On the evening of 11th May, 2016, Professor Liu Danchu of Fudan University was invited to come to our “Science and Humanity” Forum and brought students the lecture of “Chemistry Is around Us”. The lecture took place in room 302 of Phoenix Building and over 100 students came to this lecture.
At the very beginning of the lecture, Prof. Liu arouse students’ interests by a color reaction experiment on scene. This experiment also led to the topic of this lecture: miraculous chemistry is just around us.
Basing on the broad spread controversies on “whether mothball result in cancer” last year, Prof. Liu explained the differences between synthetic mothball and natural mothball and comforted students not to worry about the mothball to much after he introduced five categories of cancerogen by International Agency for Research on Cancer. He then elaborated that antibiotics are often double-edged-sword by talking about Shanghai “Turbot Event”. Antibiotics can cure some illness as well as result in cancer because of scruple inevitable cancerogen in the medicine. He also pointed that many students fond of eating shish kebab. However, the cancerogen in shish kebab is very high, so he hoped that students should treat harmful goods to the body rationally. We not only need to distinguish the boundary between “prohibition” and “quantity limitation”, but also strictly control the quantity of acceptable daily intake. We need to remember that “dosage decides the toxicity.
Prof. Liu took some familiar advertisements as example and pointed out that amounts of non-scientific and even deceptive language were included in the message. He suggested students to know natural scientific knowledge as much as we can, so that we can develop our opinion to avoid the disoriented advertisements. By introducing a case of “taking shower in chilly spring”, Prof. Liu indicated that some magazines and newspapers would published non-scientific views. Therefore, he hoped students to consider carefully about untrue speech and nonsense information. We must take the responsibility which we are requested to take in society. At last, he shared a famous speech of Einstein to students on scene, “ the fun of observing and understanding is the most beautiful gift of nature”.
In later interaction section, students raised questions actively. Prof. Liu gave patient, careful and professional answers to students’ questions about selection of cosmetics, toxicity of lipstick, diet coke, health care products and tooth-paste using.
All seats were occupied in this lecture. Prof. Liu’s pragmatically and humorous explanation led students to study and know much chemistry knowledge in the relaxed atmosphere, which broadened students’ vision.
(Article: Wu Hao, Photograph: Wang Bin, Date: 12th May, 2016)