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

last updated 8 January 2015

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.

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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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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