Flavors and Fragrances--How They Can Manipulate Us

I well remember the day I was going through a buffet line with my former supervisor, Percy. As we passed each entree, I told him the chemical name of the predominant flavoring or coloring in each food. When we got to those fake "crab" legs, with that red coloring on top, I told Percy that it wasn't crab at all, but a gelatinized cod that was colored with some red dye number 5. The woman ahead of us in line apparently had enough and asked me to stop talking. She wanted to enjoy her lunch. I assured her that, if the crab legs were real crab, the red color is not a dye, but a potent, highly-colored toxin. However, it was in low concentration, so it wouldn't put her into anaphylactic shock. I had the best of intentions.

My first career job as a chemist was in flavors and fragrances. I worked for a company that made natural and unnatural chemicals for foods and fragrances. This is a fascinating area of study, especially when I began to realize that chemicals are what stimulate our senses of taste and smell.

Our sense of smell depends upon air-borne molecules that are emitted by some source. How do molecules become air-borne? There are a couple ways. The principal way molecules become airborne is when they evaporate. Smaller molecules can just float right into the air. This should be nothing surprising. Water on the sidewalk after a rain will “disappear” due to evaporation. When you smell fresh fruit, like an orange, the fragrance components in the orange evaporate from the peel, and you can smell the molecules floating in the air.

Another way molecules become air-borne is when they are associated with small particles, such as dust or smoke. Cigarette smoke, for example, consists of microscopic particles. When you take in smoke from a cigarette or if you breathe second-hand smoke, you breathe in the particulates containing odor molecules. Generally speaking, breathing particulates, such as smoke or the air on a hazy day, is unhealthy. Particulates find their way into our lungs and are not easily expelled.

I believe that most smells we encounter are evaporated molecules. Although we associate smells with emotions such as enjoyment, feeling secure, or uncomfortable, smells are really much, much more than a way of affecting us.

For example, consider a fragrant rose. The principal chemical in that fragrance is a fairly simple one: phenethyl alcohol (pronounced: fen’-eth-il al’-co-hol). This is a molecule with eight carbons, one oxygen, and a bunch of hydrogen atoms. It almost completely captures the rose fragrance, right down to that slightly cloying note that you smell a few seconds into the experience. Roses have the machinery to make that chemical. Why would a rose want to make phenethyl alcohol? Darwin's Theory of Evolution has an answer. The phenethyl alcohol attracts beneficial insects, such as bees. Bees love the sweetness of roses and spend a good deal of time around them. In their rapture, the bees gather some pollen on their bodies and then fly off to another rose bush to get raptured all over again. The bees also collect some nectar for their honey manufacturing at the nest. So, it’s a natural win-win situation.

Nature has a very different way of “thinking” about a rose fragrance. Nature doesn’t really “care” if you enjoy the fragrance of her flower. “Enjoyment” may not even be in her vocabulary. I will tell you a word that is in her vocabulary: Information. The phenethyl alcohol in the rose is, to Nature, anyway, an information molecule. When the rose emits that fragrance, it’s say to the whole world: “Hey, all you bees and other beneficial insects out there, here I am. Just home in on my phenthyl alcohol and you will find me. Take my pollen and propagate me and my species.”

That phenethyl alcohol is also an information molecule to us humans. When we walk by a rose garden and take in that fragrance, a little voice in our heads says: “Wow! That smells so good! But, I know what I’m smelling just doesn’t smell good, I’m smelling an information molecule. It tells me that there is a rose garden nearby. That’s because the phenethyl alcohol I’m smelling right now can only come from one thing, a rose plant. It makes me relax and think calm, peaceful thoughts. I wonder if I can take one of those roses with me so I can smell it all day in my house.” Well, that’s what my little voice says.

But, let’s take it further. Look at any garden center and you will see a huge variety of roses that you can purchase and plant in your yard. Somebody decided that lots of people would want to smell that fragrance, so, they took roots and saplings from a really nice-smelling rose plant and multiplied that plant all over the world. Now, more than any rose plant in the world, the continued existence of our rose plant is assured, thanks to us humans who fell for phenthyl alcohol and the information it conveys. And, it’s all because roses emit the information molecule phenthyl alcohol. Our rose will survive longer than you or me. I wish I emitted some phenthyl alcohol, then maybe somebody would find a way to keep me around longer. Then again, I would be very attractive to bees and, for humans, that’s a down side. I suppose I will have to find another way to survive.

Speaking of surviving, roses may enjoy a visit from a bee, but, its thorns certainly discourage visits from other creatures attracted by its smell, such as deer. What creature wants thorns lodged in their gums?

Flavors and fragrances are very powerful chemicals that affect us emotionally. They can stir our memories, make us feel good, or make us feel uncomfortable. In future blogs, I will describe more of the myriad ways they influence us.

Nicotine--Where It Comes From, Where It Goes

Did you ever wonder why cigarettes have nicotine? Did you ever wonder what nicotine is?

Nicotine is a chemical compound. A chemical compound is simply a bonded collection of atoms. The atoms are bonded, or held together, mainly by electrostatic forces: positive and negative charges associated with the atoms attracting each other. A single unit of a chemical compound is a molecule. If you have a bottle of the same molecules, like nicotine molecules, you have a chemical substance. Bottles of nicotine are fairly common in chemistry laboratories. Retail price for about a pint of the stuff is around $800. The discounted price is probably around half or less.

Nicotine is in the class of alkaloids. Simply stated, alkaloids are molecules that contain the element nitrogen. In the good, old days, when our analytical methods were crude, chemists would identify alkaloids by tasting them. If they were bitter tasting, we had an alkaloid. Quinine, the stuff in the tonic water you flavor your drinks with, is an alkaloid, one of the most bitter-tasting alkaloids known. For some reason, alkaloids tend to have powerful biological effects, besides bitter taste. Some of the better-known alkaloids, such as cocaine, morphine, and ephedrine are examples. Most alkaloid names have the suffix “-ine.” When I see a chemical name ending with “-ine,” I know it’s an alkaloid.

So, why is there so much nicotine in tobacco? Is it there to get us addicted? Probably not! Nicotine is one in a class of defense chemicals. It's a poison. It's poisonous to humans, and, to a lot of insects. Consider, if the tobacco plant leaves a bad taste in an insect's mouth, or makes it sick, the insect will look for something more palatable. Thus, the tobacco plant survives because insects avoid it. If only humans were as intelligent as insects sometimes. Why are humans so attracted to poisons like nicotine or alcohol (yes, alcohol is a poison, my friends, stay tuned for a blog on that)? So, even though insects are smart enough to avoid the toxic effects of nicotine, smokers aren’t. But, before it poisons us, it addicts us.

The nicotine in tobacco is a natural component of the plant, just like the fragrance of a rose is a natural component for the rose plant. Nobody has to add nicotine to tobacco leaves, it's already there. Your average tobacco leaves have about 3% nicotine. That means, if you have 100 pounds of tobacco leaves, you have 3 pounds of nicotine spread out in the leaves.

Our good friends at the Brown & Williamson, a major tobacco company, decided that 3% nicotine was not enough in their tobacco leaves. So, in the 1970s, they cultivated a special variety of tobacco called Y1, which contains up to 6% nicotine. No wonder the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started an investigation to see if Brown & Williamson was manipulating nicotine levels to addict even more smokers. The tobacco companies also tried the other direction by making the “Lights” line, with reduced nicotine. The nicotine can be extracted away from tobacco using a process called supercritical carbon dioxide extraction.” Yes, that’s the same carbon dioxide at the center of the greenhouse gas/global warming discussion. Anyway, after the tobacco is extracted and has reduced nicotine content, the cigarette companies make their “Lights” line. And, of course, they have a whole bunch of nicotine from all that tobacco they extracted.

Did you ever wonder what the tobacco companies do with all that nicotine they extract from tobacco when they make those low-nicotine cigarettes? They sell it as an insecticide. The boll weevil that attacks cotton cannot survive exposure to nicotine. So, the cotton is saved. It is harvested and converted into all sorts of fabrics, like the fabric used for shirts. The fabric goes to a garment manufacturer to make shirts for you to buy.

So, you have your cotton shirts and smokers have their low-tar, low-nicotine smokes. Next time you see somebody ask for a carton of Marlboro Lights at the open-all-night convenience store, thank them for your shirt.

Chemistry, chemicals, molecules, nicotine, extractions are not easy concepts. I know I dumped a lot of technical stuff on you. If you want to know more about this fascinating area, please Google the terms on your browser. There is a lot of information out there, the more you read, the better your comprehension.

What's with NASA and those Rockets?

I've been around long enough to remember staring at the family's black and white TV displaying a smoking rocket for hour after hour, listening to some announcer trying to fill up that time explaining NASA nonsense at us. There were countdowns, aborted countdowns, countdowns that were holding at "T minus 6 seconds," and adding time to the clock, like the countdown was some sort of football game and the officials had to put some time on the clock.

All we wanted was to see a huge plume of exhaust shoot out of the bottom of the rocket, hear that loud thundering noise as the rocket, with three totally helpless guys, gets flung into space, or at least real high. After a couple decades, rocket launches weren't that inspirational anymore, and today we rarely see a launch on TV. But, rocket launches are still problematical, dependent on so many factors, and incredibly resource intensive. I'd like to address the whole resource thing.

It's not easy to propel a rocket into space. To get into orbit, you have to accelerate to about 18,000 mph. To escape the pull of the earth's gravity to go someplace else, like the moon or Mars, you have to achieve 25,000 mph. This is a huge job for any contraption NASA designs. And then, there's the energy required. You have to burn tons and tons of fuel to achieve these speeds. You need armies of engineers and support people, and vehicle construction facilities, and on and on and on. NASA's budget for 2009 was $17.2 billion. I guess when you compare that number with the sub-prime bailout, it's a bargain. But, look what it pays for. We have satellites, an international space station, a skateboard-like thing that rolled around on Mars, and some probes, and a few more humans in space, risking their lives to float around in free-fall.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of it. But, any forward-looking, visionary type, like myself, would take a look at the NASA program and ask: What's wrong with this picture? How are we going to truly explore space, like our solar system, our galaxy, and beyond, if we can't get a human past the moon? I don't know about you, but the thought is pretty demoralizing.

As much as we deny it, if we simply abide by Sir Isaac Newton's vision, we truly are alone, separated by vast distances of space and time from any other planet, star, or galaxy. But, we want to get out there something awful. Look at all the movies and TV shows about warp speed, alien cultures, and teletransportation. Well, my friends, right now that's nothing but a bunch of plot devices. Today, if we want to visit Mars, forget it! In Star Trek, if somebody wants to visit Andromeda, hell, just point the Enterprise in its general direction, and in a few hours at warp speed, we are there, having bar brawls with the Andromedans. If you miss by a few parsecs, no problemmo, just make a course correction, and you are there.

I don't know about you, but I don't know anybody who has a warp engine, dilithium crystals, or can fold space. Trouble is, if we don't find another way of getting from point A to point B besides using rockets and space modules, we are going to flash in and out of existence on Spaceship Earth, and nobody will be the wiser, at least nobody on Andromeda.

A while back, I really got concerned about this and wrote a letter to Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer who consults for NASA. I asked him if anybody was working on anything besides the big rocket approach to space travel, he actually wrote back to say that he wasn't aware of such an effort. Later on, NASA did admit to having a small section devoted to "Alternative Propulsion Technologies." Imagine my relief.

Bottom line, from where I sit, forget the rockets. Anybody can see that they can only take you so far. Sure you can throw a bunch of sattelites in orbit, but, getting free of the earth's gravity just ain't gonna cut it.

I do believe that there are alternatives to rockets. I believe there are ways of getting from Point A to Point B, even if they are separated by light years, and I believe I have some very rational, practical thoughts on how to go about accomplishing this. I'm not going into specifics here, because I'd like to bring some of my ideas to fruition, but I'd like to leave you with a question.

What is gravity?

Consider this: Although we know how gravity behaves, and we can predict how one object of a given mass can influence another object from a distance, we don't know what it truly is. For example, the sun exerts such a powerful gravitational field, that it actually holds the earth in orbit. It does this from a distance of about 93 million miles, give or take. Just how does the sun hold the earth; which is hurtling around the sun at over 33,000 mph from flying out into space? Nobody knows.

See, not even the most intelligent physicist truly knows what gravity is. Not even Einstein. Old Al had some ideas about "gravity waves," but, that doesn't explain gravity, does it? My point is that there are some fundamental things going on, things that directly affect us, and we don't know what they are, we don't know what causes them, and we sure as hell don't know how to influence them. Other things we don't really have a good bead on: light and matter come to mind, we don't know what those are, either. We do have a very good idea about what they do.

So, when it comes to understanding our world, when we consider the most fundamental forces around us, we haven't a clue. Any scientist will tell you that we can understand anything using the Scientific Method. However, with all the resources at our disposal, we don't get gravity and other forces. The scientist in me says this: We aren't seeing the whole picture. If we saw the "Big Picture" we might begin to understand some of these fundamental concepts.

There's a story I'm fond of: It's nighttime and Bert is standing under a street lamp, apparently looking for something. Ernie sees Bert, walks up to him and says: "Hey Bert, what are you looking for?"

Ernie replies: "My wallet, I lost my wallet."

Bert inquires: "Where you do you think you lost it?

Ernie points off into the darkness: "Over there someplace, I think."

"So, if you lost your wallet over there, why are you looking here?"

Ernie looks at him like he's from Mars: "I'm looking for my wallet here because the light is much better here than over there."

Is it possible that we are only looking for our answers where the light is best?