You probably know that I am not a fan of Bonnie Garmus’ error riddled book, but I thought maybe they would clean up all that mish-mosh in the TV series. After all, there are probably hundreds of people working to produce this series based on the book. Foolish me. It’s worse.
I admit I could barely get through one episode, not only because of the scientific errors, but because Elizabeth Zott’s overwhelming paranoia about being mistreated as a woman is so overplayed. And all of the men in the lab are treated as ignorant, overbearing boors, laying it on pretty thick.
The scientific babble about phosphate rings and the like is better than her talking about covalent bonds in the book. But it’s pretty clear that the actress (Brie Larson) has no idea what any of that babble actually means as she races through it.
The writers took an incident from later in the book where she is a TV cooking show host and moved it into the preliminary scenes as a teaser of what is to come. In the book, she tosses out some canned soup because it if “full of chemicals,” but in this scene she adds “bad chemicals” and implies they will kill you. This is utter nonsense, of course, and nothing but pandering to the fears of the uneducated. The FDA regulates additives and preservatives, and no one is going to die!
Zott tells people that she is interested in abiogenesis, or how life began. But she never mentions that we have a pretty good idea how it began. She should know as every chemist does, about Wohler’s syntheses of urea from inorganic starting materials in 1828, showing that there is no difference between living and non-living compounds.
Soon after that, she is shown beginning her own after-hours research and discovering that the bottle of a compound she needs is empty. So, she sneaks into Calvin’s lab to get one of his. We soon learn that she needed some ribose (a simple sugar) for her experiment. But the bottles they show are narrow necked brown bottles, which would be unlikely to be the container for ribose, a white powder. And, in fact, it would be in a commercially labeled wide mouth bottle, because it was easily available from chemical supply companies. Today, it is sold as a dietary supplement, so anyone can see that it is a powder by a simple search.
Just to extend Zott’s humiliation, Garmus throws in a beauty contest for the secretaries, and Zott is asked to join. All of the secretaries are portrayed as ridiculously stupid, which is simply unreasonable. They are working in a research lab and have to know what they are doing. This would never happen in any company, not even in 1951!
Zott and Calvin join up in the same lab before the first episode is over, and Zott reorganizes the lab to make things easier to find. She put all the spatulas in a beaker near the sink. But the spatulas they show are the kitchen spatulas that you might use to spread cake icing. Lab spatulas are considerably smaller, like these:
You’d think someone would check on that sort of thing.
Calvin’s lab is decorated with huge 1-liter and 2-liter round bottoms and Erlenmeyers, all perfectly clean, because the kind of biochemical research they are interested in is actually carried out in very small flasks with milligrams or micrograms of material.
He is also shown eating food (mostly peanuts) in his lab and leaving them on lab benches, where both he and Zott help themselves. This is a lethally dangerous idea and again would never happen in any real lab. You don’t eat on the lab bench (or preferably at all) in the lab!
Calvin is also shown showering under the lab safety shower. This is very cute, but they don’t work that way. Once you pull the chain, they stay on until you reach up and turn off with the lever. They are made to drench you if you spill something dangerous on yourself. And they can’t be enclosed like that: they have to be accessible from anywhere in the lab within 10 seconds.
And finally, Larson mispronounces citrate with a long “I,” saying sy-trate instead of sit-rate. Surely someone on the staff would know better than that. This is just embarrassing.