Supawan Tantayanon: ‘I designed my own portable lab’

In the early years of my career I had to be in the lab all day long, day after day, teaching. At that time, the world didn’t focus on safety much. In 1982 I returned to Thailand from the US and it was the same. We had fumehoods, but not the standard ones because it’s an old building, and things like that. So I felt that the situation is really bad. We’re trying to avoid anything happening to the students, but we still had the same kind of labs as four decades ago.

I felt that I would like to do something like screening all the experiments to substitute the chemicals for safer ones, or maybe change the experiment but still teach the same thing. I applied for a grant from the Thailand Research Fund, but they said ‘you have to do it with other universities’. So OK! We worked with seven universities.

I was inspired to do small scale chemistry by Stephen Thompson at Colorado State University. He showed me the experiment that is gas diffusion between an ammonia solution and hydrochloric acid. This is amazing in a petri dish, it’s a very small space but you see movement. You see a flow of ammonium chloride falling down from the cover to the bottom of the petri dish continuously. That’s really the first thing that made me decide to go for small scale.