CRAWFORD: Can you walk me through this graph? 

KANTERS: Zero—the graph kind of goes right to left. So, zero, there was a chemical that would always show up at zero. If it wasn’t, you had to keep trying it so that that would show up at zero, so that everything else to the left would be in the exact position that you knew what that was. If it wasn’t on zero, the other graphs weren’t right. Each peak would show you the hydrogens—this is measuring the hydrogens—in a molecule. All of the H’s are showing up at different places along this graph, according to where it is in this molecule. We knew each one, and what that was, and where it showed up on that graph.

CRAWFORD: This particular graph is telling you where the hydrogens are. Do you do a separate scan for carbons, and things like that, or is it just hydrogens?

KANTERS: Just hydrogens for this one. And if you had an impurity, it would show up in here, and you would know that you had something in there that shouldn't be in there. The straighter your peaks are, and the more clear the peaks are, the more pure. I have had some that are just kind of rounded mounds, I would say; those are very unpure. The more distinctive the peaks, the better the molecule. Actually, there’s another one that does carbon; this one only does hydrogen. Then there’s an instrument at the Liquid Crystal that ran infrared for the different branches of the molecule, with other things, like oxygen. This is strictly hydrogen.

CRAWFORD: Then you're able to discern this chemical structure from this data?

KANTERS: Exactly.

CRAWFORD: What is this black line here?

KANTERS: I’m not exactly sure why that’s up there. That might be another graph. Usually they don’t have that. You can see on the other ones they don’t usually have that. I’m not sure if that’s something else, over top of that, but that’s usually not on the graph that I—she might be trying to explain something with this.

CRAWFORD: This graph here, aside from the black mark, this was your work, or could have been?

KANTERS: I would say yes. Yes, could have been. Because I had some in some of the other publications, but that’s what mine looked like. Sometimes in the acknowledgements in the back, it will say that—“Somebody ran that.” The only thing I can think of was this up here is less—the peaks should look like this. This is less pure because they're blended peaks. I’m not sure if maybe that was what it was like before somebody clarified that. It doesn't normally do that.

CRAWFORD: I gather that the letters here—so there’s like letters A and B—correspond—

KANTERS: Right.

CRAWFORD: —to these. So here’s A, here’s B.

KANTERS: Yes.

CRAWFORD: How do you decide that this peak, this hydrogen, is in this position on the molecule and this hydrogen is there? Were you involved in that?

KANTERS: I knew, when I ran that, because I made the liquid crystal, and I knew where it should be. According to where it is on the phenyl ring or the benzene ring, here, it definitely will determine where it is on this map, or on this graph. You can see that they're different, on both ends, and that has a big influence on how the scan will run, when it’s coming out, coming to the lab. It’s just the spin of that magnet, and I’m not sure exactly how that—I knew that I had the right thing if I saw that. You always see the same thing to begin with, but then what you're looking for might be out here. Or, the purity; you don’t want to see an impurity in there, and those show up, if it’s in there.

CRAWFORD: What would an impurity look like?

KANTERS: A mound. It’ll be like a little small mound, in there.

CRAWFORD: Just in the middle or—?

KANTERS: Or even the peaks here, if you didn’t have your exact molecule, these peaks, it would just be one round kind of mound, or like a—mound.

CRAWFORD: That would tell you that there was something else in there other than the liquid crystal that you're looking for?

KANTERS: Right.

CRAWFORD: Good!

KANTERS: So that’s interesting.

CRAWFORD: Great. ×