Illustration by Veronica Berns

When Veronica Berns PhD’14 was nearing the end of her path to a doctorate in chemistry, one thing kept bothering her. It wasn’t her research — five years of work studying crystals and the structure of solids — or the defense of her dissertation. It was that many of the people closest to her had no idea what she was studying.

“My family, my friends — all of the people I knew who didn’t do science for a living — they didn’t really understand what I was doing or why it was cool,” she says. “So I came up with this idea of drawing a comic book to make the language of chemistry easier to understand.”

During the last few months at UW–Madison, Berns started noodling around with pictures and text for Atomic Size Matters, a simplified explanation of her research. She told her adviser, Danny Fredrickson, about it, and he encouraged her to include the comic in her dissertation. She did, much to the pleasure of her review committee.

“People really seemed to like it,” she says. “All of these chemists asked me when they could get a copy and how they could do something similar.”

After graduation, Berns used Kickstarter to raise money so that she could publish Atomic Size Matters. Online donors contributed $14,400, and she took the book through a printing, selling copies through her website, veronicaberns.com.

Today, Berns works as a bench chemist for Honeywell, synthesizing new solids in a lab in Illinois. But she still thinks about creating another comic.

“I’d like to do something on Nobel Prizes,” she says. “Every year, these great discoveries get awards and coverage in the press, but the media often leave out the good parts. They don’t explain what it is about science that makes this work so cool.”

An early interest in chemistry and an unwavering commitment to basic research has earned a Badger a prestigious award that’s often called “the American Nobel.”

Richard Scheller ’74 has been chosen to share the 2013 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. Among Lasker recipients, eighty-three have gone on to win a coveted Nobel Prize.

Scheller, executive vice president of Genentech in California, has studied how messenger chemicals move between neurons (a type of nerve cell), focusing on the tiny containers that hold neurotransmitters and release them to signal a neighboring neuron. Communication between cells is essential in our nervous systems, allowing us to, say, throw a ball, hear a string quartet, or remember a face.

As a student at the UW, Scheller recalls, “There were tremendous opportunities … to do individual research and an honors undergraduate thesis. I have had a little more experience with different universities now and can look back and say … [the UW] is an absolutely terrific, first-rate institution. I owe a lot to them for the education that I received there.”

UW chemistry professor Bassam Shakhashiri says Scheller “stood out right away in Chemistry 104, a second-semester course. What he has done is a great tribute to the ingenuity of the human brain.”

A student’s answer on an organic chemistry worksheet: this is a depiction of a reaction mechanism (an SN1 reaction, for those in the know) with curved arrows showing how electrons “move” and change from one compound to another. Not every notation (e.g., “Hypersomething”) is correct.

The cruelest course on campus may not live up to its legend.

Harder than teaching a dog how to “Bucky,” more terrifying than losing Paul Bunyan’s axe, able to crush dreams in a single semester. The most infamous class on campus is now … not that bad?

For decades, generations of Badgers have lived in fear of one class in particular: organic chemistry (or “Evil O. Chem,” as it is not-so-fondly called).

Attending a fifty-minute lecture three days a week, UW students in introductory organic chemistry (Chemistry 341 and 343) learn the basics about carbon compounds. A pre-requisite for many majoring in a science or medical field, this course also coordinates with a lab and weekly discussion sections.

After hearing nothing positive about organic chemistry from fellow students, Alex Kelsey x’14, a psychology major at UW–Madison, believed the course’s infamous reputation. “I was absolutely terrified to enroll in organic chemistry,” he says. “I actually considered changing career plans to avoid taking the class.”

But some things aren’t as bad as rumored. Perhaps the hellish reputation this course has is outdated — rooted in ways of teaching that are now obsolete.

“Students have been afraid of organic chemistry for forever,” explains lecturer Matt Bowman. “Maybe it’s because of the way it used to be taught, where it was memorize this, memorize that; it’s not taught that way anymore.”

Bowman attributes this change in part to the addition of discussion sections led by teaching assistants (TAs). In the past, students had only one option for getting help outside of the regular lectures: attending professors’ office hours. The discussion sections allow students to meet with a TA and ask questions, review problems, or get tips on how to solve equations.

The online tool Learn@UW is another resource today’s students can use to understand organic chemistry. “I can post my TAs’ notes from my lecture and my own notes so students can see different examples,” explains Bowman.

“The truth is that, yes, it’s a difficult class, and some people are more adept at understanding the concepts than others. But there are plenty of resources available to help students,” says Alexandra Douglas x’13.

Bowman realizes that most students come to an organic chemistry class believing it is going to be awful, thanks to all the negative hype that surrounds it. And, despite added resources to help students succeed, most chemistry classes maintain a retention rate of only 80 percent — a fact that he attributes to the class’s bad rap.

“[Students] come in expecting to have a bad time,” explains Bowman. “And because of that, some of them are not surprised — they have a bad time.”

Perhaps the secret to success in organic chemistry is to not believe its reputation. “The class did not live up to the hype, and it is actually my favorite class to date,” says Kelsey. “My opinions of organic chemistry now are drastically different from what they were before I took the class.”