Something About Heat

WILBUR Lincoln Scoville may not be your normal hot guy with his keen interest in chemistry. (Still I haven’t met someone who loved chemistry other than those who are passionate about it. Like mathematics, chemistry is a love it or hate it thing. Few like it in high school and fewer still goes for it in college.)

But in the quest for defining minute characteristics of chemicals that means something to ordinary human beings like most of us, Scoville certainly blazes the road he set for future generations. And providing a measure of hotness in chili was only one of many.

Well, in 1912, while working for Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company, he devised the test and scale to measure piquancy (hotness) of chili peppers. But for this and his other achievements, he won the 1922 Ebert prize, the 1929 Remington Honor Medal, and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Columbia University in the same year.

The test bore Scoville’s name, and he called it then the Scoville Organoleptic Test. Later on, it came to be standardized, and called the Scoville scale. It uses Scoville heat units (SHU) to indicate the amount of capsaicin present. While pure capsaicin rates the highest at a maximum of 16 million SHU, the scale is capable of measuring piquancy even stronger than that in pure capsaicin.

One such substance is resiniferatoxin, an alkaloid present in the white sap of some species of Euphorbia, the same genus as Mangagaw (Euphorbia hirta). It has a Scoville rating of 16 billion SHU, capable of producing extremely painful inflammation, and in certain species, has a reputation for producing cancer. This is something to be careful with in using Mangagaw in the home treatment against dengue. It is possible however that boiling the plant can destroy resiniferatoxin if present and render it harmless.

The Law Enforcement Grade pepper spray, which law enforcers use to control crowd or riot, and even for self-defense, including against dogs, is an Oleoresin Capsicum spray with heat rating of 5.3 million SHU.

Our red cayenne pepper (Capsicum annum) or the Tabasco pepper (Capsicum frutscens) has only 50,000 SHU maximum. Bell pepper has zero SHU.

Well, I’m not alone in the idea that chemistry can be very complicated to handle. Former NBA maverick star Dennis Rodman tells all: “Chemistry is a class to take in high school or college, where you figure out two plus two is 10, or something.” I hope, with chemistry, you’re not as confused as me or Dennis.

This article appears in Sun-Star Cebu newspaper on 25 August 2010.

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