 we should get started so I'd just like to welcome everyone to this the fourth lecture in this year's winter lecture series so for those of you who don't know my name is James Wright and it's my great pleasure to introduce Professor Terry Collins who will give today's lecture lecture is entitled learning to love the future through green science. Professor Collins is the Teresa Hines Professor of Green Chemistry and Director of the Institute of Green Science at Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. He's also an honorary professor and distinguished alumnus of the University of Auckland and as you might expect perhaps Professor Collins earned his doctorate degree from the University of Auckland. He then conducted postdoctoral studies at Stanford University. He taught first at Caltech and then joined the Faculty of Carnegie Mellon University in 1987. He started teaching green chemistry in 1992 creating the first course of this type anywhere. His pioneering research which has helped to develop the interface between chemistry and sustainability began before green chemistry was even a recognized discipline. His achievements have been acknowledged in many awards including the U.S. Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award in 1999, the Pittsburgh Award of the American Chemical Society, the award of the New York Metropolitan Catalysis Society, the Charles E. Kaufman Award of the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Heinz Award for Environment and the Fellowship of the American Chemical Society. So recognized internationally for his groundbreaking research on Tamil activators, his green chemistry education and public speaking on the chemistry dimension of sustainability, Professor Collins continues to champion the sustainability course and I now invite you Terry to come and present your lecture. Well thank you very much James. It's a great pleasure always to come back to New Zealand and to be here in this beautiful city. I think my hearts and America of my soul might be here. Learning to love the future of your green science. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to begin talking very broadly then I'm going to come and discuss how we approach developing chemistry for sustainability at Carnegie Mellon and then we're going to come back to the not able the evidence says crystal clear to handle that power well. We think in the short term we think about our families educating feeding them the grandkids etc we'll see that. We don't think about human beings five generations ten generations out and we didn't have to in the past because we didn't have the powers that we have now with the powers we have we have the power to completely mess everything up and apparently at least from my reading that is what is happening now so the need to bring sustainability into universities which after all train the leaders of the civilization is probably the most critical single intellectual need that we have in the modern university. It brings transgenerational justice to the to the center of our civilization's ethical stage if we don't address it there is no good future and so really this is our first granddaughter on the day that she she was one it really is thinking about the present and and the future and if you think when you get one of these they're you know mum and dad are really happy granddad and grandmother are really happy and this baby will perhaps go on and have its own generation and if your granddad and grandmothers we are we are now we might see that baby and then something happens this comes along and so actually I think there will be very different if we lived instead of for a bit less than 100 years for three four 500 years because it's on the order of 100 years the scale on which things the disaster's playing out in slow mo that's the problem that we are not if it was impacting us personally and we could see it we might be a little bit different but an actual fact as we know this is really what we want to think about we need to be thinking as never before we never had the need to before about the what happens to our species and to everything else moving forward and I would argue chemistry is actually central to that intellectual construct it's really about developing an intimacy for the future and the present really deep in the core of each human being something we've never had to do before so it's Al Gore shows this picture and has what I I consider great great movies this is Apollo 8 the first man mission to the moon sent this picture back December 24 1968 well we saw that picture I think we didn't have color television but we saw the picture here's what the pilot said of the vast loneliness is inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on earth and so here's the earth from taken from picture from under the the rings of satin by the Cassini spacecraft that's it's one and a half billion kilometers from earth this tiny little dot out there this is our garden of Venus the precious singularity the palace of all known life our only visible home our greatest joy our everything and securing its good future as the greatest test we've ever had of our intelligence and character as a species so we don't probably all know this has got to be quite famous but I remember once I came back to New Zealand and we went up north to a beach with friends and that they had there was dust I'm very legit to dust so I couldn't sleep so I went out for a walk at like three in the morning and I was there was no light but I was able to walk and eventually I looked up and there it was the starlight was extraordinary that's our galaxy alone and as far as we know there's nothing there other than us in terms of life we are a singularity as far as we know and here's our friends next door um this is my what god makes very clear is that everything that's precious actually isn't the earth it's in this very thin skin about 10 miles from the bottom of the ocean to the top of Everest so it's unbelievably tiny and fragile and here we are um chemical technologies present really three it truly is chemistry at the technological core of all the major threats to to civilization there is chemistry and there are three existential threats to this chiffon and ecospiracles are going to fly first of all this climate change and you may say we have leaders in america who who don't think it's happening um the evidence is completely overwhelming it's happening it's happening now we actually have islands in the in the um off new islands that are going underwater rapidly the people are all happening to move we're losing as you know the beautiful islands at halls of the pacific and presumably some of the melt some of the um kiribati people and the and the tubal winds are coming here because of it um nuclear misadventure or mishap is a really big threat it's almost fortunate we had Fukushima it's horrible to say but now the argument that we won't have one of these accidents in a in a jurisdiction where we're not supposed to have one is crystal clear that is still absolutely out of control absolutely out of control and finally we have the thing that my group is most interested in the low dose toxicity of every day everywhere chemicals and we'll talk a lot about that new zealot can really contribute powerfully to the to the future god by deepening national competence and dealing with these threats and you could make of yourself an example to the world you are uniquely blessed you're you're isolated you have a fantastic climate there aren't too many people that the more you get the more difficult it gets to organize things and actually the things that you have to do are really logically fairly straightforward and so if new zealand decided to make of itself an icon of sustainability for example solarize your your energy base as quickly as possible of course people say it costs too much now but actually once you've got it the energy is free from then on out generation or two out you're hugely advantaged if you do this in my opinion anyway so we'll be focusing on the low-dose toxicity now this is a chemical i know there's some chemists that are not in the room but for the chemist this is this phenol a we make about 18 billion pounds a year and it's literally in everything and it's an estrogen so we will come back to that later we reviewed that in fact we conducted a study that included the university of Auckland some of the james and nourishing gala here in the audience and their students did part of this work um this is a 30 page paper where we review everywhere where you can find bpa as far as i can tell there isn't anywhere where you can't you can find bpa in translucent transparent shrimp on the in the Marianas trench it's everywhere it's an estrogen um in animal studies uh we've extensively validated associations with breast and and prostate cancer i'll come back to that so how does a chemist begin to interact with the world to try to figure out toxicity particularly this incredibly threatening low-dose toxicity that i'll go on and on about and i'm in a very fortunate position i get to move around the world a lot and meet people um and make friends with the kind of people who are doing the right kind of research to answer the right kinds of questions and so we held a conference i significantly chose the speakers at this incredibly beautiful phyps conservatory it's run by a genius richard pian sentinia you'll see him shortly and if you want to know how to do a green building come to bitsberg and talk to to richard this this thing is unbelievably green everything about it so this is the party we had it uh last month is that's pete meyers who could coin the term endric interruption amazing that's shana swan who reviewed the literature and showed we have a oh i'll come back tyron haze uh is a remarkable character many of which are related to misdemeanors of the animal system the normal system this problem is as big and maybe even more there's a lot of risk but we don't have a common shared vision of where the land is kind of obviously that the scientists where they share more position and hopefully we'll share that with our students insights and students and other courses and we'll develop our problems of sustainable chemistry today and not primarily people tell you we're working on silos between the america and the sylas and if you get people start talking with each other and recognize that some of the issues and problems that people are addressing not just happening to us from the computer we're associated with it's happening to everyone else well all of us together we offer a piece of the puzzle and we want to treat it the best we can to treat the educators around us on the right bringing this kind of multidisciplinary group together so if you want to see this it's online you can go and look there are five short videos and then everybody's talk is there um so now to the psychology part at least at least my version of it if you what i've come to realize is that human beings when they build constructs particularly pyramidal constructs as such as an academic discipline or a university really primarily focus on interacting with each other to gain approval to gain support to get funding to do their stuff it's very very much a human dynamic it's like a fluffy cloud though it's moving it's changing shape all the time all very anthropocentric and it has beneath it the affirmament of reality which is the ecosphere towards which this fluffy cloud is deeply unrealistic and brutally dismissive our future as a species really depends on how we adapt the fluffy cloud our political social and interactiveness to the demands of the ferment of reality um in the fluffy cloud there are some principles it's a dollar first in all things business problem with the dollar bill is that it's immediate value not it doesn't it doesn't compensate for negative value in the future of many of our technologies very present oriented it's clever but it's unwise it's isolating and specializations it's deeply tribal um and when this brings us to um when we develop a chemical technology is there are two critical things does the technology perform well and does it have good cost performance and so if you have something like a fast car it's better than a slow car most people think same with chemistry a good a wonderful reaction or a powerful drug that can make money off it goes to the marketplace however every chemical also has a health performance and you are carrying about more than a thousand chemicals probably that were not in the urine of your grandparents and some of these chemicals are bioactive in animals that the concentrations found in your and your your bioactive negatively there's an environmental performance so for example the reproductive pill 10 millionths of a gram in each pill of the active estrogen ethanol estradiol you start feminizing male fish of certain species at sub parts per trillion european rivers are running four to six parts per trillion they've got a big problem we've lost many we've lost species of fish quite literally from the rivers of pennsylvania because of estrogenization there are multiple things but ethanol estradiol is a really powerful contributor and finally there's a fairness performance that essentially uh it takes on all sorts of various forms depending on how you think about it i have time to reflect on that too much but if we really succeed the value proposition for sustainable kind of chemical technology going to look like this it'll have yeah you have to you have to make money you have to work well but you're not going to hurt health you are going to be fair and you're not going to hurt the environment so that's the challenge can we do this can we figure this out um and so back to the gossamer thern skin of the of the planet this is the ecosphere this 10 miles or so maybe 15 maybe 20 depends on what you want to count um and there are really two places where we human beings assault that mercilessly one is with energy now we bring in to the economy every single year about 10 gigatons of carbon most of which is burned to run the energy system we don't do absolutely nothing else on that scale nothing we don't make a gigatons of polymers so that if we were able to pull a switch here and stop the carbon flow in and the resulting 40 gigatons of co2 going out the world would be totally different with respect to sustainability we have to deal with the energy problem and so the other is toxics and the frightening part of it is low dose toxic so the economy is actually a subsystem of the ecosphere i mean how can you have a grocery store without animals eggs and meat etc and on and on you go if you think about have to go something's going wrong with my okay so every day 10s of millions of tons of stuff comes in from the ecosphere to feed the economy what then happens when it gets in there is chemists take a sizable hunk of it and turn it into other stuff these are the drugs the polymers all the things that and it cycles around in the economy and eventually the used economically spent matter gets ejected back to the ecosphere so your sustainability issues have to do with the incoming stuff in the middle and the outgoing so the chemical enterprise what words okay so chemists work over here on extraction processes primarily we've got some of the solar going on really critical we need much more as i pointed out here we make all the stuff that you that run the civilization and here we sort of manage the waste but we don't really this is the least this is one of the most serious problems the red arrow and it's the least focused on by chemists because well you can't really make money from you know waste material and water and stuff like that so the institute for green science focuses right there at the exit point from the economy to the ecosphere of matter my institute and you ask yourself how can you parameterize these health environmental and fairness performances we're very lucky the catalyst i'll tell you about has spectacular cost and technical performance so we don't have to worry about that the normal thing people are worrying about we approach parameterizing health environmental performance by just as i said finding the right people to work with and getting together and asking the questions how do we do this how do we how do we tackle building these performances into new technologies and the group that i've had the privilege to work with is really extraordinary and i kind of view it as like a a an international college a virtual college really for sustainability we spend a lot of time on the internet we talk talk almost daily with some of these guys all right so now we'll come and talk about that catalyst what we actually do so starting in 1980 i had the idea that if you could only disinfect water with with um hydrogen peroxide rather than chlorine you'd get rid of all the chlorinated disinfection byproducts some of which are associated quite strongly with with certain cancers and human beings but hydrogen peroxide has the thermodynamic power to break down to kill bugs but not the but not the kinetics not it's not fast enough you need a catalyst to speed it up and so the catalyst that we would talk about we'll come back and even look at this thing again there's nine atom in the center there's four nitrogen surrounding it and these gray rings are organic matter that at the critical part we fiddle the gray rings there's a water molecule sitting on the bottom um and the way we the way the catalyst design protocols started in 1980 and running very strong to this day is the following you begin on 1980 imagining what you think the gray blue thing should look like and you make it um and then you test it um and the problem is you're going to make when you when you put peroxide with this catalyst you're going to make something that's really reactive it's got to go and kill bugs action burn molecules it turns out we found out later in the water but but it's going to be really reactive so what it does is it kills itself it either commits suicide or or or homicide depending on whether it's attacking itself or another molecule um and that's bad because you want it to live long enough to do to do work so what we did that was unusual is we when something didn't work we didn't abandon it we went and found out how it was decaying and that you just think of like chain we find the weakest point in the chain and then we use our chemical intuition to make that weak point stronger and make us an iterated catalyst and around this around this ring we go again and systematically over time the catalysts get better and better and so actually um you through the years you see going down there you spin around over a 15 year period we ended up um with what are called Tamil activators so these are molecules that are less than 1% the size of the enzymes that do this highly efficient chemistry with peroxide um but they outperformed the enzymes it's the first time anybody's actually got anything with an pulley of the enzyme activity but we're actually outperforming them and we were very early on and then um we discovered that there was a fundamental weakness in our original design about three or four years ago and we continued to develop and now we have fortunately because we've got brand new patterns um spectacular um even even better catalysts so this brings us to how do you think about a problem like this and I'm focusing on the logic rather than details because I know a lot of people here aren't chemists and so I see five intersecting loops like cogs in the design of of um the sustainable products that we're after the first is inside this green box and it's called the design loop so you want to make a small molecule oxidation catalyst candidate we started there in 1980 um the current best catalyst after after all those years is is um there's more than 30 or 40 catalysts actually into the design um you test the technical performance once you get it um uh today's uh the best catalyst we've got right now is achieved in 2017 um this thing is already competitive with hydrogen peroxide with ozone which is what europe is considering to remove micro pollutants from its municipal wastewater um but we think that we'll we're I'm sure it's going to get better maybe 10 times maybe as much as 1,000 times better and when you do that um you have a big impact on on the cost of the technologies um if you find it requires improvement and we're always trying to improve it anyway but sometimes you find you have to improve it you redesign the catalyst you come back here and that's a design loop you just keep going around it so that's the iterative design loop now let's suppose you eventually get to the point where you've got a catalyst that you really like so today the new Tamil catalyst are ready for large-scale commercial development we have commercially developed one of the older catalysts reasonably significantly but unlike ozone chlorine or UV peroxide that people use these are not one reagent you can change the catalyst and when you do you change the activity um so the remarkable feature of the red design loop is that we can continue to build immense savings and sustainability into new now Tamil based water treatment by iterative designing for higher technical and economic performances to attain superior drop in replacements and we've never had this possibility before in water treatment um now if it's acceptable if you get to something then you ask the question is it safe 10 years ago nobody knew how to tell if any chemical was safe from these low-dose adverse effects so this team of people I've talked about and you'll see them soon got together and said well how do we how do we make it safe and it would be like me saying I don't take too much credit because it was everybody was a big part of it but I've well you're mr estrogen you understand the estrogen part of woman's system and you're mr androgen and you're mr thyroid and you're mr pituitary and you're mr such and such what tests do we have to pass with any chemical to make you happy that we don't have an estrogen and androgen or thyroid like hormone etc and we spent five years on that problem phone calls weekly then even more often several retreats and eventually published a paper doing it so we now know how to tell to the highest levels at least of contemporary science whether or not you have a safer unsafe catalyst if it's not acceptable for safety you go back to the design board so we now come to a major civilizational problem the problem of how we test for the safety of a chemical and actually the basic underlying principles 400 years old traits back to guy called parasols us and what he said is often short short short captured and preceded in that statement the dose makes the poison so we started a high dose and we break we lower the dose until we reach if we're studying animals and out say an LD 50 50 percent of the animals are die within this period of time and then we keep going down until we reach a low L a lowest observed adverse effect level then we keep going down till you get a no L no observed adverse effect level and then the regular days come in and say well we want to be safer than that so they set a daily exposure 1 to 2 orders of magnitude lower the problem is the endocrine system works at infinitesimal concentrations and it's not accounted for in this so we really should turn the testing protocol upside down this would create when we talk about it a firestorm with industry but it needs to be done because of how the endocrine hormone system functions with women working at parts per trillion to low parts for billion levels the historical dose makes the point it's wrong the low our lowest observed adverse effect level obtained when you come from low to high it's going to be different from when you come from from high to low because you go through this window if you started an incredibly low dose and bring it up you go through the window of activity at the endocrine system that you don't even test for when you're when you're coming up here and you might think well surely if I've got a lot up here the endocrine system will recognize that but no it doesn't because cells have defense mechanisms and when there's enough material too much material they say I don't like this guy and they turn on their defense mechanisms so this is a huge change that we have to make we need to turn it upside down if it's acceptable you then go and you start you say okay maybe I have a I have a safe commercial catalyst candidate so you begin optimizing the commercial synthesis and we work with toll manufacturers to do that if the cost is on set pull well back you go start again and then you break out of that we've done once and we're sure to break out now with the new catalysts and you go to bulk catalyst production and then you start engaging with regulatory agencies in the markets that you want to and you run pilot trials and you do demonstration blunts so that's the real world tested and then once you've done that if it's our catalysts you um you um we we think we have a major thing possibly missable wastewater you um you think about industrial wastewater as well including oil and gas production we have fabulous results there um agricultural wastewater so that you can get the estrogens and the and the antibiotics out of animal urine and feces if you if you have a concentrated animal operations we have many of in america um and landfill leachate it's astonishing landfill leachate is so estrogenic nothing can live in it because of bpa we'll tell you about the shortly nothing can live in landfill leachate um it's the breakdown of polycarbonate cap plastic leaking bpa and where bpa is thought it is about two thousandth one two thousandths the the strength of activity of estrogen estradiol the natural female estrogen so it's quite a weak estrogen but if you raise the concentration to parts per million parts per thousand and parts per hundred and you have that in landfill leachate you completely overwhelm that difference and you have a very potent estrogen estrogenic system and the big goals are we want our rivers lakes and oceans to to to um see revival of fish species we want safer source water human consumption we want drinking water treatment follows and so to pull all this off so we're about here with the new catalyst to pull all this off we need a lot of money and um we need partnerships and the university will cut licenses with people to try to make that work um i'm just going to go past this because i'm not i'm already speaking too slowly okay so the team is what's me and um at that Carnegie Mellon Alexander Ryboff a russian kinesis who's who's phenomenal russasha studies the way the catalyst work and he will tell you um that um these are as well understood as any any um as any uh catalytic system our water treatment experts at brunel and rat kanda believes that our technology is going to be a lot cheaper and better than ozone and we have a large interaction with africa that we're trying to fund we have 12 african countries that we have academics in various countries want to play with the catalyst to attack their water problems it's led by this guy dr chimizia and yakara at university of lagos douglas fisher runs uh the publication uh network if you want to understand endric and disruption just go and get above the fold it's free from environmental house sciences and every day you get information coming into your computer about how chemicals are impacting the environment douglas runs that our biological safety teams led by jolly jones it has ruben abayon who does huge computer calculations of things bruce blumberg bruce studied the catalysts and said well they're not estrogens androgens or um thyroid hormones um we heather is i'm not going to talk about her work uh fred bon sal this is mr bpa this guy's incredibly famous he discovered the lodos adverse effects of bpa he's had all sorts of fights industry tried to bribe him and he's very in front of people so he's public about it um and has his career has been about fighting um to bring uh reason to bpa um and fred um studied with julia taylor our catalyst with mice assays to see if they were causing any problems with the mice and they're not um uh susan agle works with us on fracking uh floors we have we have we we have we have wonderful results there where we can remove the endric and disruption activity of fracking floors robert tangway's mr zebra fish he has an enormous zebrafish lab and so you do zebrafish developmental assays um um where you really find out if you've got problems for endric and disruption and thomas solar is mr thyroid and down here we've got mr james rye who is really really doing fantastic work with membranes in the cat catalyst um so let's come back to the central the central core the thing we did not know that existed in toxicity as a scientific culture as a political culture we didn't know until 1991 there was such a thing as endric and disruption plenty of signals in the literature but 1991 this amazing woman theo colbourne got a group of people together and they oh my god these chemicals are messing up aquatic life by interacting with their endric and hormone system and so um an endric and disruptor is an agent from outside the body that interferes with the relief but production release transport binding action of elimination of natural hormones in the body responsible for homeostasis and particularly the regulation of developmental processes now you saw shana swan's face i don't know if you remember she was the lady that came up about second in the list of speakers shana has just done a meta analysis of all sperm count studies in western man we are down 52 percent since 1973 52 percent human male sperm counts have dropped in the west 52 percent since 1973 you look at other countries that are sort of more secretive about or more quiet about these things and you see all kinds of problems you you would have thought the chinese would be in trouble they've only had so we we can produce these effects with the chemicals in the lab animals so the association there is very strong you would have thought the chinese would be in um in trouble because they are stabbed on so chemicals so quickly and they are not careful about what they do with the chemicals so um around six years ago they don't have a major study of the chinese population for this of my knowledge but around six years ago they studied um sperm donors and they had um height restrictions and about 30 000 and 57 percent passed the bar which is pretty good they did it 18 months ago no height restrictions and 17 percent passed the bar that's what i would expect knowing knowing because what you're what you have is you have this massive assault in the last couple of decades of chemicals into um the chinese environment they're very concerned about water and we're hoping to work with them by the way this is the biggest thing to ever hit chemistry it's like it's like a locomotive coming and hitting it right in the body and how we deal with it again is an enormous test of our fortitude and and and character this is the this is the group that we've put together the tiered protocol for endocrine disruption that that's one of our meetings and the object is to ensure new new chemicals like like our catalysts are not and their degradation products are not endocrine disruptors but what do you do about something like the pill what do we get rid of the pill um by the way my personal advice to everybody is don't take the pill because it's it's got this incredibly potent estrogen you take a teeny little bit it gets into your into your um uh blood and it fools you that you if you're a woman that you're pregnant so you don't you don't ovulate and then you go off the pill and it clears pretty quickly and you ovulate but you if you've been on it for a couple of years you have to assume that it will have come to equilibrium it's fat soluble it will have come to an equilibrium concentration with everything in your body and so once you take the equilibrium input off licitalia principle is going to take over and the stuff will leak back out slowly and you don't even want some parts per trillion of ethanol estradiol anywhere near a forming fetus i would try barrier technologies and the old-fashioned approaches i'm i feel i have to say that because of what i've what i've learned about these things um so many endocrine disruptors are integral to our city way of life you kind of damned if you do if you don't damned if you don't deal with them um and so one of the things that you can do is much more effective product stewardship um so we'll just these are the toxicity studies and i'm going to buzz right by them looking at the time there so i want to uh but they exist and they're very they're very neat so we'll buzz right by them so this is how the catalysts work so there's the iron atom in the middle there's the four nitrogens there's the stuff that we changed to get the properties that we want and there's a water molecule sitting there oxygens red the two blue things are hydrogens um when you put it with peroxide it just incinerates virtually not everything but certainly most of the problematic endocrine disruptors so i'm just going to use a football as the substrate and essentially what happens is that the peroxide lands on the iron you see the football getting oxygen on it and then it gets more oxygen and then after a while of this happening thousands of times per second it's shredded two carbon dioxide and small molecules now down in New Zealand i changed the football so what is the football um well it's any dye we've done hundreds um so you can see it here we're putting um peroxide into the water and we'll turn on the stirrers and then we'll put um we'll put the catalyst in and you can see those molecules decomposing but you can see with your eyes as they disappear and if i leave this running they'll go all go colors um pesticides a number of them um a bunch of drugs explosive residuals disinfectants um cyanotoxin the first one was done by nourishing gal here salindo spore on just the beginning he's working with a catalyst that's a hundred times less active than our best catalyst we're going after cyanotoxins in a big way for not so so you get a cyanotoxin bloom they put out these toxicants that kill everything but also if you eat species with cyanotoxins then they're really not good good for you either sulfur compounds we use them in in sugar diabetes sensors they can be used there the russians develop that various hormones um lots of endric and disruptors the critical thing um phenomenal disinfection technology what we really started to get is absolutely phenomenal it'll even split water reasonably well the first water splitting reactions of iron for chemists that activates unactivated ch bonds and here's mold stain removal so i've shown this here once before it's a technology that was developed in indianapolis uh by india mount mold remediation so you notice the black color disappearing in seconds on contact there's an infinitesimal amount of the catalyst in that solution what they would normally do is go in and they'd scrub with the solution without the catalyst for a couple of days takes two day two day mandates of labor is cut down to less than two hours by the catalyst very powerful and that's the that's that's uh not by any means the most active catalyst um and so here is for a little bit of the science of killing of of things bacterial spores of the a la anthrax or the surrogate that people use bacillus atrophias that isn't that doesn't produce the tripartite toxin um is the hardest thing to call then come the protozoans that people water people are often very worried about then fun go then virus and then vegetative bacteria so we start at the top level at um with a bacillus atrophias anthrax surrogate this is what the spore looks like under the scanning electron microscope before you treat sort of punctate and there's a lot of stuff in the middle when you treat it swells up and it's in a squirt out um those the conditions um and so you start off with a solution that has a hundred a million colony forming units per milliliter and you you you want to get it down to meet the military target you want to get down to 10 in 15 minutes and so as we just increase the concentration log you want log of the number present among over the initial number to go to minus seven in 15 minutes and so nothing much happens with um uh that's a tertiary butyl hydroperoxide actually but as you increase you increase the catalyst concentration you see things going faster and at 50 micromolar but by our our standards an enormous amount um by most people's hardly any um you see that get similar count well you know as always I put way too much in the talk and I want to leave some time so I'm going to hop right to the end um so our latest studies are with the city of Tucson's water we we study 40 micro pollutants we're using our latest catalyst hydrogen peroxide at 20 parts per million the latest catalyst you are competitive um at with four parts per million of ozone under those conditions a kilogram of the catalyst will treat 22 and a half thousand tons of water and it's fast it's all over in an hour 22 that quantity of water is the amount produced per day by 150 000 Europeans so we we really do think we've got something really nifty here the only thing that could go wrong would be a nasty toxicity surprise and so we're working on that but I want to finish it with a little bit more philosophy um so this is just seeing a um this this is um pro-panelol it's a beta blocker many people in the room might be taking pro-panelol it's it's a micro pollutant it's bioactive for tiny concentrations put peroxide in nothing happens um our first new Tamil did a pretty good job our best old Tamil beat it um you want it to go to zero as quickly as possible um the current best new Tamil takes it out that quantity out in less than five minutes you can see that's unbelievable catalysis you have almost no catalyst the 100 nanomall okay so we have we think we have a good but come back to this what can New Zealand do well you can train yourselves to think well and act well before the greatest challenge our species has ever encountered the universities cannot continue to ignore this they cannot continue to dismiss it um so it's great to see a green chemistry centre here I hope it thrives the five-loop approach is my best shot at it you are critical to the good future of New Zealand in this regard but it's going to take much more it's going to take a change at the core of every human being mind and heart to save in the words of Hans Jonas a great Gnostic philosopher the survival and humanity of man from the excesses of his own power and so just very quickly what does a university do well you know when students come into this university we take all these things in science and put it in their head and University of Auckland does that very well I can attest from my own experiences and I know the faculty I know they're they're very conscientious um but there's all these other things having to do with sustainability the death of first etc etc you got to put those in at the same time somehow you have to integrate the implications of technology and the student goes out therefore equipped to be competent as a sustainability leader we train the leaders of civilization forget about what people think about you now okay we've got all these prizes and things and okay I've got a few but forget about it what really matters is what the future thinks of you because they don't have anybody speaking for them they don't have anybody so forget about being what being being famous and and all of these other things that academia thrives on and think about the critical thing in the future um it's a direction not an end point you sure as hell know as we're doing we are the epicenter in Pittsburgh of gas production in that in in the United States you sure as hell know that's the wrong direction the the planet does not need another giant carbon technology it needs solar so it's directional um it's tragic what's happening to biodiversity it's it's heartbreak leaders champion biodiversity is a sort of a first pass credential the our problem is our obsession with money and power that dollar bill does not integrate the damage to the future we externalize the damage and leave that to future generations to deal with and we take the cash that you can get and use it in the present you've got to figure out how to make jobs wealth and sustainability are enforcing I was telling you that earlier on you really have to go after these dudes that are creating denying sustainability problems and right now we are in big trouble in the US god loan that's what we'll do you have to resist the distortion of science at the expense of the common god these all have a big lecture around them of course I'm sorry I'm just giving it never devalue sustainability for money tribute or political support it's the most precious thing you can imagine and honestly if you go and ally yourself with people you can trust to make the great faith with sustainability for any reason you're going to have a great life as a as a scientist thank you very much for your attention and that's time now for some questions so does anyone have a question they would like to ask yes hard to say it's linear the lines the line over the last decades is linear so it's going to keep going one assumes the okay so this brings us to the field of epigenetics and it's completely possible to lock these disruptions in to future so Mike Skinner at the University of Western Washington exposed um female pregnant rodents to um an antiandrogen estrogen and the males came up very obviously you can see with males they've been reproductively damaged and the postdoc accidentally bred from them they could still breed from them last I heard there were down nine generations nothing had changed they were all damaged so um it is very public information so if you look around and you see where population growth for many reasons obviously but I think chemicals are part of it is a lot um and there's some delicate things to say here but they're very public a Christian Annamore did a um program six and love around the world um on CNN um and she visited Tokyo and I've been to Japan many times and the Japanese 100 125 million people on a piece of real estate the size of the United Kingdom but they can only live in 18 percent of it because it's mostly mountainous and there's nowhere to put the rubbish so they burn it and so Osaka turns out to be the dioxin cap from burning organic chlorine waste the dioxin cap capital of the world um it looks like the Japanese have some severe problems so if you look at this firm counts the few studies that have been done they're rock bottom um and a professor at one of their universities in Tokyo commented publicly 40 percent of Japanese adult males are virgins sorry it's tough to tough to talk about um if you wherever you find populations very densely concentrated uh and very um with very great um chemical concentrations that chemicals are more and more part of their life um my guess is you will see these these effects and I could go on and on to to to back that up so I don't know some of my friends will see it certainly solve the population problem how biggest biggest population growths are in Africa Ghana a democratic 50 per 100,000 woman I think um lowest to Hong Kong Korea uh uh Japan if the BFPA is a wicked awful problem we a friend of mine told me recently that the amount of money made by products with BPA in them is 750 million dollars per hour get a part of a billion dollars per hour so it's all the TVs and things however BPA they use in a lot of ways so it's a radical trap so they'll put it into other polymers that like polypropylene polyethylene or whatever to to stabilize them and you know this because you can you can boil them and get the stuff out but the major thing is polycarbonate now polycarbonate is when you take so BPA is the two phenols the oxygens are out there and you couple them with phosgene so you you you basically handcuff them together with a ceo group but that is a hydrolytically sensitive functionality and so once you once the hard plastics of our TVs and now goodness knows what make their way to the landfill and water starts running over them they slowly they're more than 90 percent BPA they slowly start leaching BPA that's the landfill problem um I know what we do about BPA it's it's right there are people who have designed um BPA analogs that aren't estrogens that's for sure um and um I spend a lot of time doing that more expensive but um you know when you look at what's what's what's happening uh well we at least have to keep talking about it and hopefully address it yeah I know what to do to reduce my footprint I think actually for someone you're aged the most important thing you do is protect yourself because you're a um you're a a step to the next generation so so okay so everywhere where where you can get um chemicals that you don't need out of your life is a good thing so all these smells you have in your house the nice smelling things turns out a lot of those highly problematic um certainly um trident organic um by the way um if people take activated sludge from the from the surge treatment part and put it on the land there's plenty of BPA in it and it ends up in the vegetables so if they're using activated sludge it's not exactly organic um as a fertilizer I don't think New Zealand does that a lot but it's done a lot under US so so essentially um I would try to um I would do it that way um you in the United States now you have to pay more it's ridiculous you have to pay more for non-contaminated food um but you can you can get chickens that are free range and that they don't use antibiotics or any anything um we had a practice in the United States probably here where people were feeding Roxasone which is an arsenic compound to chickens lots of it reason is that um arsenic compounds promote vascular growth so the chicken gets bigger fatter fatter and plumper um but the manure was full of arsenic so then the chicken manure was going out and you're putting arsenic all over the place so we we we have such a massive re-evaluation to do of all the things that we do to really get this right um you and people of your age um are really important because we failed we have failed collectively my generation's failed so we need you to come in and take over and and do it right or better you're talking about testing for various things to go over and over and see the effect and all sort of things and um I know that a lot of chemical bacteria supply themselves would you comment on the synergistic effect of different things that are in the environment absolutely fantastic question yes there are synergistic effects and we on we know very little about them we we have done some there are some studies where people have taken such a low dose of a series of compounds that there's no observed effect but when you put them all together there's there is an effect um and so it appears to be at least additive it may be more than additive um that's yet another major part of the dimension you see the thing is really to be a chemist in today's age you really need to know what God knows about how life works so that you you don't go in and interfere with it and and um again the nice thing at least as we know is that there is a the really big thing is it is one thing endocrine disruption and other signal there are other signaling pathways that that you can almost tell cells what to become so if you end up taking for example tributyltin tributylin is used to stop barnacles growing on paint in on on the bottom of ships but if you if you feed tributyltin to animals it'll go and tell stem cells that wouldn't otherwise do this to go and become fat cells and you'll make them extraordinary fat all with with um diethylstilbestrol which is one of these lucky not really lucky but lucky cases where where we have studies because people were given the drug um thinking it was going to be okay and we could then study the expo you you give you give one part per billion of diethylstilbestrol two rats they'll blow up like balloons you give a hundred parts per billion and they'll be incredibly scrawny that's how the endocrine system works the dose response curve is not monotonic and so um and what's more you can take rats and look at the male male reproductive track and you the it's being put together as rats or mice being put together day 13 through 17 so if you you you give the mum the um the chemical on day 13 14 15 6 etc and then go look different parts of the reproductive track will be messed up on the different days really dramatically so so it's very hard when you have a time in development say the human fetus we've got this all worked out actually um uh Theo Colburn while she's alive set up um uh this wonderful um critical stages of development um of the baby through from conception to post birth where everywhere where there was a chemical that looked like it hit something she she signaled it all so we we actually do know quite a lot about it um it's a matter of getting our med schools and everybody else to understand it i think we're running out of time i think that's one last question also just a good question say avoid chemicals but you're talking about avoiding chemicals i'm just wanting a in your food square that so so whenever whenever anybody especially chemists says avoid chemicals chemists tend to circle the wagons and and say look at all the great things we've done when we have done great things we could not have this civilization without our chemicals so let me just start by saying that i love chemistry and and i know a lot about what chemistry has done for the world and it's absolutely incredible however we have these negative effects and that we have to deal with them and my my net evaluation is if you can avoid antibiotics hormones etc in your food avoid them right i mean you're some of these you're you're effectively taking a low dose of antibiotics by eating some of these things well that messes up your gi tract everybody should take probiotics by the way that's another thing because you're um your uh your your gi tract and people don't seem to understand how really important that is in taking our food and and breaking it down into the new nutrition that we need and i could describe you studies that that make it crystal clear that having a very high functioning gi tract is critical to not getting dementia and other things but anyway no one could go on and on okay i think sadly we are well over time so i better draw things to a close now i'd like to thank you terry for again a wonderful talk thought-provoking challenging informative talk and ask everybody to to join with me and thank you