Breaking Bad: An interview with the show's science advisor

For five seasons, Breaking Badass Walter White has made a habit of believing that he's the smartest guy in the room. But even Walt wouldn't stand a chance against Dr. Donna Nelson, a chemistry professor at the University of Oklahoma who has volunteered her expertise as a science advisor to Vince Gilligan since midway through the series' first season.

We chatted up the Oklahoma native about bad science, her work on the series, and how Walter White has inspired a new generation of scientists (in a good way).

You've long been a proponent of promoting scientific accuracy in the entertainment industry. When it comes to bad science, which films or TV shows are some of the worst offenders?

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I don't think that I would be happy to point anybody out; I might make a lot of enemies. I would say that things are getting better. It used to be, in many old movies, that you'd have a rocket going from Earth to Mars and they would show it flying through space. The rocket would be going from left to right across the screen, and the smoke coming out of the rocket would be going up — instead of behind — the rocket, showing that the whole thing was being done in the Earth's gravity. A lot of these things are just funny to me. If you're a scientist, you just groan; it's like nails on the blackboard.

It must be a very different experience watching certain movies or shows from a scientist's perspective.

I don't think there's any popular show that gets it 100 percent right, but that's not the goal. The goal is not to be a science education show; the goal is to be a popular show. And so there's always going to be some creative license taken, because they want to make the show interesting.

In the case of Walter White, his trademark is the blue meth. In reality, it wouldn't be blue; it would be colorless. But this isn't a science education show. It's a fantasy. And Vince Gilligan did a fantastic job of getting most of the science right. And I am just thrilled with that. I think Vince Gilligan is a genius, and you can quote me on that!

How did your involvement with Breaking Bad come about?

I'm a member of the American Chemical Society, which has a trade magazine called Chemical & Engineering News. And that magazine interviewed Vince Gilligan during season one, it was maybe after five episodes, and in that interview Gilligan said, "I really want to get the science right." Vince is really interested in science, but he didn't have a formal science background. He said that he would appreciate constructive remarks from a chemically-inclined audience, and when I read that I thought: This is what we've been waiting for! A Hollywood producer who says he wants help and he really wants to get the science right. This is fantastic.

Then I thought: Oh my god, but look at the subject. This is illegal meth production! I don't want anything to do with that.

But I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. I watched the first five episodes and realized that the show doesn't glorify meth production, and it doesn't glorify the drug culture. I don't think that young kids would be enticed into doing illegal activities when they see all the horrible things that happen to Walt. I mean he gets shot at and stabbed and beat up and dragged through the sand in his underwear — all sorts of things. He has a horrible, horrible life, so I just couldn't see kids watching that and thinking, "Yeah, that's what I want to grow up to be."

So I told the editor: Vince is saying he wants assistance; let's see if he really does. Can you contact him and tell him I'd like to volunteer? And they did. And he got back in touch with me.

What does being a science advisor on the show entail?

I just try to do anything that they ask. Initially, I went out to Burbank and they asked me all sorts of questions. They were still at a point where they trying to build Walt's character, so they asked me: What makes a person become a scientist? What makes a student enter science? What makes someone leave science? What makes a person persist all the way through and get a PhD and then become a high school teacher instead of a professor like you? What makes a person leave science? Are there any characteristics that all scientists have?

I had taken my son with me, who is a chemical engineer, and they even asked him some questions. I didn't think of it as an interview, but I guess it was, because they asked, "If we contact you in the future, would you be willing to answer our questions?" And I said sure! Later, they would email script pages for me to proof or they would phone if something was particularly urgent. So I would answer questions or do calculations or do drawings to go on the blackboard — I did all sorts of things like that.

What's the most memorable instance of a scene you reviewed and suggested be changed?

I tried to change as few words as possible, because there are stories of a science advisor getting too heavy-handed and just alienating the writers. The writers know how to make a script popular; the science advisor knows how to get it correct. If it was dialogue, I would try to keep the cadence that they had. And I also tried to get it back to them really fast, because I knew they were always on a time deadline. So we got along really well.

One of my favorite [scenes] is where Walter is talking to Gus Fring and he's essentially saying, "You need me!" He's touting his knowledge of science. "And by the way, does the reaction destroy the chirality of carbon one or is it carbon two? My knowledge of chemistry makes me very valuable to you." He's being very forceful about his importance there. And I think that that is really a good representation of how important science is, because a lot of people in our society don't understand that everything — from their food to the fabric of the clothes that they wear, their car parts, the carpeting in their house, the paint on their ceiling — comes from chemistry. Chemistry has benefited our lives so much and a lot of times people don't think about this. They just take it for granted. Not everybody, but a lot of people just don't think about it. And so I think that scene is a really good one, especially the way [Bryan Cranston] played it.

Do you watch the show as it airs each week?

Oh yes, I've seen every single episode of the show.

How has advising the show changed your experience as a viewer?

Their criteria are entirely different from the criteria that I use in my research lab a lot of times. And so I think any time you stretch and step outside of your own world, it helps in terms of your creativity. It has certainly made me think about things in ways that I never would have before.

For example, there was a scene where Walter and Jesse are looking for a gallon container of methylamine and all they find are 30-gallon drums. So they emailed me and asked, "How much meth could be made from 30 gallons of methylamine in pounds using the P2P method?" And I just thought that was hilarious, because in our lab we minimize the volume of everything — take 10 drops of this, add two drops of that, etc.—because we want to minimize the cost, we want to maximize the safety, we want to minimize the disposal costs of anything we produce, because it's research. I've never used 30 gallons of anything! Discussing illicit drug synthesis just isn't something I do with students. All of our calculations are done in grams, not pounds. So I had to pause and laugh at that for a while.

I asked Vince if he wanted it to be really accurate or just a ballpark figure and he said he wanted it really accurate. In the P2P method, there are two steps: The first step is fixed, but in the second step I could use one of several different reducing agents. He asked me to send him a list of them, which I did, and most of them were difficult to pronounce. But one of them was simply aluminum mercury. And he said, "That's the one we want to use, because it will be much easier for the actors to say." I thought that was hilarious, because I selected these agents based on cost, safety, percent yield and purity, but never on how easy it was to speak the name of the reducing agent. So it's looking at things from a totally different perspective, which I think made me a more creative person.

What's the one subject you would have never imagined yourself researching before Breaking Bad came along?

The amount of meth produced from 30 gallons of methylamine! (Laughs) I still marvel at that. That is just so far away from anything I've ever dealt with. I've tried very hard to shut down any conversations with students about illegal activities, because I don't want to give the impression that I would be involved or even interested in something like that. That was really outside the boundaries for me.

Your work on the show has to have made you one of the university's most popular professors. Do you think the show has changed the perception of science for its younger viewers or stimulated a further interest in pursuing scientific studies?

I absolutely do. There's just no doubt about it based on what I've seen. You can look at these blogs that are up about the show and you'll see kids arguing about the details of the chemical reactions or details of the science that I wouldn't have even thought about and I think: Those kids are going to be future scientists. They're so hooked on science; it's really thrilling.

What I see all the time is that people who have been watching Breaking Bad talk to someone who hasn't been watching and say, "You've got to tune in. It's a fantastic show." So every time someone who is not being regularly exposed to science steps in and takes a look at science, that's an opportunity to win them over. And that's exactly what we need. It's popularizing science.

What about the importance of scientific accuracy in Hollywood in general? Do you think that Breaking Bad has upped the ante in terms of future series and movies really striving to "get it right?"

Some producers will be interested in that and some of them won't. I think it will help, and that's something that scientists really appreciate. I think that Vince Gilligan has set a really wonderful example, because before this it was actually said, "You can't have a blockbuster hit and have accurate science, too." Vince has disproved that myth.

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