I’ve been teaching biochemistry for more than two decades, and while the progress in the field over this period has been extraordinary, I continue to be astounded by what scientists were able to accomplish with the limited tools available to them in the era before molecular genetics and genomics. Recently while searching for ideas* for a writing assignment related to protein function, I was inspired to read Linus Pauling and coworkers’ groundbreaking 1949 Science paper reporting on their study of the molecular basis of sickle cell disease (SCD). While the molecular and genetic basis of SCD are now well-established—to the extent that they are literal textbook examples—I was unfamiliar with the historic origins of Pauling’s discovery, and I felt an almost-fanatic appreciation while reading it.

I was, however, a bit taken aback when, in the very first paragraph, I came across the term “American Negroes” being used to describe a population in which SCD was particularly prevalent. Almost immediately, I began to contemplate why I should have such a feeling. After all, the term was in common use at the time.

I realized that only in the last several years have I become introspective about my own biases and prejudices, beginning to question even the idea of race. And if I planned to assign this paper as required reading for my students, I felt a need to say something about the subject. So I spent a Sunday afternoon composing the brief statement that follows, and I included it in the description of the assignment and writing prompt. Here it is, exactly as I presented it to my students.

A note about race and racism in science from Dr. Garoutte

Race is a social construct that has no biological basis. You will surely notice that the 1949 paper makes use of terminology regarding race that seems outdated or perhaps even offensive to readers over 70 years later. As the National Museum of African American History and Culture states (4):

The term “race,” used infrequently before the 1500s, was used to identify groups of people with a kinship or group connection. The modern-day use of the term “race” is a human invention.

And on another page, the NMAAHC also recognizes that although “race does not biologically exist, yet how we identify with race is so powerful, it influences our experiences and shapes our lives. (1) “One of those ways is how our society chooses to refer to groups of individuals who identify or are identified as belonging to a particular race. Furthermore, as Tom Smith stated in 1992: 

Labels play an important role in defining groups and individuals who belong to the groups. This has been especially true for racial and ethnic groups in general and for Blacks in particular. Over the past century the standard term for Blacks has shifted from “Colored” to “Negro” to “Black” and now perhaps to “African American. (6)

The US has conducted a census every 10 years since 1790. The census in year 1900 was the fist to use the term “negro,” but only in the instructions for census takers. The Pew Research Institute notes, “In 1900, there were no specified categories on the census listing form, but the instructions called for enumerators to list “W” for white, “B” for “black (or negro or negro descent)…” and so on. (3)

According to USAFacts, “Negro” was added as a category in 1940. They further note (8):

For free people, the 1850 edition offered three “color” options on the census for free people: “White, black, or mulatto.” Census instructions provided no guidance on how Native Americans living under US jurisdiction would be counted. “Mulatto”, meaning someone of mixed white and Black ancestry, would be on the census through 1920…. The 1900 census was… the first to count all Native Americans, both on reservations and in the general population…. [In 1940,] Black Americans were coded as “Negro,” the first time that term was used as a racial category in the census. Censuses used the term… until 2010, sometimes combined with the terms “Black” and “African American.” The 2020 census offered Black and white Americans the opportunity to write in their ethnic origins for the first time. 

Even the famed author and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a letter in 1928 in which he used the tern “Negro”  to refer to himself and others. He wrote (7):

“English,” “French,” “German,” “White,” “Jew,” Nordic” nor “Anglo-Saxon”… were all at first nicknames, misnomers, accidents, grown eventually to conventional habits and achieving accuracy because, and simply because, wide and continued usage rendered them accurate. In this sense, “Negro” is quite as accurate….

The term continued to be used on the US census for decades. The 2020 census was the first since 1940 to not include “Negro” as a category (8).

Science is not immune to racism, and indeed, has been (and continues to be) used to defend and sometimes even create the very idea of race. Our current understanding of race evolved in western Europe, along with the invention of modern western science and the Age of Reason. The Science History Institute’s Distillations podcast released a ten-part series in 2023 entitled Innate: How Science Invented the Myth of Race (5). Here is just one quote, from the first episode:

As Europeans colonized the globe, they encountered countless new things and became obsessed with categorizing them. They even made a whole new field of science taxonomy. And the father of taxonomy, the guy responsible for how we see the whole natural world—that was a Swedish botanist and doctor named Carl Linnaeus. He published his catalog of living things, Systema Naturae in 1735. In the tenth edition, he broke down Homo sapiens into four categories: Americanus, Asiatic, Afer, and Europaeus. And he color coded them red, yellow, black, and white. 

I cannot recommend this podcast series enough.

Works Cited:

1. Being antiracist. (2021, December 16). https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/being-antiracist
2. Changing racial labels: From “colored” to “negro” to “black” to … (n.d.). https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749204 
3. Cohn, D. (2010, January 21). Race and the census: The “negro” controversy. Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2010/01/21/race-and-the-census-the-negro-controversy/ 
4. Historical Foundations of Race. National Museum of African American History and Culture. (2021, December 16). https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/historical-foundations-race 
5. Innate: How science invented the myth of Race. Science History Institute. (2023, June 12). https://sciencehistory.org/about/projects-initiatives/innate/ 
6. Smith, T. W. (1992). Changing Racial Labels: From “Colored” to “Negro” to “Black” to “African American.” The Public Opinion Quarterly, 56(4), 496–514. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2749204 
7. The name “negro.” Teaching American History. (2021, September 10). https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-name-negro/ 
8. USAFacts. (2021, May 26). How the census collected race and ethnicity data from 1790 to 2020. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-the-census-collected-race-and-ethnicity-data-from-1790-to-2020/ 

* I am indebted to UCLA Professor Emeritus of Biochemistry Albert Courey. Although I have never communicated with him, I found his assignment online and modeled my own after it.

My New Year’s Resolution for 2020 was to reduce my consumption of single-use plastic. Here’s what I wrote a year ago:

I’m here to announce my new-year’s resolution. In 2020, I pledge to use zero — or as close to zero as possible — single-use plastic items or packaging. This means no water or soda in plastic bottles, no disposable plastic or styrofoam cups at fast-food restaurants or convenience stores, no plastic straws (except those I’ve saved and reused). I don’t plan to entirely give up some things, such as margarine, but wherever possible, I will choose a sustainable alternative. And I’ll write a blog post every week in 2020 to chronicle my experiment. Along the way, I will explore some facts and myths about recycling.

Of course, I didn’t know what 2020 was going to bring us. While I totally failed at writing a post per week, I did continue to do my best to avoid single-use plastic. Although COVID-19 made keeping my resolution more difficult than expected, there were some successes. Here is my recap.

Success stories

• Cranberry juice: I bought only unsweetened cranberry juice at Aldi in glass containers. Diluted 1:1 with water and sweetened with homemade simple syrup or Splenda, this is just as good and about as cost effective as Ocean Spray.
• Orange juice: Switched back to using FCOJ (frozen concentrated orange juice). Aldi still has a version in cardboard cans. Minute Maid costs twice as much as the Walmart brand, but still comes in those cardboard cans with metal ends, unlike the plastic “cans” of the store brand.
• Pancake syrup: I stopped buying this entirely, and make my own from scratch. Here’s a recipe:
  • Combine equal volumes of dark brown sugar, granulated white sugar, and water (say, 3/4 cup each) in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil for about a minute. Allow to cool. Add 1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon each of maple flavoring and vanilla. Transfer to repurposed glass bottle (I use a soy sauce bottle).
• Grapefruit juice: I cannot find this in concentrated form, but Food 4 Less carries Florida’s Natural brand in a 52-ounce waxed paper carton. (Walmart stopped carrying this in 2020).
• Mayonnaise, olive oil, sesame oil: I am able to find these in glass bottles or jars. I have to go to Natural Grocers to buy organic mayo, though, as I can no longer find any mayo in glass jars at regular grocery stores. The Ojai Cook brand is good and the least pricey of the options, though it is still over $4 for a 16-oz jar. Thankfully, I don’t need much. For many recipes, I can substitute some or all of the mayo with fat free sour cream or Greek yogurt. Though these are only available in plastic…
• Disposable water bottles/cups/straws: I simply do not often order beverages when I am out, trying instead to remember to take a full refillable water bottle with me.
  • Chick-Fil-A and Sonic use only styrofoam cups, but Braum’s will still serve you a shake in a paper cup if you ask. I keep a reusable straw in my car and wash it after use.
  • Instead of bringing a case or two of bottled water to my daughters’ swim meets for which we signed up to provide snacks, I brought a 5-gallon refillable Culligan water bottle, and this rechargeable water dispenser. Since swimmers bring refillable bottles anyway, this was perfect. What’s better is that I was asked to bring it again, and the following season, the coaches asked girls to bring 2 refillable water bottles and not to bring disposable bottles. A win!
  • Coffee: I rarely get coffee out anymore. A couple of times, I did get a hot Starbucks (in paper, but with a plastic lid) but I don’t get the cold drinks. I tried to use my refillable cup at the local convenience store and received a really hostile look and was reprimanded (“You can’t bring that in here anymore.”) COVID really put the clamps down on using refillable cups. Even though we now know that this isn’t the primary method of viral transmission, I wonder if we’ll ever get back to where we were on this previously.
• Dining out: Since we haven’t eaten in a restaurant since March, takeout is the only option.
  • I discovered that Mexican restaurants are the best for reducing waste, and especially plastic waste. Fast-food Mexican comes in paper wrappers and paper bags, and with no plastic utensils. Local full-service Mexican restaurants send their takeout in aluminum trays with cardboard lids. That’s a win.
  • Other fast food: I typically don’t get drinks out. Chick-Fil-A serves their sandwiches and fries in paper/foil (but their drinks are in horrible expanded polystyrene). Pizza (Caseys, Old Chicago, Woody’s) comes in cardboard boxes. Some Chinese comes in those paper cartons with the wire metal handles. But we have to remember to tell them not to include sauce packets and plastic utensils.
• Eating in:
  • We have always cooked a lot at home, and continued to do this. Being home more meant more build-your-own pizzas (with fresh vegetables and sauce from a glass jar), casseroles, grilled chicken and fish, rice bowls, eggs (scrambled, hard-boiled, fried), cheese, fruit, soup, stir fry, and lately, sushi.
  • Bread flour and yeast were both hard to come by early in the pandemic-induced quarantine. This fall we finally got a sourdough starter from a friend and made the leap into bread baking. It’s been great — and no need to buy yeast!
  • I discovered recently that my wife stopped buying chicken or vegetable stock in cartons. I didn’t even notice. We now only get Better than Bullion in a glass jar and make our own stock.
• Beverages: If it doesn’t come in glass or aluminum, we try to avoid it. Soda, beer, wine, etc. are all on the grocery list. But with the aluminum can shortage this year (who would have thought!), I had to do without my beloved Coke Zero for several weeks. And we haven’t been able to get Fresca since March. Diet ginger ale is an imperfect substitute.
• Eggs: We go through a lot of eggs. We get them by the dozen in recycled paperboard cartons from Aldi or in a case of 60 in a cardboard box from Neighborhood Market.

Areas for improvement

• Dining (of course).
  • We got takeout from the local Italian restaurant. Everything was in separate polystyrene containers. Pasta in one, side dishes in another, breadsticks in a third. We were too guilty to order from there again.
  • We got Indian food a couple of times. Each main course came in a plastic tub. These can be reused, but how many of these does a family need? And they’re smelly and stained, so they went into the garbage.
  • When traveling: We went to visit our daughter at her university and got takeout from a local Korean restaurant and ate it in the park (see photo above). We also got frozen custard while we were there. While we didn’t order drinks and used our water bottles. the amount of single-use plastic was tremendous. But it was that or nothing. I will be happy when we can eat in restaurants again.
• Beverages: While I was committed to no disposable plastic, the rest of my family was not. My daughters continued to purchase smoothies in Styrofoam, iced coffees, Gatorade in plastic bottles, and protein shakes in unrecyclable multilayer packaging. On the other hand, they use refillable water bottles often and I don’t think we purchased any bottled water at all this year. We also now have some powdered Gatorade that one daughter chose to buy (on her own) rather than buy a case of it in plastic bottles. My example is rubbing off some.
• Other refrigerated or pantry items:
  • We’re still getting milk in 1/2-gallon polyethylene bottles. We don’t go through a lot of milk, but perhaps in 2021 I should look into whether we can even get nonfat milk in refillable glass.
  • We also purchased several bottles of salad dressing in plastic bottles. However, my wife has a recipe for a homemade vinaigrette with olive oil that she has been using more regularly. Ketchup and barbecue sauce are difficult to find in anything other than plastic.
  • Vegetable (canola) oil still pretty much only comes in plastic bottles. I may need to research other options.
• Shopping: There’s no way to use your own reusable bags when you use the grocery pickup service. However, we did reuse most of those plastic bags as kitchen garbage bags or to dispose of used kitty litter. I don’t think we can ever eliminate all single-use plastic, but I was much better about remembering to use my own bags on the occasions that I shopped for myself inside the store.

Summary

Even in 2020, I call my experiment to reduce my consumption of single-use plastic a success. Some sacrifices had to be made, such as doing without Fresca, even when the product returned to stores in 2L polyester bottles. Some reduction came at a cost, such as paying more for organic mayo in a glass jar. But many of the changes I made just improved my quality of life all around. Making my own pancake syrup and bread means that I have high quality ingredients (no high-fructose corn syrup) for less money, and never have to worry about running out, as long as I keep the pantry stocked with sugar, flour and salt. Then there are the other random finds that save money as well, such as Goose Island IPA in a 15-pack for about $1 per can! And I cannot think of a downside to not buying water in disposable plastic bottles at all.

I do not plan to abandon these changes in 2021. Most of them are simply lifestyle changes. I feel I’ve made a tiny step toward sustainability. I plan to continue to try to make more sustainable choices in 2021, such as eating less meat, washing clothes only as often as necessary (with less detergent), using only washable masks (!), and, of course, trying to use even less single-use plastic. I’ll let you know how it goes.

There is a soundtrack to my life, and I dream in perfect pitch.

When I wake up in the morning, if it’s not to an alarm, there’s nearly always a song in my head. This morning at around 6:30, it was “Hold On My Heart” by Genesis. When I woke up around 3am to go to the bathroom, there was another song I don’t now recall. Invariably, this song is playing in the correct key. It plays as I make my breakfast, as I take my shower. I can start singing it, if I’m careful. If I’m not careful, I might hum the wrong note, and then I get “stuck” in the wrong key, and might be uncertain I can find it again. To test this, I’ll sometimes sing a few bars in the shower and then start the track playing on my shower speaker. I’m always right. Not a semitone off. Not a microtone.

When I was a teenager, I recall going deer hunting with my dad. We would camp out in the back of his pickup truck, wake well before dawn, and trek through the barbed wire fences and into the woods with our hunter orange vests and deer rifles. We would find a likely location, one we had perhaps scouted out days before, and I would sit, back against a tree trunk, with a granola bar and a banana in one pocket (and extra shells in the other), a Thermos of coffee, and a view down a draw where a buck would hopefully wander, or be chased, through. And wait.

It would be quiet. Occasionally a rustle of leaves would pique my attention. But it was usually just squirrels.

In the long quiet spaces, my mind would sometimes fill with a song. If I listened really closely, I could actually hear the song in my head – the phrasing, the instruments, the voices. I practiced this. It was as if I was literally hearing the song. Sometimes I would get stuck on one line from the chorus, and it would repeat over and over. Faintly, but audibly.

I know what you’re thinking; that I fell asleep. I didn’t. I can still do this, if it is really quiet, and I have time to just sit and meditate. Which rarely happens these days.

I recall in high school choir, one of my favorite songs we sang was Shenandoah. It was an eight-part, a capella version, arranged by James Erb. (I didn’t know this, I looked it up on YouTube. Listening to this still gives me chills. Here‘s a moving rendition by the UNT A Capella Choir.) I sang second tenor.

Our choir had a tendency to drift flat on this song. Our director (I honestly do not recall if it was Trudy Tunnell or Sharon Owen that year – I think maybe we did it two different years) would play the first two notes, a major fourth, on the piano, to give us our starting pitch. One time in rehearsal, she played the notes a half-step higher than written. We stayed on key.

Afterwards, she asked the choir if we noticed anything different. I did. I knew from the start it was a half step higher. And I said so. I don’t recall anyone else noticing. Though I’m sure some did, they remained quiet. When we were invited to a joint recital with the Pittsburg (KS) State University choir, this was one of our selections. We sang it a half-step high. I have the recording somewhere.

Now, don’t ask me what key it is in. I don’t know. Ask me to sing an F, and I can’t do it. The MSSU Concert Chorale often warms up beginning on an F, and someone in the choir always sings the initial pitch. When I was there, it was never me. But ask me to sing the first bars of “We’ll Be Together” by Sting, and I will hear it in my head in the correct key. Starting with the synth horns and slap bass. If I can get the note out before someone sings or plays a different note, getting the wrong key stuck in my head, I’ll do it.

Sometimes when I hear a song in the background, or over some other distracting noise, like when I’m mowing the lawn with earbuds in, my ear will get “stuck” in the wrong key. I’m listening to the song, and it just doesn’t sound “right.” Or perhaps it does, but then something “clicks” and I notice that I head been hearing it in the wrong key, but then the key snaps in, and I’m good.

You know that song “Material Girl” by Madonna? Remember that high-pitched “ding-ding?” You know you remember. Bum–bah–da-da-dat-dat {ding! ding!}” That ding drove me crazy. I can hear it in my head right now, though I likely haven’t heard it with my ears in years. It’s flat! Not an entire semitone flat, but not in key either. It drives me crazy just thinking about it right now.

So, I don’t have perfect pitch, or “absolute pitch,” as typically defined. I cannot name the note of a pitch I hear. Ask me to sing middle C right now and I cannot. But ask me if I can sing the first notes of “Material Girl” right now, and I bet I can. [OK – I just sang that synth-guitar riff. Then I pulled it up on YouTube. And I was right. Just thinking of that terribly flat ding-ding put the song into my head and I can’t get it out. So in my head, I choose to play it in key.]

I know I have relative pitch. Wikipedia defines this as “the ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note by comparing it to a reference note and identifying the interval between those two notes.” I can definitely do this. To this day, I still judge intervals using the songs Trudy Tunnell used to teach us in choir. Major third and perfect fifth were from the first three notes of the Marine Hymn. From the halls of Montezu-u-ma… Perfect fourth is Here comes the bride. Minor sixth is the theme from Love Story (Where do I begin?) And Some….where… o… ver the rainbow is an octave.

But this is more than simply relative pitch, isn’t it? The Wikipedia article on relative pitch references another characteristic called “tonal memory. “In music, tonal memory or ‘aural recall’ is the ability to remember a specific tone after it has been heard.” It goes on to say:

Tonal memory may be used as a strategy for learning to identify musical tones absolutely. Although those who attempt the strategy believe they are learning absolute pitch, the ability is generally not musically useful, and their absolute tonal memory declines substantially or completely over time if not constantly reinforced.

When listening to music, tones are stored in short-term memory as they are heard. This allows sequences of tones, such as melodies, to be followed and understood.

But if I can recall the key of a song I haven’t heard in years, and sing the correct notes without prompting, what I experience is more than just short-term tonal memory. Isn’t it?

What do you think? Can you do this? What do I have?

[Edit: An earlier version of this story attributed “Hold On, My Heart” to Phil Collins rather than Genesis. Oops.]

tl;dr – Carolina Distance Learning Lab Kits? 0/5 Would not recommend. If you plan to use them in Fall 2020, be prepared for issues.

I have taught an online allied health chemistry class — a so-called GOB, or General, Organic, and Biological Chemistry class — every fall and spring semester since 2016. The course has a laboratory component. When I originally developed this course in the summer of 2016, I looked for vendors of at-home lab kits. There were three: Hands On Labs (HoL), eScience Labs, and Carolina Distance Learning (CDL). I initially went with Hands On Labs.

While there were strengths, such as the vendor assuming liability coverage, both I and my students were dissatisfied with the HoL kits. First, they were very expensive. Furthermore, many experiments used materials or procedures quite dissimilar to what students in a face-to-face lab would experience. One experiment had students measuring the density of gummy bears as they absorbed water over hours or days, which proved impossible to complete accurately. A particular oddity was a “Beer’s Law” experiment that employed a colorimeter with a red LED that had to be hooked with wires and alligator clips to an included digital multi-meter. Students made dilutions of a solution, placed the solutions into the colorimeter, and recorded resistance readings in ohms. They then plotted resistance versus molar concentration to create a pseudo-Beer’s Law plot. Not only is resistance two conceptual leaps away from absorbance (it’s not even %T, for goodness sake), the data, which were supposed to be linear, gave what looked instead like an exponential curve. In the fall of 2016, I had my research student test out kits from different vendors, and here was his result:

So, the data is poor, and I’m not sure that students learned anything about linear graphing or colorimetry from this experiment. Even worse was quality control issues with the colorimeters. Several students reported that their colorimeters did not work, and HoL sent them replacements (which delayed their work, of course).

As I alluded to above, I was fortunate enough in 2016-17 to have two Chemistry Education majors work with me on a research project. They tested the experiments in sample kits from the three vendors. Based on their results, I decided to switch to Carolina for Spring 2017. I have since used the CDL kits with students for seven semesters. I have stuck with CDL because their customized kits were less expensive than the HoL kits, and because they supplied written materials and quizzes that I could more easily incorporate into my LMS (HoL used their own proprietary LMS site). Basically, CDL was better than nothing (i.e. making my own kits or using “virtual” labs).

CDL didn’t have a Beer’s Law experiment, so I gave up on Beer’s Law and adapted a “dry lab” from another source to introduce graphical analysis skills. CDL did have their own an “Introduction to Graphing” dry lab, but it focused on bar charts, manual calculations of variance, and graphing data by hand for which there was no reason to assume a linear relationship (e.g. height of wheat plants in cm vs. time in weeks) — but then adding a linear trendline anyway, and using the equation to make predictions. In short, I felt the activity introduced misconceptions about the usefulness of graphing and statistical analysis, and was not useful for a chemistry class.

Several themes are repeated in many other CDL experiments. Some give poor or even useless results (e.g. “Thin-layer Chromatography of Spinach Extract,” which did not actually separate any pigments, and “Evaluating the Efficacy of Antacids,” for which the included procedure did not work because the suggested amount of acid added was insufficient to neutralize the included antacid tablet, or even half the tablet). Some have written introductions that are unclear, irrelevant, and sometimes even incorrect (e.g. “Determination of Acetic Acid Concentration,” in which the terms “vinegar” and “acid” are used haphazardly, even in pseudo-chemical “equations,” needlessly confusing students). Others are simply targeted at the wrong level for an allied health chemistry class (e.g. “Characteristics of a Buffered Solution, which requires students to use the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation to determine the volumes of acetic acid and sodium acetate to add together to make buffers at various pH values AND doing calculations using ICE tables: both skills that are way above the level required for this course). Furthermore, CDL does not give permission to alter the PDF instructions for the experiments, stating that this would negate their insurance coverage and ADA compliance.

I have continually felt as if I were beta-testing the activities for CDL. As far back as 2017, I reached out to them to report two specific issues with the “Determination of Acetic Acid Concentration in Vinegar” experiment — specifically, that a link to a video was broken, and that one of the activities in the “Investigation Manual” was not present in the Answer Key. I suggested that they might like to hire one of my my research students as a subject matter expert to edit the activities, because “as a secondary education–chemistry major…, I judge her well qualified to evaluate both the scientific accuracy and the pedagogical delivery of the experiments.” In response, I was told that CDL was hiring high school students as interns to test the experiments, because, “in the past when we used college students they tended to have enough background knowledge that they would (probably subconsciously) gloss over small issues that would stop someone else without that knowledge dead in their tracks. It has allowed us to see firsthand the small and sometimes complicated, issues that would frustrate a student late at night.”

My reaction to this statement is that many of these experiments actually suffer from the exact issue that the CDL specialist claimed they were trying to avoid: “issues that would [stop my students] dead in their tracks.”

One of my research students attempted to complete all 13 experiments in the CDL kit that my students were using that particular semester, and evaluated them as “good,” “fair,” or “poor” on 6 criteria:

1. Quality of the written materials (this included the sections titled “Overview” and “Background”)
2. Scientific accuracy of the written materials
3. Quality of the stated learning objectives
4. Alignment of the learning objectives with the experiment
5. Are the experimental instructions easy to understand and follow?
6. Do the instructions work? (That is, do they achieve what they are intended to achieve in the experiment?)

Of the thirteen experiments analyzed, three (23%) exhibited at least one section that scored “poor.” None of the experiments scored “good” in all six criteria. When I reported this to CDL, they asked if we could set up a conference call with me and my student to discuss the issues we had found.

After a while, I simply stopped reporting errors and issues I found to CDL, because it seemed to me that if they were going to benefit from us continually editing their activities for them, that we should be on their payroll. However, as there seemed no better option, we continued to use CDL as the vendor for laboratory kits.

In my experience, CDL also suffers from quality control in assembling and shipping the kits. Each semester, there are students who find that their kit is missing a particular item or items, or includes items they do not require. To their credit, CDL has always tried to make it right by shipping the missing items to students at their expense, but this still causes delays for the student (and the instructor), and recently these delays have become protracted.

In Spring 2020, this problem reached a new level — beginning well before the pivot to remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic that happened at the end of March.

On February 3, I sent an email to the CDL Business Manager of Distance Learning stating that I had already received reports from two students who were missing the plastic and aluminum cylinders required for the first “wet” experiment, “Exploring Density.” I expressed my disappointment in the continued lack of quality control. After all, we had been ordering the exact same kit since Fall 2018. Eventually I gave several students credit for the parts of the experiment they could not perform, and suggested that CDL should refund the students some money rather than shipping them the missing items. They agreed to give $4 refunds to those students. In explanation, they claimed that the small packaging of the cylinders was causing them to be overlooked when packing the kit and suggested that they would “be updating the packaging of the lab to a bright green bag and having “any kits containing our density lab… be checked by a third Quality Analyst….”

By the end of February, it became apparent that missing cylinders was not the only issue. A student reported that she had “nothing needed for the next two assignments,” so I suggested that she reach out to my contact person at Carolina. It turns out that the student was asked to box up and return the kit to CDL, because they had sent a kit for a different school. CDL sent her a corrected replacement kit.

Then on March 4, a second student reported the same issue, and CDL sent her a replacement, allowing her to keep the original incorrect kit. I sent a long email to the DL manager at CDL describing the large number of issues with CDL kits and their quality control.

On March 15, I emailed my entire class to let them know that several students had been shipped the wrong kit, and gave them the contact information for the person at CDL who could ship them a replacement. On March 22, a student messaged me, “I’ve tried to tell them a few times, but I don’t think they are understanding my problem. I tell them I’m missing some items and they say they’ll talk to someone and let me know and then I never get a response.” (To be fair, I cannot verify this students’ statements.) The student and I had several email exchanges until finally, on April 22, he stated the following:

There were a couple calls before the last one where I don’t think they completely understood what I was talking about. I can’t remember why, but I just remember thinking “That’s not the problem.”

During the most recent call, I had the box in front of me and I said I was missing a few things. I scattered everything out of the box based on the packages and said all of the package names I have, and what I was missing according to one of the labs I needed to do. I was told to leave my number and I believe I was asked when the best times were to call me, and that was that.

Apr 22 email from student who never actually received the correct kit from CDL in Spring 2020.

In the end, I allowed this student to pass the class by completing alternate assignments and taking zeros on a couple of experiments that ended up not affecting his letter grade.

The final issue is with the supply chain. On April 9, I emailed the DL manager in response to a survey to explain that I was not teaching the class in the summer, but that “it is on the schedule for the fall.” Last week when I checked in with them about using the same kits we have used four semesters in a row (again, to be fair, I should have checked sooner), I received this response: “…we are sold out for August and September.  We have 7 kits in stock of the [KIT ID used since Fall 2018]. With Covid19 pandemic our volume of kits is over whelming.  We do have some availability in October is [sic] that would work.”

So, I guess it is time for me to find a new lab option. Since I have heard that all the vendors are over-committed for Fall 2020 due to the COVID-19 pivot to remote learning, I guess I’ll be devising my own virtual experiments, simulations, and/or kitchen chemistry.

As I begin this year-long experiment to avoid single-use plastic, I’ve already discovered the “zero-waste bloggers.” I planned to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” But a quick search of the interwebs shows me that I’m at least 2 R’s short. Apparently there are at least 5 R’s. But what are they? Duckduckgo showed several options on the first page of resutls. And the final one even has a bonus!

• refuse, reduce, reuse, repurpose, recycle
• reduce, reuse, recycle, refuse, recover
• refuse, reduce, reuse (+repair), recycle, rot

I discovered that I’ve already been working on the “Refuse” part. I’m not going to be “zero-waste,” and that isn’t my target. I’ve already failed at trying to make compost for my garden. How much difference can I make without even making sacrifices (such as refusing things I don’t need anyway) or with minor sacrifices?

Already this year, only a week in, I’ve succeeded, and I’ve failed. I took my daughter to see a musical in a nearby city. We went out for lunch before the show, and she had some leftovers. I used a container from my car to store them in, negating the need for a disposable takeout box. I’ve been keeping these in my car for some months now. I bring them home, wash them, and return them to the car for the next time they’re needed.

After the show, we went to an early dinner with her friend and his family. The friend’s family bought dinner, and offered to send leftovers home with us. I tried to refuse, weakly. But, not wanting to make a scene, I agreed. So we went home with pizza in an expanded polystyrene container. What’s more, while my daughter and I only ordered water to drink, others ordered sweet tea that arrived in 22-ounce polypropylene cups–one of which my daughter was offered as a “souvenir.”

When I went out for a omelette today, I again put my leftovers in a reusable container from my car. But without thinking, I used two containers of jelly from the table for my toast. It’s so easy to use disposable plastic without even thinking. In this case, I would have had to deny myself the pleasure of mixed-fruit Smuckers in order to eliminate the small amount of plastic waste.

And I still have some of my favorite yogurt in the fridge. I can’t get the Dannon coffee yogurt in the town where I live, so I have bought many of them when I visit a nearby town (note the October date on the package in the photo). This yogurt comes in a disposable polystyrene container, as shown by the “6” code and the letters “PS” on the bottom. I’m still going to eat this yogurt, but when it’s gone, it’s gone, for the duration of this experiment. The experiment is for 2020, but I’m hoping for lasting changes in my habits. I’ll keep you updated on what I have to sacrifice, and where I can find legitimate sustainable alternatives. But I’m gonna miss this yogurt.

It was easy to avoid using foam take-home boxes without sacrificing anything at all, but more challenging to enjoy my jelly or yogurt without throwing plastic in the garbage.

As a trained organic chemist/biochemist, I am not opposed to the manufacture or use of plastic. I recall using polystyrene beads in high-school “shop” to fill molds in steam baths to make storage containers for the clay chess pieces that we (that is, the shop teacher) made. I still have this chess set.

In the next post, I’ll explore the chemistry of polystyrene – where it comes from, and where it goes. And we’ve got many more kinds of plastic to look at on this journey. I’ll try to keep it interesting.