The Medicine Man – How Sean Connery made me become a chromatographer

This sounds a little “Cliché” but is true: I owe part of my few papers to Sean Connery.

Although he made me cry in "Untouchables", was in “Medicine Man” that he did the greatest impact on my life.

I don’t really remember when I saw Medicine Man of the first time, but was in Technical school (during high school) that I could understand that fantastic technique he used in the middle of jungle to identify the cure of cancer.

For those who never saw, in Medicine Man, Sean Connery is Dr. Campbell, a botanic performing studies in the middle of Amazon. For achieve his results Dr. Campbell request a Gas Chromatograph and an assistant, The assistant wasn’t exactly what Dr. Campbell requested so the problems stated.

Today I recognize that movie made some mistakes like:

Identify NaCl and FeCl3 in a plant extract by GC, Instantaneous structures using a Flame ionization detector and maybe the worst: using sugars as calibrators.

LEFT: Dr. Campbell in two scenes of Medicine Man, both with some columns and separation funnels on background.

NaCl and FeCl3 are non-volatile compounds and since the main limitation of gas chromatography is analyse compounds that can vaporize, they just shouldn’t be there.

LEFT: A closer view of the GC system in Medicine Man.

The FID detector is not able to differ ethanol and methanol, so take structures from this chromatogram is just impossible.

Even actual mass spectrometers cannot predict the structure of compounds, unless they are very know and be part of a reference library. To establish a structure of unknown compound techniques such as NMR is essential.

Use sugar as calibrator, hhmmm, let’s use our good will and think he used glucose derivative as “internal standard”. Still have a lot of issues against him, like, the anomer conversion problem.

LEFT is  Dr. Campbell discovery,  this would be the cure of cancer, the peak #37, a clearly terpenoid related compound.

Although with some technical mistakes the Medicine Man is the embryo of all chromatograms in TV and movies. All CSI people should thank Sean Connery for this.