Breaking Bad's Meth Consultant

Trying to remain faithful to the science :

Originally from the small Oklahoma town of Eufaula, Nelson picked up an interest in science from her father and grandfather, both doctors. In 1983 she became the first tenure-track female professor ever hired by the university’s century-old chemistry department. She estimates that she has taught organic chemistry to nearly 10,000 students.

...Nelson got involved with Breaking Bad after reading an interview with its creator, Vince Gilligan, in Chemical & Engineering News. “He said neither he nor his writer had a science background, and so they had to rely on Wikipedia and the Web,” she says. “When I read that, I thought, ‘We scientists are always complaining about shows getting the science wrong. It’s like fingernails on a blackboard to us. This would be a great opportunity to work with one.’”

Her second thought, however, was “Wow, do I want to get involved with this show? I wouldn’t want to do anything that looks like it condones illegal synthesis. People say it glamorizes illicit meth labs.” After watching a few episodes, she stopped worrying. “It portrays the characters getting beat up, shot at, having these horrible lives,” she sums up. “I don’t think any kid watching it would want to be like that.”

... In one of the first scenes Nelson was asked to help with, the show’s antihero, Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston), was supposed to explain the nomenclature of alkyne hydrocarbons to his high school chemistry class. “When I saw what they had written, I thought, ‘Wow, they really need help,’” she recalls. She rewrote much of the dialogue and handed the staff some explanatory diagrams, which she was delighted to see Cranston re-create precisely on-screen on the classroom blackboard.

...In one episode, Cranston and his young sidekick, played by Aaron Paul, can’t find any pseudoephedrine—a common meth precursor chemical often extracted from cold medicines. The two steal some 30-gallon drums of methylamine to use instead. “I looked up the exact process in which you’d use methylamine and did all the calculations on how much it would yield,” says Nelson. Turns out there are several different processes one can use. “They chose the one that was easiest for the actors to say.”

The show is now in its fifth season, and Nelson is clearly enjoying the secondhand glamour it brings her—she even made a brief cameo appearance as a nurse in one episode, she says, but wound up on the cutting-room floor. Meanwhile, she’s hoping to leverage her Hollywood cred by making a public service announcement warning Oklahomans about the dangers of crank. That idea came from a recent meeting with the state’s governor. “She told me,” says Nelson, “that the biggest problem we have right now in the state is illegal meth synthesis.”