Staging a return to fun

Sue Law talks to Martyn Poliakoff, a professor combining green chemistry with whizz-bangs.

Strangers passing Martyn Poliakoff in the street often call out "hello, Einstein" and his striking appearance is caricatured in a cartoon replacing a photograph on his webpage.

Well aware of the power of image, he is determined to put the fun back into chemistry and to improve the flagging image of a subject that this year has seen an 11 per cent drop nationally in undergraduate intake.

One of the last exponents of the dying art of staging impressive chemical experiments, Poliakoff is also doing cutting-edge research and teaching in green chemistry, which he believes is the future for a subject too often synonymous with pollution and toxic waste.

Born into an aristocratic family, who fled Russia during the revolution, he is clearly influenced by a family tradition of the dramatic. His English mother trained as an actress and his brother is film director Stephen Poliakoff.

A day spent with Poliakoff is an experience in itself. A curious mixture of shyness and flamboyance, he strides rapidly down the corridors of Nottingham University where he has taught for 21 years, greeting a passing colleague in fluent Russian. Plastic dog toys litter one of the cluttered desks in his office - "I use them to demonstrate the shapes of molecules" - and opera plays in the background as he explains his teaching style: "A lecture has to be a dramatic performance where you also get across a body of facts. In a good lecture, students rarely realise they are absorbing the facts because they are enjoying themselves.

"Students need to see that I am interested and excited by what I teach or else why should they bother to learn? Much of the excitement of chemistry is seeing what happens, but from children's chemistry sets upwards, all the fun has been taken out because of safety rules," says Poliakoff, who 18 months ago was the first western scientist to become an honorary professor of chemistry at Moscow State University.

He acknowledges that the legendary Nottingham explosives lecturer Colonel B. D. Shaw was an early influence on his teaching style. The first world war hero, who gave his famous demonstration lectures all over the world, once advised him: "Never tell the audience what's going to happen. Something may go wrong. Just tell them to watch your experiment then adjust your patter accordingly."

Opening his second-year undergraduate lecture on nitrogen, he shows the class a beaker with clear liquid and another with pink liquid on the wooden bench. "You can turn one into the other by adding hydrogen peroxide," he explains, pouring it into the potassium permanganate. The class wait expectantly, then start to laugh as the liquid stays stubbornly pink. "Oh well, I think it's too cold straight from the fridge," Poliakoff says, peering into the offending beaker completely unfazed.

Later, he pours out liquid nitrogen and waves of white gas roll over the bench and across the floor. Poised with a lighted splint to burn magnesium in the nitrogen, he warns: "This burns very brightly. If you look directly, you won't see much more of this lecture." Eighty pairs of hands obediently cover faces and the students squint at a flash of light.

It is easy to see why his brand of living chemistry is so appealing. Back in his office, Poliakoff says experiments that go wrong often prove more useful as a learning experience for students, who are excited by the unexpected. He includes demonstrations to inject an element of fun and also to help the class refocus after long sessions at the blackboard.

"Doing a live experiment is like the difference between cinema and theatre - the audience is wondering if you will drop something, or what will happen next. In science, it is important for people to actually see reactions happen. It used to be more common, but live demonstrations are a dying art as too many lecturers are worried they will look silly if it doesn't work," he says.

A boyhood experience taught him the unpredictability of experiments. He tried to distil formic acid from oven cleaner in his laboratory at home, filled the room with deadly fumes and had to run to safety. From an early age, he planned to be a chemist and took his degree at King's College, Cambridge.

Poliakoff admits he is not a natural extrovert and used to feel "terribly shy" performing in public. The breakthrough came as a student, during a conference when he had written out his whole lecture to read verbatim. As he showed his first slide, all the lights were put out and he was too shy to ask for them to be turned back on so he could see his notes. "I began to realise that delivery is as important as content in terms of exciting the audience."

His lively teaching style is certainly popular with students at Nottingham, who have commented on course evaluations; "give him a pay rise" and "can he give all the lectures?" After an enthusiastic reaction to a "really tedious" lecture on substitution in cobalt compounds, he remembers: "I worked myself up into such a state of excitement that I couldn't do anything for the rest of the day." It is this enthusing of a new generation that Poliakoff feels is essential for the future of subjects that have been damaged by growing environmental concerns and a series of horror stories such as the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal.

"The word chemical has very unpleasant connotations. The chemical industry and academics have still not done enough to improve their image," Poliakoff explains.

"As I got older, I had an increasing desire to do something useful and the idea of environmentally friendly chemistry caught my imagination." His research into supercritical fluids in green chemistry has led to a collaboration with Thomas Swan, a County Durham company that is building a unique chemical plant to make chemicals for fragrances and detergents, using a cleaner, more energy efficient process.

He is a member of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's working party on sustainable chemistry, and the management committee of the government's sustainable technology initiative.

Poliakoff is teaching on Nottingham's four-year degree course, to be run jointly with chemical engineering, green chemistry and chemical processing, which is being launched next year: "I believe green chemistry is possible and it will attract young people to chemistry as a worthwhile activity," he says.

Details: www.nottingham.ac.uk/supercritical/

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