How’s this for a coincidence? A few years ago on an organic chemistry exam I asked the following question: A compound used to clean coal is often referred to as 4-methylcyclohexane methanol. What is the correct IUPAC name for this compound? The answer is 4-methylcyclohexylmethanol. IUPAC stands for International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and is the organization charged with developing a system for naming chemicals. Given that there are some 60 million known chemicals, nomenclature obviously has to follow stringent rules to avoid ambiguity.
The coincidence I’m talking about is that this chemical which I more or less haphazardly selected to formulate an exam question is now all over the news! That’s because some 30,000 liters of the chemical leaked into the Elk River in West Virginia from a holding tank resulting in 300,000 people being told to avoid tap water except for flushing toilets. The chemical is used to separate small rocks and pieces of clay from coal by virtue of density. Coal particles float, the undesirables sink.
Virtually every account was sprinkled with the terms “toxic” and “poisonous”. Toxicity of course depends on the dose, and evidence about toxicity in animals when the chemical is consumed in its pure form has little bearing on what may happen to people exposed to water in which it has been greatly diluted. I suspect that the people who rushed to emergency rooms complaining of symptoms they linked to the spill were likely suffering from the “nocebo effect.” That doesn’t mean the symptoms weren’t real, just that their source may have been the mind and not the water. This of course is not to suggest that there should be no concern about such a spill. 4-methylcyclohexylmethanol does not belong in our water system. Many would hold the opinion that it doesn’t belong anywhere, given that the use of coal, “clean” or not, is an environmental disaster. Incidentally, virtually none of the accounts used the correct name for the chemical in question.
