 That chemistry is indeed the central science. It is the thread that ties all of the other sciences together. If you have a good feel for what molecules can and cannot do, you have a pretty good feel for what can and cannot happen in the world. Not long ago, I was looking through an issue of Time Magazine, which of course generally is a very, very good publication. It's all about eating organic, eating local, all good stuff. I mean, I'm very, very much in favor of eating lots of fruits and vegetables. I constantly hound people to do that. I do lectures on this, telling people to partake of these things more often. So I absolutely no objection to promoting eating vegetables of any kind, whether it's organic or conventional or local or from far, doesn't matter. What matters is that we should be eating lots of them. Anyway, I'm reading through this article. When all of a sudden, I'm stunned as I get to a quote. The quote is from Dr. John Gousseau, who happens to be a professor of nutrition education at Columbia University. The quote was, as for butter versus margarine, I trust cows more than chemists. Well you can imagine why this is disturbing to a chemist, because I've never thought of cows as being particularly intelligent, doesn't sit too well with me. I've always thought that we chemists are somewhat brighter than cows. But Dr. Gousseau painted an image of the cow as a brilliant scientist, because it uses nature to produce its output, milk, etc., natural, therefore it should be good for us. She doesn't trust chemists because they created margarine, and that of course is what she was objecting to. Because to her, margarine was a chemical concoction. Well yeah, margarine is a chemical concoction, everything in the world is. Those are nothing other than the building blocks of matter. That natural milk the cow produces is just as much a chemical concoction as margarine. But indeed in the manufacture of margarine there is some intervention by science. And we make margarine of course by taking vegetable fats and hydrogenating them. And that has caused a problem. The problem of course you are familiar with, this is the notorious trans fat, it's a product of the hydrogenation process. Well there are issues with trans fats because they can boost your LDL that is your bad cholesterol and that of course is linked to heart disease. So there certainly was a legitimate issue there, and this is what she objected to. That margarine was dangerous because it was a chemical concoction and therefore butter, which was natural was much much safer. Well the fact is that today we have margarines that don't have any trans fats. We have a large variety of them and you can look on the label, it will tell you that there is no trans fats because there are processes other than hydrogenation that now can be used. Well who developed these processes? It was chemists of course and it was chemical knowledge that made this possible. Furthermore I think it is interesting and important to point out that even with all of the so called bad fats in the margarine, it saturates fat content plus the trans fat. The bad fats were still a lot less than what you find in butter. So this idea that the cows are more trustworthy than chemists is a scientifically bankrupt notion. So many people have this opinion that chemicals are synonymous with poisons. It has resulted in what I call chemophobia, the irrational fear of chemicals. Well this is something that especially this year International Year of Chemistry would like to challenge and point out some of the discrepancies in this argument. Anyways I told you I've been doing this for about 30 years on the radio as it's painfully evident. Of course only because you see the dial telephone there. And to tell you the truth I don't remember the very first question that I was ever asked a long time ago but I remember the second question. It is indelibly etched in my mind. So I was sitting there listening carefully you know because I was a little bit nervous. And I thought I heard the caller ask this rather remarkable query. I was stunned. I didn't know quite what to make of this. You know you start to have all kinds of strange anatomical juxtapositions going through your mind. But it turned out that the caller also had been somewhat nervous and he had spoken very quickly. And he had forgotten a very important word. That was golf. He had wanted to ask a question about golf balls. Why? Because as I quickly learned from his explanation golfers have a habit of picking up their golf ball and kissing it before putting it back down and whacking it. This is not for aerodynamic reasons it's not a good idea to fill in the dimples with saliva. It's of course superstition. And this golfer was worried about the pesticide residues on the golf courses. And of course they're still concerned about that today. And he was worried that he would transfer some pesticide to his lips by kissing the golf ball and that this would eventually lead to some sort of calamity. So we discussed this and I told him that you know only the dose makes the poison and the amount of pesticide that he was exposed to like this was trivial. But it also suggested that there were much better things in life to go around kissing than golf balls.