Most people agree that science festivals are a great way to disseminate information on ideas, cool experiments and work going on at local universities. But for people living in rural communities it can be much harder to meet active scientists. That’s why when ScienceGrrl Glasgow were asked to participate in Bang Goes the Borders on the 23rd of September we jumped at the chance to talk to a new audience!
For our activity, we decided to try to replicate some of the work of Dr. Tu Youyou a Nobel prize winning chemist who discovered the antimalarial drug artemisinin in sweet wormwood. Dr. Youyou is one of ScienceGrrl Glasgow’s #UnsungHeroines – female scientists who we feel deserve to have their achievements celebrated for their contributions to our scientific knowledge.
Dr. Youyou undertook her work on artemisinin in China during the cultural revolution, when intellectuals were often persecuted for their work. Dr. Youyou was not recognised for her work for a long time due to the communist nature of the project and the fact that her discoveries were helping the Chinese army during the war efforts in Vietnam, so were top secret!
Interested in methods to purify compounds from ancient Chinese medicines, Dr. Youyou collected over 2000 recipes looking for ways to isolate their active ingredients. One recipe she found was for a drink made from sweet wormwood in a book written in 340 AD by Ge Hong. The drink was intended to treat “bone steaming fevers” and the recipe was written on silk and bamboo. The parchment had partially degraded, but Dr. Youyou was able to follow the extraction protocol and eventually managed to improve it and purify the active compound – artemisinin.
Sweet wormwood doesn’t grow in the UK, so at Bang Goes the Borders we decided to extract a molecule from another plant – spinach. Most people know that chlorophyll is responsible for the green pigmentation in plants, but many people don’t realise that there are actually several coloured pigments that make up the green colouration. These colours can be easily extracted using materials found in most households as follows:
1. Grind the spinach in a pestle and mortar (or blender or chop into fine pieces)
2. Add alcohol – we used gin at 37.5% alcohol – and grind again
3. Using a pencil, mark a line on piece of coffee filter paper 1 cm from the bottom
4. Spot the green liquid onto the filter paper on the line
5. We like to add a control of green felt tip pen here next to the spinach
6. Dip the end of the filter paper into acetone-based nail polish remover and allow the liquid to travel up the paper, bringing the green colour with it.
7. The green colour should separate into three distinct bands – green, yellow and orange
Most of the participants were able to separate the colour into the three bands and some people even got four – two orange bands travelling at different speeds in the acetone. The green felt tip pen separated into blue and yellow and since the yellow didn’t travel to the same place as the yellow spinach band we could conclude that they were not the same yellow pigment. We were really pleased with how the experiment went and the participants enjoyed extracting molecules from plants in a similar way to a Nobel prize winning scientist.
We hope we encouraged people to explore what other molecules might be in plants in their homes and to think about how some people – especially women – are not recognised for the important work they have done.
We will be bringing more of our #UnsungHeroines to the public over the coming months – check our events page to keep up to date with what’s on.