Louis Pasteur: The Space of Life
A photo of mine from the Heidelburg Castle has been used in the documentary “Louis Pasteur: The Space of life“. The image used is from the chemistry laboratory at the castle and was used as the background for the laboratory of Jean Baptiste Biot, the man who discovered the chiral nature of tartaric acid.
As you can see below, they’ve zoomed in, then shrunk it, flipped it horizontally and used it as a background for scenes showing Louis Pasteur and Jean Baptiste Biot. It seems ironic to me that they used a mirror image for the background of a documentary about chirality :p
The documentary can be viewed on the LaRouche website:
My photo can be seen in the background between 6:20 – 7:46 and 19:58 and 22:02.
Posted on 2010-06-14 by
Chemistry lab in Heidelburg
Our lab got renovated recently. It doesn’t look anything like this old school chemistry lab we saw at the Heidelburg castle though!
Posted on 2009-03-07 by
NMR Quench
Our 500 MHz NMR machine quenched itself today
Here is an awful quality photo I took of the aftermath.


To make things worse, our other machine (300 MHz one) has been out of action since late last year, so we now have no NMR access whatsoever … for any non-chemists out there, this is bad, VERY bad!
MRI Quenching
I did some YouTubing and found this video of an MRI machine quenching itself (MRI and NMR are very similar instruments).
Liquid Helium
The NMR machine was full of liquid helium. The quenching involved the liquid helium evaporating very rapidly. Here’s a video about the properties of liquid helium and a video of a liquid helium fountain.
Posted on 2008-03-24 by
Natasha round
Natasha came round to visit. She let me wear her lip pucker-upper
And Daria took this photo of us.
Posted on 2007-08-15 by
Sally's inaugural professorial lecture
We had another Brooker Bunch group photo done. This time was by a professional photographer and will be used in advertising for Sally’s inaugural professorial lecture. As you can tell, I’m not a big fan of having my photo taken
Posted on 2007-07-17 by
Brooker Bunch and visitors
We’ve had quite a few visitors to the Brooker Bunch research group recently including Jane Nelson and Grace Morgan. This photo was taken facing away from the University of Otago Chemistry Department. From left: Jane Nelson, Grace Morgan, Humphrey Feltam, Ryan Hellyer, Jonathan Kitchen, Andy Noble, Owen Clements, Sally Brooker, Nick White and Scott Cameron.
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Posted on 2007-03-26 by
The communicator
My dear friend Debbie Jordan won an award recently for “outstanding communicator” at the NZIC conference in Rotorua. Here’s the poster she presented at the conference.
and here’s a demonstration of Debbie using her subtle but effective outstanding communication skills
Posted on 2007-03-03 by
Lehn Stock photos
The poster presentation at Lehn Stock 2007 was a good chance to network with chemists from other parts of the country.
A rather stunned looking Matt Polson walking in front of my attempt to take a photo of the Steel group from Canterbury. Matt used to be lab demonstrator many moons ago.
My fellow Brooker bunch members Scott, Humphrey and Jon getting into the spirit of Lehn Stock 2007.
A nice photo of Jon Kitchen and Lisa McLintock during the poster presentation at Lehn Stock.
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Lehn Stock
I attended the Dunedin Supramolecular symposium and presented my poster on mixed cobalt(III)/silver(I) coordination complexes. The star of the show was Nobel prize laureate Jean Marie Lehn who spoke about his pioneering work in the area of supramolecular chemistry.
From the Supramolecular chemistry Wikipedia page : “Supramolecular chemistry refers to the area of chemistry which focuses on the noncovalent bondinghydrogen bonding, metal coordination, hydrophobic forces, van der Waals forces, pi-pi interactions, and/or electrostatic effects to assemble molecules into multimolecular complexes.
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