Hello! If it was the post-apocalypse, would it be realistic for a chemist to ask for uncontaminated samples of 'old world' substances from before the apocalypse—like hair dye, deodorant, etc.—so they could reverse engineer them and synthesize usable facsimiles? What equipment would they need? What sorts of ingredients would be difficult/impossible to obtain/create? Thanks in advance!!
You need to determine three things toreverse-engineer a mix:
- The reagents—the what
- The amounts—the how much
- The procedure—the how
When you’re creating your final product, you need to addthings in the right order. Otherwise, your mixture might not mix well, things might precipitate out, you might have a runaway reaction, or any number ofother happenings. A chemical analysis might help you with the first two requirements, butthat last requirement is something that’d rely on knowledge and wisdom.
Unfortunately, unlike the movies, you can’t just plop yoursample onto a scanner and have the computer instantly spit out a perfectanalysis of what and how much. Instrumental analysis is not that straightforward:
- There isn’t One Instrument To Rule ThemAll—instruments are chosen and calibrated with specific standards based on what you wantto analyze. If you have a GCMS (gas chromatography/mass spectrometry) calibrated for quantitative analysis of lightweight VOCs (volatileorganic compounds) and you feed in a sample of heavy PAHs (polycyclic aromatichydrocarbons), the readout will be nonsensical because it won’t match the calibration standards. Also, the instrument would be contaminated, which will screw up future VOC analyses until it gets flushed and cleaned.
- You need to prepare your samples—by which I mean you need to turn it into a phase that the instrument can accept. For example, an X-raydiffractometer analyzes minerals ground into a very fine powder, whereas HPLCor MS have samples dissolved into solution.
- Your samples need to be relatively pure and diluted appropriately. If you simply dilute your hair dye and feed it straight into theinstrument without removing the majority of your inactive ingredients, yourresults will be an absolute mess because there’s too much there. If your sample is beyond the concentration range of the calibrationstandards, you will not be able to quantify your results. Badly prepared samples could also contaminate the instrument.
- Molecules don’t always survive a trip through an instrument wholeand hale; they often fragment and the readouts reflect that. Also, particular functional groups (fragments) of a molecule often have characteristic ranges ona given instrument’s readouts, but the exact result varies depending on the particularmolecule. Your analyst needs to be trained tointerpret the results.
- Finally, a mixture has multiple components.In the case of hair dye, you might care about the actual dyes—i.e. themolecules that would bind to your hair and change its colour. But a sample ofhair dye has a lot of other things like thickeners, emollients, oils, pH adjusters, antimicrobial agents, et cetera. If you want toreverse-engineer a complete sample, you’d have to work up yoursample, keep all the workup phases, and analyze them each by turn. You may notsuccessfully identify all of the components.
Does that sound like a lot of work? It is.
Going back to your question: what equipment you will needdepends on what samples you’re analyzing. In the example of hair dye, I wouldexpect you need to have some common organic solvents, filtration setups, flashchromatography columns, and the glassware required to do some basic workups to separatethe organic dyes from the everything-else. You will also need volumetric equipment to dilute your samples with acceptable precision.
Ideally you’d have a fully functioning HPLC (high pressureliquid chromatography) that you can feed the appropriately-dilutedsample and it’d separate and analyze all the dyes in the sample for you (I knowAgilent has a column that can do this). The silicones common in hair products could probably be identified via GCMS (gas chromatography-mass spectrometry) or FTIR (Fourier transform infrared). Some of the inorganic stuff could probably be identified via ion chromatography. These instruments would need to be set up, supplied with appropriate gases, and calibrated with calibration standards. The samples would need to be prepped, with stabilizing solutions, correct solvents, and internal standards.
Seeing that instrumentation works when the instrument is appropriately chosen and calibrated, suchquantitative analysis really only works when you have some idea of what you’relooking for. If you have a blob of red gel and no idea what it is, this maytake you a while.
As for what would be difficult to source after the apocalypse…this is really hard for me to answer. It’s reasonable to assume that many chemicals, especially laboratory-grade chemicals (which are graded for high purity), would be hard to source after the apocalypse. However, if you’re at the point where you are able to set up chemical laboratories, then perhaps enough time has passed for industry to sufficiently recover. As a reader, I would accept that you can source the ingredients for hair dye if you’re at the point where you can set up a lab to analyze hair dye; the latter has higher standards of purity.
Now, my question to you: do you have to reproduce thissample of hair dye exactly?
Assuming there’s nothing amazing about this particularsample of hair dye, I don’t think it’s worth the effort to exactlyreverse-engineer this sample. Hair dye is also pretty low on thelist of priorities after an apocalypse. If we are at the point post-apocalypsewhere we can think about dyeing our hair, and we have the resources to set upchemistry laboratories correctly and interpret their results, I’m assuming someknowledge from the pre-apocalyptic days survived the apocalypse. Even if theexact formula of your favourite L’Oreal dye didn’t survive, maybe something fromGarnier did, and you can simply reproduce whatever you do have and tweak as yougo along. Or you might just mix the dyes you do have on hand, add in a bit of antimicrobial agent, and call it a day, even if it doesn’t smell as nice or work as well.
Desperate times, desperate measures and all that.
~Z