The Difference Between Science and Breaking Bad

While Vince Gilligan and the writers of Breaking Bad were getting a crash course in science, University of Oklahoma chemistry professor Dr. Donna Nelson was getting a crash course in television as the science advisor for the show. In an interview at mental_floss, Nelson highlights some of the differences in the two occupations' vantage points.   

For example, there was a scene where Walter and Jesse are looking for a gallon container of methylamine and all they find are 30-gallon drums. So they emailed me and asked, “How much meth could be made from 30 gallons of methylamine in pounds using the P2P method?” And I just thought that was hilarious, because in our lab we minimize the volume of everything—take 10 drops of this, add two drops of that, etc.—because we want to minimize the cost, we want to maximize the safety, we want to minimize the disposal costs of anything we produce, because it’s research. I’ve never used 30 gallons of anything! Discussing illicit drug synthesis just isn’t something I do with students. All of our calculations are done in grams, not pounds. So I had to pause and laugh at that for a while.

I asked Vince if he wanted it to be really accurate or just a ballpark figure and he said he wanted it really accurate. In the P2P method, there are two steps: the first step is fixed, but in the second step I could use one of several different reducing agents. He asked me to send him a list of them, which I did, and most of them were difficult to pronounce. But one of them was simply aluminum mercury. And he said, “That’s the one we want to use, because it will be much easier for the actors to say.” I thought that was hilarious, because I selected these agents based on cost, safety, percent yield, and purity, but never on how easy it was to speak the name of the reducing agent. So it’s looking at things from a totally different perspective, which I think made me a more creative person.

She's had to walk a fine line to add scientific accuracy to the show without losing the entertainment value. Read the rest at mental_floss. Link