This Month The Mad Chemist

2

"The inclusion of this footnote in a quite scholarly article," Lambert explained, "stemmed from the discovery that Dr. Gaspar ... and I shared a mutual, and independently long-standing esteem for the adventures of Donald Duck. We both had retained copies of some of the classic adventures. It was Dr. Gaspar who rediscovered this early mention of carbene."

Other members of the scientific community sought out the reference. A year later, the Studio received a letter from Richard Greenwald, a scientist at Harvard. "Recent developments in chemistry have focused much attention to species of this sort," Greenwald commented. "Without getting technical let me say that carbenes can be made but not isolated; i.e. they cannot be put into a jar and kept on a shell. They can, however, be made to react with other substances. Donald was using carbene in just such a manner, many years before 'real chemists' thought to do so."

The telltale panel has since been used to illustrate an article by Robert A. Moss ("Carbene Chemistry," Chemical and Engineering News, 16 June 1969) and a textbook by Robert Morrison and Robert Boyd (Organic Chemistry, 3rd Edition, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1973).

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