The Chemistry of Breaking Bad Goes Viral

Author: Antonia Niedobitek
Published On: September 1, 2014
Copyright: Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

To their great surprise, Tunga Salthammer, Fraunhofer WKI, Braunschweig, Germany, and Falk Harnisch, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Leipzig, Germany, received overwhelming response to their article on Breaking Bad. The paper went viral on Breaking Bad forums, Facebook and Twitter. The authors received countless emails from peers as well as from fans of the TV series. Soon, the article became the most accessed paper of Chemie in unserer Zeit. An English translation was published in ChemistryViews in December 2013, and triggered a press response on an international scale.

Salthammer and Harnisch were training for a marathon in autumn 2012 when they were brainstorming for a possibility to publish an article together. While running, they discovered a common passion: Breaking Bad. Kilometer by kilometer, they structured the article.

In response to immense popularity of the article, Salthammer and Harnisch are invited to give lectures on Breaking Bad, which are very well attended. The lectures, in turn, caused the authors to reflect more intensely on the chemistry in their paper. For example, own experiments demonstrated that the synthesis of monophosphane from red phosphorus is more complicated than they had expected.