent campaign to trick the man into ingesting a toxic chemical. 

Wang pleaded guilty on Thursday to administering a noxious thing — namely, the chemical N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), which scientists use to generate cancer in rats for research purposes — to endanger life or cause bodily harm, as well as to a charge of aggravated assault. He’ll be sentenced Nov. 2, a clerk at the Kingston Ontario Court of Justice said...

Other articles here and here. Terribly disturbing - best wishes to the victim.  

The McNaughton story ends: plea deal, deferred sentence

Via Anon105PM, a coda to the Brian McNaughton story - the inevitable plea deal (article at The Chronicle of Higher Education, written by Jack Stripling): 

Brian McNaughton, the former Colorado State University professor who was charged with a felony for fabricating a job offer to secure a pay raise, reached a plea deal this week that will allow his case to be dismissed in a year if he remains law abiding and completes 100 hours of community service. 

Under the agreement, McNaughton pleaded guilty to attempting to influence a public servant, a crime punishable by up to six years in prison. He was granted a deferred sentence, however, making him eligible to withdraw his guilty plea in a year if he complies with the terms of the deal. In addition to community service, McNaughton must complete a “cognitive thinking class.” 

McNaughton declined to comment on the plea deal.

(Read the whole thing here.)

I don't really think that Brian McNaughton deserves prison time, in the sense that the injured party with standing (the taxpayers of Colorado, presumably) probably should reserve prison for those who are most in need of being kept apart from society. But if Brian McNaughton had been a cashier at a grocery store and stolen $5000 from the till, would he have gone to prison? Probably, I dunno.

I can't help but notice something that happens when professors are charged with crimes: the system-as-a-whole (prosecutors, defense attorneys, employers, judges) delivers a result that consistently avoids prison. I have plenty of biases and thoughts about the criminal justice system in America, but the overriding one is this: if we have one set of punishments for those who have money and status, but another for those who do not, we don't have a system that is delivering justice.

The Brian McNaughton story only gets weirder

Readers of the blog will undoubtedly remember the odd case of Brian McNaughton, the Colorado State professor who faked an outside offer letter in order to get a raise. Via The Chronicle of Higher Education's Jack Stripling and Megan Zahneis, an answer to my question: Why did the Larimer County District Attorney go after Professor McNaughton?

Final as it seemed, the separation agreement never envisioned a person like Kyle Strunk. A private investigator and fiscal hawk, he would not rest until McNaughton’s lie was exposed. The website for Flatirons Private Investigations describes Strunk as a retired military intelligence officer who speaks Arabic and German. According to his biography, Strunk maintains a secret security clearance, and his two decades of sleuthing have sent him to the Middle East, Oceania, and Asia.  

But the assignment that has most animated Strunk of late started closer to home, near his Broomfield, Colo., headquarters. In Strunk’s telling, Stacey McNaughton first contacted him to ask if the private investigator would surveil her ex-husband when their children were visiting him in Fort Collins. Strunk says he never did that particular snooping. But he took a keen interest in what he learned about Brian McNaughton, a public-university professor who had defrauded the taxpayers of Colorado and seemed to have gotten away with it. 

This was just the sort of thing that got a rise out of Strunk and his buddies, a group known as the Colorado Society of Private Investigators. 

“We investigate public corruption,” Strunk says, “and this kind of met that test.”
This past spring, Strunk sent a records request to Colorado State for correspondence related to McNaughton. What he found angered him. This wasn’t some employment dispute that could be quietly worked out by lawyers, he concluded; it was felony forgery. But that crime, Strunk was convinced, had been swept under the rug by the university. 

The records Strunk obtained, including a recorded phone call, showed that Jason Dobbins, a detective with the university police, believed he had an “open and shut” case of identity theft and forgery against McNaughton. But the police appeared to sit on the case for 10 months, during which time McNaughton negotiated with the university as if the criminal matter had been shelved. 

It was only after Strunk and others mounted a campaign, pressuring public officials to bring the hammer down on McNaughton, that the university police referred the case to the Larimer County district attorney. 

“The whole state of Colorado,” Strunk says, “was flooded with letters saying, ‘This person did this; why aren’t you doing anything about it?’ ”

So that explains it: Professor McNaughton had the bad luck of having someone find out about his forgery, and that person implemented a campaign of pressure on the parties that could do something: the university police and the Larimer County DA.  

Former CSU professor McNaughton charged by Larimer County on July 2

A couple of further details about the Brian McNaughton case at Colorado State (article by Nick Coltrain of the Fort Collins Coloradoan) (note that Anon0831AM had this story on July 13):

In July 2017, Colorado State University chemistry professor Brian McNaughton confessed to forging an offer letter and using it as leverage to secure a $5,000 raise and better investment in his lab from the university. 

After initially pushing for him to resign shortly after discovering the forgery, CSU decided to let him stay on staff for almost another year, enough time to land a job at the University of Delaware. 

The University of Delaware has since rescinded its job offer to McNaughton and scrubbed him from its faculty website, where he had been listed as recently as Wednesday morning, and Larimer County has charged him with attempting to influence a public servant, a Class 4 felony. 

In 2017, CSU received an anonymous letter accusing McNaughton of forging the offer letter. On June 29 of that year, and two years after McNaughton delivered the forged offer letter, CSU Vice Provost Dan Bush sought to establish its veracity.... 

...McNaughton was charged with the felony July 2. Shortly after, media reports emerged. The University of Delaware rescinded its offer to McNaughton on July 9, just a couple weeks before his scheduled start day there.\

I'm more than a little bit flummoxed that the Larimer County DA is following through with this felony charge, but something tells me that his attorney will manage to have Dr. McNaughton avoid jail time. (According to this Colorado criminal defense attorney blogpost, the maximum punishment is 2-6 years, with a $2000-$500000 fine.) I'd love to know who (either the DA or Colorado State University) is the driving force for pressing charges - it just seems so unusual. 

Colorado State biochemistry professor fakes job offer, gets caught

Via Twitter and Denver's local CBS station, quite the story out of Colorado State University (article by Mark Ackerman)

FORT COLLINS, Colo. (CBS4) – A former professor at Colorado State University is facing a felony charge for fabricating an outside job offer to improve his status at CSU. Professor Brian McNaughton, 40, ran the McNaughton Lab, a biochemistry research group at CSU. 

He is now charged with attempt to influence a public official, for presenting his employers with a fictitious offer letter from the University of Minnesota in order to get more money from CSU. 

The falsification was determined through a series of emails between leaders of the two schools. CBS4 obtained the conversations through a Colorado Open Records Act Request. 

“It is my understanding this letter is simply a fake,” wrote Dr. Dan Bush, Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at CSU. “Needless to say we are shocked and dismayed that one of our faculty would fabricate such a letter to advance the status at CSU.” “Quite shocking indeed!” wrote Tom Hays, Professor at University of Minnesota. “I can confirm that I did not write, nor sign an offer letter to Brian McNaughton during my interim term (2014-2015) as Dean of College of Biological Sciences at the University of Minnesota.”

McNaughton resigned his position at CSU. In a letter to the Dean, McNaughton apologized for an “enormous mistake.” He wrote that he got the idea to fake the outside offer from colleagues. 

“It was openly stated that multiple former CSU faculty (now either dead or no longer affiliated with CSU) lied about an outside offer as a mechanism to improve their salary,” McNaughton wrote. “I’m not excusing it, and I’m not excusing my own actions, but these factors are real.”

From conversations with professors at research universities, I have heard departments basically demand an outside offer before considering a pay raise. That said, I think this is reasonably common in many industries (particularly financially-related industries?). I imagine that the demanded raises are relatively large (greater than 10%?)

I do think it is interesting that this ultimately got caught - I wonder when that happened? I suspect that non-email conversations were how this was uncovered, i.e. one department member saying to a friend in the other one, "say, I heard you guys made Prof. McNaughton an offer?" and the response was "uh, what offer?

It's also interesting that Prof. McNaughton claims that faking outside offers was common - I would love to know the backstory on that claim as well...

UPDATE: Anon838 notes The Chronicle of Higher Education has McNaughton's letter. Might offer some insight into his state of mind.

Also, the article makes a vague comment about felony charges. Who is pressing charges? The university? 

ArkPharm proprietors arrested for fentanyl distribution

Via Matthew Katcher, this story by Rick Kambic of the Pioneer Press (at the Chicago Tribune website)

Two suburban residents appeared in federal court Thursday morning on charges related to the sale of fentanyl and fentanyl precursors over the internet using unlicensed businesses. 

Wei Xu, 52, who goes by the alias “Scarlett Hsu,” lives in Vernon Hills and operated a business known as 1717 CheMall Corp. from a warehouse at 222 Terrace Drive, Mundelein, according to a news release from the U.S. attorney’s office. 

A multi-jurisdictional task force led by the Drug Enforcement Administration raided 1717 CheMall Corp. late Wednesday. Employees of neighboring businesses posted photos of the activity on social media, but the U.S. attorney’s office was unable to disclose what was recovered from the warehouse. 

Xu was charged with one count of knowingly distributing a controlled substance. Prosecutors said she used the company’s website to sell “fentanyl and other controlled substances” from the site’s “estore.” 

Federal prosecutors say Liangfu “Larry” Huang, 53, of Northbrook, ran a business known as Ark Pharm Inc., which operated from a warehouse at 1840 Industrial Drive, Libertyville, until recently moving to 3860 N. Ventura Drive, Arlington Heights, according to the federal complaint. 

Also via Matthew, check out the website.

Looks like you can't buy fentanyl "for laboratory purposes only" and escape the long arm of the law. [Nods] Good to know. 

University of Minnesota biochemistry professor investigated for sexual harassment

It's not every day that you read this in the pages of a local alternative weekly (by Micah Emmel-Duke; via City Pages, the alt-weekly for the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.): 

...“When are we going to have sex?” 

This is how University of Minnesota biochemistry professor Gianluigi Veglia often talked to and about the students and employees in his laboratory, according to two sexual misconduct investigations. His name is well known in his field. His curriculum vitae is 39 honor-filled pages long and meticulously lists the millions of dollars in grant funding he’s received through the years. He has taught at the U of M, which has shared in the bounty of his grant money, since 2000. 

“Take off your shirt so I can just see a little.” 

Accusers and witnesses detail many other instances of misconduct. Among the allegations: He told lab members he only hired them for their looks; he suggested women’s presentations would be more effective if they dressed in more revealing clothing; he told his female lab members (whom he frequently called “Veglia chicks”) to flirt with prospective students to entice them to join the lab; he even threatened to withhold Ph.D.s if complaints were filed. 

Veglia told investigators he simply hadn’t made many of these comments. Others, he said, were misinterpreted jokes or the vengeful lies of disgruntled and unsuccessful students. He declined to comment for this story. 

...Following the investigation, he was given typical sanctions, like attending sexual harassment training and meeting with his boss. A bigger blow was his removal as the director of the university’s Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Center and the accompanying annual salary bonus of $10,000. 

Other sanctions sound tough but are not as harsh as they might seem. 

For example, Veglia isn’t allowed to supervise undergraduate students through the 2019-20 school year and was also removed from the two graduate programs he taught in, with his readmission to the programs contingent on his conduct, including “no reports of sexual harassment.” 

Veglia can still do research with graduate students and others, which means his federal funding will keep flowing into the school....

Here's the official investigation (what you can read, anyway). It's pretty remarkable to me that he wasn't fired. The miracles of tenure...

(The author of the piece is willing to be contacted about other instances of sexual harassment in the sciences, especially in Minnesota. micah.emmel.duke@gmail.com; Signal: 612-293-5088)

Oh dear

For me, it's hard to read this Reddit post without both a bit of recognition from my past, as well as the desire to tell OP to run away quickly...: 

I've just taken over a 'lab', AKA the filthy garage that makes numbers, and want to turn it into a Lab. Halp!

I've just got a job at a waste oil processing plant. It's tiny. 6 people work here in total, with only myself (the new Site Chemist) and one other using the lab. 

Currently, the lab is a tiny cupboard containing an old XRF, KF, balance and a couple of spectrometers. Everything is coated in oil. The 'test methods' are stored in the plant guy's head, and there is basically nothing written down regarding SOPs, methods, calibrations, safety etc. 

As the site chemist, I've been given this cupboard and also the garage that contains the cupboard to turn into a fully functional, legitimate lab. Naturally, the first thing I did was think about safety and, accordingly, I asked the plant guy to stop washing sample jars out using chloroform and disposable nitrile gloves (no, we don't have a fume hood). 

What next? Of course, this is now my job and I do in fact have a plan, but do any of you guys have any tips on setting up a 'new' lab? Any resources I will find useful? I'd just like to make sure I don't miss anything out regarding safety, good practice etc. 

e: For info, I'm also responsible for health and safety for the whole site as well as environmental monitoring of everything we dump. Just trying to get a handle on the lab, which is what I know best, before I start making sweeping changes to everyone else's work areas. The lab is a mess because there was no chemist here before now.

 Yikes, this would not be a good situation to be in...

Ahhhh, price fixing

Also in this week's C&EN, the remarkable ways that companies manage to boost their profits (article by Marc Reisch)  

...Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC), which serves 475,000 Maryland customers just outside of Washington, D.C., filed suit on Oct. 19 in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, charging that seven alum makers—including General Chemical, Chemtrade Chemicals, Geo Specialty Chemicals, and Kemira—rigged bids and allocated customers among themselves between 1997 and 2011. 

WSSC says the scheme raised prices it and other U.S. utilities paid for alum through 2016. At least 68 other civil suits based on alum price-rigging allegations have been filed in federal court to recoup costs, WSSC says. Others suing alum makers include the Illinois-American Water Co., which filed its suit in April. In June, the cities of Baltimore and Richmond, Va., which supply water to their residents, also filed suits. 

WSSC is asking the firms named in its suit for $5 million in compensatory damages and additional damage to be determined in a trial. 

The WSSC and other suits follow the U.S. Department of Justice revelation in late 2015 of the price-fixing scheme. At that time, DOJ announced that Frank A. Reichl, a General Chemical sales executive, had pleaded guilty for his role in the scheme. As part of a deal with the government, he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors investigating the conspiracy...

Whenever I think of price fixing cases, I can't help but think about that goofy ADM lysine case. Who knew that the plan to preserve profits extended to alum?  

How did the Kobe Steel faking happen?

Doubtless you've heard about this, but in case you haven't, via the New York Times (article by Jonathan Soble and Neal E. Boudette) 

TOKYO — Big manufacturers of cars, aircraft and bullet trains have long relied on Kobe Steel to provide raw materials for their products, making the steel maker a crucial, if largely invisible, pillar of the Japanese economy. 

Now, Kobe Steel has acknowledged falsifying data about the quality of aluminum and copper it sold, setting off a scandal that is reverberating through the global supply chain and casting a new shadow over the country’s reputation for precision manufacturing... 

...Kobe Steel said on Sunday that employees at four of its factories had altered inspection certificates on aluminum and copper products from September 2016 to August this year. The changes, it said, made it look as if the products met manufacturing specifications required by customers — including for vital qualities like tensile strength, a measure of material’s ability to withstand a load without breaking when being stretched — when they did not. 

On Wednesday, the company said it was investigating possible data falsification involving another product, powdered steel, which is used mostly to make gears. The company said the powdered steel it was examining had been sold to one customer it did not name...

So here's what I want to know - how the heck was this not caught by the customers? Is metallurgy different than chemistry? Did customers only rely on Kobe Steel's testing? (Do they not have their own QC labs?) Man, that's remarkable if so.

(Of course, how often did you QC stuff from Aldrich in grad school? Rarely, if ever, for me.) 

Resolved: lying on your resume is dumb

From Twitter, a really good story from UC-Irvine chemistry professor Jenny Yang, told in a number of tweets: 

Crazy thing happened. A Prof. emailed me for a personal reference after interviewing someone for a job that seemed like a great fit. 

Only problem? I had never heard of this person. They said they worked in my lab from 2013-2014, year I started. Unlikely I'd forget someone. 

Just in case, I asked everyone that had been in the lab that year if they remembered this person. They did not. They checked notebooks too. 

One of my students TA'd this person but I never taught this person. Looking back at my emails, this person had asked if they could do research in my lab but I said I had no space.  

Anyway I told the Prof. this person never worked n my lab. Prof emails me the next week. 

Says this person listed the wrong name on CV. They worked for a Jenny Yeng that was only at UCI for 1 year, ran a small group, and somehow does the same research as me. I said there is no such person.  

Prof. said they talked to this 'Jenny Yeng' on the phone.  

Said glowing things about the candidate. 

So this person lies on their CV. Gets caught. Makes up a fictional person to serve as a reference.  

And it cost them a job. I sure hope they learn a lesson and decide to revise their CV and be honest.

I don't have much to say about this, other than the obvious: eventually, lies get caught.

How to end up in jail for doing chemistry: do it in your apartment

Via random clickings on Twitter, the case of Chase Coble, a Kansas community college chemistry student who finds himself on the business end of a 66 month prison sentence for aggravated arson (article by John Green of The Hutchinson News): 

A judge on Friday sentenced the Hutchinson college student convicted of aggravated arson for starting a fire while conducting chemical experiments in his Plaza Towers apartment to serve more than five years in prison. 

District Judge Trish Rose denied a defense motion to grant Chase Coble probation in the case, or to cut his sentence to just four years, stating the grounds the defense offered were insufficient to grant a sentencing departure.

In case you were wondering, he was hit with the charge of aggravated arson because the apartment building he was doing the experiment in was occupied. It's interesting to read the affidavit from the local police department and their concerns about what he was up to (from another Hutchinson News article):

Among chemicals in the apartment were bags of ammonia, potassium permanganate, saltpeter, sulfur, sodium EDTA, toluene, bleach, methyl ethyl ketone, acetone, camping fuel, vinegar, charcoal, and muriatic, hydrochloric and sulfuric acid. 

All those items, ATF Agent Neal Tierney, a certified explosives specialist, advised investigators, can be used to make homemade explosives.

(A bag of ammonia?) Bizarrely, the student was doing some kind of research project:

“He said he was trying to bond metal and plastic components to create a new type of metallic/plastic material for conductivity in computer components,” the affidavit stated.

What a strange story. It's a shame that he could not have found his way to a local research university laboratory rather than risking life and property running experiments in his apartment.

(Surely home chemists on the interwebz have some advice as to how to avoid Mr. Coble's fate and still conduct chemical experiments in their residence?) 

A proud moment for chemistry students everywhere

From English-language German news outlet thelocal.de, an all-too-common story: 

A 28-year-old student at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich used the laboratory to analyse drugs for two dealers in return for some cocaine. 

An unnamed student at the university appeared before court on Monday after giving in to stress and resorting to helping drug dealers with their business.

Two pushers wanted to know how pure their product was, so they recruited a 28-year-old student to be their Heisenberg and test it for them. They posted cocaine and crystal meth to the student, and he brought it to the Grosshadern Klinikum - LMU’s hospital and research centre and part of the largest hospital complex in Munich. 

There he proceeded to test the drugs to determine the potency of the active ingredients.The student was surprised that he was in trouble and told the court that he didn’t know he was guilty of any offence. 

The Chemistry student also defended himself to the Munich court by saying that his tests failed to produce anything meaningful. “I made up the results,” he said. 

As a reward for his 'findings', the dealers gave the student between two and four grams of cocaine.

This sounds like some sort of bizarre comedy movie, especially when the dealer's name was "Shiny Flakes" (HT to Lisa Jarvis for this last detail.)

(It is interesting to me how this thing always seems to involve students and not chemistry professionals - a problem of youth, or do professional chemists want too much money to ply their trade illegally?)