It's elementary, my dear Watson

Did you know that a grand total of 67 actors have played the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes in film and television and on stage and radio? I didn’t think so.

 

My favorite has to be Basil Rathbone, although I didn’t see him on the big screen until years after his movies came out in the late 1930s and much of the 1940s. Several other actors I saw in the role played Homes well, but the difference was that Rathbone was Holmes.  When he put on that curious, double-billed “deerstalker” hat and clenched that rather long, gracefully curved pipe in his teeth, you were looking at the world-famous sleuth, not the well-known actor. After reading all of the Sir Arthur Conant Doyle Holmes’ novels, the moment I saw Rathbone on the screen, I knew the producers had their man.

 

With this as background, I suspect you can imagine my reaction when I learned that there is now a special online edition of the American Chemical Society’s Journal of Chemical Education (JCE) featuring a collection of mysteries based on the famous Sherlock Holmes detective series by Doyle, with a chemistry twist. I checked it out immediately, of course, and I invite you to do the same at “The Chemical Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.”

 

Holmes’s chemical adventures are the work of Thomas G. Waddell and Thomas R. Rybolt, of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and Ken Shaw, of The Waterford School in Sandy, Utah. Norbert J. Pienta, Ph.D., editor-in-chief of JCE and professor of chemistry at the University of Iowa, noted that Waddell and Rybolt’s stories appeared from 1989 to 2004 and Shaw’s from 2008 to 2009.

 

“These science ‘whodunits’ have found wide use in classrooms to illustrate chemistry topics,” Pienta said. “The virtual edition — the first for the Journal of Chemical Education — packages the whole body of 17 stories in a single convenient location.”

 

In a commentary, Erica K. Jacobsen, an associate editor of JCE and editor of the virtual edition, praised the collection for both its educational and entertainment value.

 

“Teachers, students, and chemistry aficionados alike will enjoy working through these mysteries. Each can function as an enrichment activity for students, a mind-bender for weary heads before a school vacation, an application of a recent unit’s concepts in a challenging mystery, or simply a fun evening for a teacher while unwinding from correcting a stack of lab notebooks. Whatever the use, join Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as they travel the streets of London solving their varied chemical adventures. The game is afoot!”   

 

For more details, go to Sherlock