Swimming in Formaldehyde

I was teaching at Kaplan again tonight in my usual sexy attire, helping my students love the world of science as much as I do. During the discussion of aldehydes and ketones, somebody mentioned formaldehyde and caused me to remember a funny story told to me by my favourite biology professor at Mount A. It goes a little something like this:

When Doug was a PhD student, he worked in a biochemistry lab with several other students. One of them was not very bright, always messing up experiments and creating health hazards wherever he went. Lets call him Dwayne.

In their lab they had a -40°C cooling bath. Water couldn't be used to circulate the low temperature because it would freeze, so instead they used methanol. On this particular day, Dwayne needed to heat something to +40°C, so he heated the bath without changing the solvent within it. Now methanol has a pretty low boiling point, lower than water or ethanol (the good alcohol!), so it began to evaporate and fill the room with methanol vapour.

Methanol is an alcohol, but it is not a party liquid like ethanol. It can be used in antifreeze or as a clean-burning fuel. More importantly, it's very toxic to us. The enzyme in our liver responsible for alcohol breakdown (alcohol dehydrogenase) turns ethanol into the benign compound acetaldehyde, but it can also break down methanol into formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is the stinky liquid used to preserve animals, effectively pickling them so they don't spoil. If you've ever dissected anything in school, you know the smell of formaldehyde.


Back to the lab. All of the students were unknowingly breathing in the methanol vapours. Soon enough they all started going blind. That is, everyone except Dwayne (for some unknown reason). The methanol entering their bodies was being converted to formaldehyde and pickling them from the inside, destroying their optic nerves and depressing their nervous system. This is pretty serious and can lead to death.

Doug realized what Dwayne had done and what was happening to them so he acted quickly. He took all of the students to the campus pub and ordered some rounds of shots and several pitchers of beer with the clear intention of getting completely wasted.

As I said before, the same enzyme breaks down methanol and ethanol. By getting hammered, the students were slowing down formaldehyde production by overwhelming the enzyme with ethanol. If you metabolize methanol slowly enough, you can sweat out the small amount of formaldehyde produced and not go blind or die.

There are three lessons to be learned here:

• 1. Competition of enzymes does have real life applications.


• 2. If you accidentally ingest methanol, get really drunk as fast as you can.


• 3. Be careful when working in a lab with idiots.