Regular or unleaded? Students in new Environmental Chemistry course check the lead content of their hair

Students enrolled in the University of Chicago’s new Environmental Chemistry course are learning that the residue of pollution is as near at hand as the hair on their heads, the apples in their shopping bags or the soil beneath their feet.

From concentrations of lead in paint to traces of pesticides on fresh fruit, students are measuring the pollutants themselves with the type of advanced instruments they would find at the Environmental Protection Agency and other scientific labs.

“Other universities have analytical chemistry courses where students do instrumental analysis. This teaching laboratory is unusual in that it is dedicated to environmental science,” said Jonathan Abbatt, Assistant Professor in Geophysical Sciences. “I haven’t heard of anything else like it.”

The course, offered for the first time this spring quarter, focuses on the science underlying the formation and fate of chemicals in the Chicago-area environment. Designed for science majors and others with an interest beyond general education, the course is cross-listed in the Chemistry Department.

Coteaching Environmental Chemistry with Abbatt, an atmospheric chemist, is David Archer, an Associate Professor in Geophysical Sciences who specializes in chemical oceanography. In the lab section of the course, they will teach students how to use an impressive array of instruments.

They will measure pesticides and other pollutants with a new, $60,000 gas chromatograph mass spectrometer. The gas chromatograph separates all the individual chemicals in a sample, while the mass spectrometer breaks them down into fragments, identifies their chemical natures and measures their concentrations. With measurements in hand, students can then compare their results against a software library that contains data on 10,000 compounds.

One exercise with the instrument will involve testing organically grown fruit against fruit grown with pesticides. “Does it really matter if you wash it? I’ve always wondered about that,” Archer said.

With a $37,000 atomic absorption spectrometer, students are analyzing materials for heavy metals such as mercury, lead and cadmium. Tiny amounts of ingested lead actually accumulate in human hair. Some of the Environmental Chemistry students are seeing this for themselves in the lab, while others are measuring lead in paint.

To evaluate water quality, students will use a $6,000 ultraviolet visible spectrophotometer and an ion chromatograph from Abbatt’s research lab. With these instruments, students can assess whether it is worth buying bottled water and study what pollutants contribute to the acidity of rain and snow in Chicago.

Most of the funding for the $185,000 environmental chemistry teaching laboratory came from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The institute provided $160,000 for equipment as part of a broader $1.8 million educational innovation grant to the Biological Sciences Collegiate Division. The University kicked in $25,000 to renovate the space from research into a teaching lab.

“These really are nice, state-of-the-art instruments,” Abbatt said.

The lab eventually will serve a wide variety of students in addition to those enrolled in Environmental Chemistry, said Abbatt and Theodore Steck, Chairman of Chicago’s Environmental Studies Program. They could range from undergraduates working on relevant senior thesis research to graduate students in the new master’s degree program in environmental science and policy jointly offered by the Harris School of Public Policy Studies and the Physical Sciences Division. An epidemiologist at the Pritzker School of Medicine has even expressed interest in incorporating the lab into an undergraduate course on environmental health, Steck said.

The new course is part of an effort to expand environmental education at Chicago. In conjunction with the Environmental Studies program, the University has initiated a six-course, two-year sequence in environmental science, effective in the 1999 fall quarter, that will fulfill the entire natural sciences Common Core requirements for nonscience majors, Steck said.

Archer already teaches another course–on global warming with Geophysical Sciences Professor Ray Pierrehumbert–that will become a part of the environmental science Core sequence. Next fall quarter, Abbatt and Geophysical Sciences Professor John Frederick will add yet another course to the Core sequence, Atmospheric Chemistry and Air Quality.

The other three courses in the Environmental Sciences sequence consist of The Biosphere, Organisms and Ecosystems in the Environment; Analysis of Environmental Data; and Environmental Policy. The sequence is a rigorous series of courses accessible to all students, regardless of their majors, Steck said.

“We think that environmental education should contribute to everybody’s world-view,” Steck said. “The sequence is designed to reach students who aren’t science majors and who might not otherwise particularly have the opportunity to educate themselves in environmental affairs.”