Hi, I'm Deboki and this is okidokiboki, and today I am really excited to
be talking about a really cool thing,
which is that I am hosting Crash Course Organic Chemistry.
I'll link to Crash Course down below so you can check out
the organic chemistry series if you want,
but they also have a lot of other
awesome educational content. There's a
lot I could say about why I'm excited to
be part of the Crash Course team in
general for this, just like in terms of
getting to work with all of these people
who are so awesome and so good at what they
do, and who are especially so good at
like making this really complicated
topic accessible. Getting to see how like
the people who structure and write and
like illustrate everything are
working through all of that is really
really cool, and I feel really lucky that
I get to be any part of this process at
all. But with that said I'm gonna be a
little bit self-centered today because
I feel like it would have been
excited to be part of any Crash Course
team, but it's especially meaningful to
me that I'm hosting organic chemistry in
particular. And so I just I just wanted
to talk about that. I feel like I have
like a weirdly high number of organic
chemistry-related anecdotes for someone
who's actually not a chemist. They're not
necessarily good stories, but that's
never stopped me before from telling
them, so like why would I stop now. I took
organic chemistry as an undergrad, and
one of my like most vivid memories of
orgo was this time when my roommates and
I were like on the way to class. So
there's no one around, right, because it's the
morning, there's like nothing going on
really except everyone who has to walk
to orgo. There's no one at this
intersection except us until this car comes
up and just starts blasting Sandstorm.
It was really cool because like it was like
well, like, I guess we're gonna get hyped
for class now, but it was weird to
just like in the middle of the street,
just like with nothing else going
on, just [attempts to sing Sandstorm]
It's the kind of thing that only happens when
you're on the way to organic chemistry.
Oh there was another time that year
where I think I was like getting ready
for a quiz or whatever. 
I mean there's always a quiz, right?
And I just have this like really strong memory
of this one dream, it's like the dream
that I remember more than any other
dream that I've had, which was this dream
where I was a carbon molecule. And in the
dream as this carbon molecule, I really
wanted to lose my hydrogen, so I like got
up in the middle of the night and
and then I took off my sweatpants,
because in my head, the sweatpants
represented hydrogen. And then I went
back to sleep. And then later I was like,
hey you know, like I'm a carbon molecule,
I want my hydrogen back. So I woke up
again, and I put my sweat pants back on.
Oh, then there was another time...so I went
to a nerd camp when I was in high school,
and then when I was in college, they did
this contest where you could like
write an essay about what nerd camp meant
to you, and I was one of the winners for
this and so that meant that I got to go
to this event for Nobel Prize winners.
But the event was about an hour away
from the campus, and so I didn't know how
to get there because I didn't have a car,
but I was crafty. II was like you know
who's really smart, are the Nobel Prize-winning
professors on our campus, and
some of them are on this guest list. And
so I didn't know any of them, but I emailed them, just like "hey I'm this undergrad,
can you give me a ride to that thing
where they're celebrating you?" And one of
the professor's actually said yes,
his name's Professor Robert Grubbs, he's
an organic chemist, he won the Nobel
Prize in 2005. He and his wife took me in
their car to the Getty, and I got to hang
out with him and other really smart
Noble Prize winners, and it was really cool.
They were really nice, and I learned that
if you win the Nobel Prize, you get to
have wonderful dinners at the Getty. I
have taken a lot of science classes in
my life, and I am NOT a chemist, but for
some reason organic chemistry is the one
science that seems to be making the most
like recurring appearances in my stories.
And like that is weird to me except that
I'm also like starting to become
increasingly convinced that organic
chemistry--just like the entire field--is
like a family curse/blessing of sorts.
And to explain that, I am gonna need
to explain my family. So to start let me
tell you about my wedding. At this
wedding reception where all of our
friends, our families, they were gathered
there that day you know for food and
drinks...and also for the wedding, but
mostly for the food and drinks, to kick off
the toasts, my dad stood up in front of
all of our guests and gave them a brief
lecture about energy trophic levels. It
was really important to him you see,
because my husband is vegan, and my dad
really wanted everyone in the room to
understand like the connections between
dietary choices in the environment and
like how energy gets passed up,
down, and whatever through ecosystems
and whatever...all of this stuff he wanted
our guests to understand. And for some
of our guests this was a new experience.
For many of them, it was not because my
dad tell stories about what he knows, and
what he knows is science. To sit down for
anything with my dad is to sit down for
an anthology. The stories are tied
together, sometimes through the loosest
of narrative threads, until he's taken
you on a full journey that can (and often
has) included the discovery of the
smallpox vaccine, the use of paper to
measure the atomic bomb blast. and that
time that he got caught setting off
fireworks because he forgot that sulfur
is heavier than air. Fortunately it turns
out that there is a job for people who
enjoy talking about science to a captive
audience with little regard for time
constraints: my dad is a chemistry
professor, and my mom is too. They are the
first scientists I ever knew.
My dad's abilities and interests weren't
developed spontaneously. He was also born
to to chemists who I called Didu and
Dadu, who lived on the other side of the
world in the city of Kolkata in India.
My grandfather Dadu didn't tell stories
so much as he had stories told about him.
I didn't know about the time that he
chased down an escaped pet peacock until
my dad told me that story. I also didn't
know until an uncle told me that Dadu's
work with organic chemist Sir Robert
Robinson on the structure of strychnine
would end up contributing to Robinson's
Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1947.
The only story that I actually remember Dadu telling me was about this time he
took a boat to visit the US to visit
various academic institutions. And the
kids on the boat were like so fascinated
by this quiet Indian man that they would
just like throw candies through his like
door through the keyhole. Dadu pretty
much refused to retire, like even in his
90s he was still going to work, he was
still studying chemical reactions. But he
passed away the summer after I graduated
from high school.
That summer I only had to learn of
Dadu's death once. But my grandmother,
who I called Didu, had been bedridden
for more than a decade, and that
compounded issues that she had with
dementia and Alzheimer's. When we went to
Kolkata that summer, Didu would ask for
him every few minutes, then later every
few hours, than later every few days,
until eventually she no longer mentioned
him at all. To me as this young girl who
was growing up on stories of my
grandparents along with what I knew when
I would go to visit them, Dadu was steady like
the house that they lived in. But Didu
was frenetic like the city around them.
Or at least that's what I was told
Always when my mom conjures up the
vision of the Didu that she knew best,
it's of this woman in an impeccably-styled sari
and a matching purse zipping
around the city taking all the busses,
just going everywhere, knowing everyone,
like she owns the place. And didu
was every bit as legendary in my family as dadu was. She had been in the head of
the chemistry department at Bethel
College, a woman's college at the
University of Calcutta, and growing up it
felt like I was always meeting her
former students. Even my mom used to be
one of her students before she later
became her daughter-in-law. And I grew up
with all of these amazing stories about
her energy, her generosity, her
determination--just like how much she
loved her work, how much she loved
teaching. Probably most legendary of all
were probably the stories of her PhD,
which she did an Oxford in the 40s as an
unmarried woman. Like she was like
traveling alone to another country, and
like at that time, that was still a
striking thing. And Didu was so
determined her finish her work quickly.
Like she just she was like, you kno,
like I'm here, this is cool, you're
you're letting me work in this lab and
stuff, but I also want to go home you
know. So she decided to finish her PhD in
one and a half years...which is fucking
ridiculous to me. It took me seven years
to finish my PhD. But the stories that I
heard of didu were a sharp contrast
to the woman I grew up with, the woman
who was bedridden and whose memory was
ultimately fading. When her mind was
still active, Didu would tell me the
stories about her younger days. She told
me about games she played when she was
younger, she told me about school, she
told me about this time that she went to
a conference and she lost my dad, I think
they were in Japan, but she found him
because he was wearing his hat, it was this whole
thing. But over time as her memory faded,
the number of stories she could tell
grew smaller and smaller until she
returned to only one: the story of her
Oxford days. Even with like this distance
in time and the haze of dementia, the
thing that stuck with her were the
British guys that she worked with, like
this this mass of nameless admirers who
like were either asking her for help,
begging her for help, or being sent to
her for help. And when they weren't
asking her for help, they were repaying
the favor by like following her around
the lab to try to make sure that
her sari wouldn't catch on any Bunsen
burners and like get
and you know go on fire. And like
whenever she told me about that part, she
would laugh so much because
like to her, like even like decades later,
she's like I know like how to use my
sari, I know how to do chemistry, like
I've been doing this all day, I'm not
gonna catch on fire, I know what I'm
doing.
It was so amusing to her that like they
would be so worried about this thing
that to her, she's like yeah like, I got
it, I know how to do this. And so full
disclosure, the bulk of what I'm telling
you right now actually comes from an
essay that I wrote like three or four
years ago for an application for a media
fellowship that I was hoping would help
me transition out of like grad school
(when I graduated) and into like you know
some kind of writing career. And at that
time as I was writing that essay, I was
really struck by this idea that like you
know, I was the same age that she was
in that story, I was in the same
point in my life. And so while I was
writing it, I was just like really hung
up on this idea that that period in my
life could be--you know, like it had been
for my grandmother--it could be the last
story that I ever knew, that I ever
told. And I was just so scared of like
what my life was gonna be at that point,
that it was really hard to imagine that
that could be the case. That like decades
later, I would like look back on that era
fondly. But puzzling through what her
experience must have been kind of
emphasize something to me, which is that
these stories aren't static, like
what it is when you experience it
changes over time. The way that I thought
about it with her is like when she was
younger, like that time at Oxford, maybe
she was scared, maybe she was stressed
like she was working really hard, but it
was also probably like this funny
anecdote. Eventually that story probably
took a backseat because when she like
had to run a department, when she had to
run a household. And you know for a long
time, it was a story I didn't hear as
much of. And it wasn't really until the
end of her life that I started to hear
that story more. And maybe the reason why
this story endured, and the reason why
she started telling it again was because
it brought back this point in her life
where she was doing something that she
really loved, that she was really
passionate about, and at the same time, it
involved these characters basically
whose names didn't bring about sadness
when forgotten. And maybe the reason she
was telling me this story was the same
reason that Dadu was telling me his one
story about visiting the country that
would decades later become the place
that I was born, because it was this
thing that across time
and place connected us. Part of my
fear like over the past decade as I've
like figured out what I want to study
and later what I want to do for work, and
like all this stuff was like this
realization that I wasn't going to
continue with what my family knows best,
which is organic chemistry and research.
I wasn't gonna be able to rely on their
experience anymore and even though
that's like a thing that obviously a lot
of people do, that was the first time
that I was fully confronting it like a
few years ago. And it's been scary. The
fellowship that I applied for with this
essay, like when I applied for it, I
remember thinking of it as like this
like shining beacon of just like
opportunity, where it's like if you get this
like you can do it, like you will...you
will get to the next step, you have
figured something out, and you will be
able to get to where you want to be. And
then I got rejected, I didn't get the
fellowship, and it was terrifying like I
I was like...oh fuck, like shitm like this
is the the only path that I can
currently understand for getting where I
want to be, and now I'm not gonna be able
to get that path going, like how do I do
this, like how do I get to that place
where like I can do what I want to do,
which is just to write and talk and create
things that like are related to science?
And so the thing is like I was wrong,
like it turns out that that fellowship
was not the only opportunity out there.
And so like that's like a big part of
like why on a very selfish level
I am excited for Crash Course because it
feels good that like I get to do this
thing that is really cool and that's in
line with the things that I've been
wanting to do. But also when I told my
parents that I was going to be hosting
Crash Course: Organic Chemistry, they both
immediately had the same reaction, which
is that Didu would have been so happy.
She loved working in a chemistry, she
loved teaching. But also like I think
like if YouTube had existed decades ago,
if Crash Course that existed decades ago,
she would be doing this. She would just
like set up a camera, and she would have
taken you through how to do a chemistry
experiment without setting your sari
on fire. And so that's a big part of why
I'm excited for organic chemistry in
particular. I'm really excited to talk
about all of this cool science that like
shapes how our world works, I'm really
excited for people to get to learn about
organic chemistry to hopefully better
understand it, whether it's for their own
course material or for their own
curiosity. I'm really excited for all the
people that I get to work with. But most
of all I'm excited for my family.
I miss my grandparents.
I miss the conversations we had,
I miss the conversations we didn't get
to have. And I like that this is a part
of my conversation now with my parents,
that this is part of the story that we
tell each other. You know, traditions and
heirlooms, those are things that we hand
down from generation to generation, and
they are these things that connect us
with people that we knew, people
we didn't know. But they're like this
ongoing conversation that you have
across your family, across generations
even when you don't get to have those
conversations anymore. And our family has
those but we're all too a bunch of nerds
so apparently we hand down organic chemistry too.
