Breaking Barriers

Angelica, a student at Washington State School for the Blind, feels the temperature change of a plastic bag after distilled water was added to salts. The experiment of making hot and cold packs was part of a chemistry immersion camp for blind and visually impaired high school students. (All photos by Jeremy Chun Sajqui)

On a recent Saturday morning in a Portland State chemistry lab, the smell of vinegar soon gave way to the sweet aromas of banana and butterscotch.

It was the first experiment of the day for a group of blind and visually impaired high school students attending an immersion chemistry camp. The five students came from across the region, from Seattle to Oregon City.

Donning lab coats, safety goggles and gloves, the students followed the lead of their sighted graduate student assistants. Holding onto the elbow of their lab partners, the students walked over to the lab fume hood with their flask. Guiding the tip of the nozzle of the bottle holding propanoic acid into the flask opening, they pumped five times to add 10mL of the vinegar-smelling liquid. The pairs returned to their lab bench, placing the flask in front of a small fan. Then with the help of their partners, they added ethanol and sulfuric acid to the flask, relying on touch and smell - not sight - to observe the reactions.

Did the bottom of the flask feel warmer or cooler than before the acid was added? What were they smelling? As more time passed, a sweeter, caramelly and fruitier scent wafted through the lab.

"The whole point of doing this work is to show us that we as blind people can be food chemists if we want to be," said Hoby Wedler, a blind chemist and entrepreneur who co-led the camp with Dave Stuart, a PSU chemistry professor. "This is a lot of what I do for my career every day. I sit in a lab and I smell things and I see what works and what doesn't."

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The day camp was made possible as part of Stuart's grant from the National Science Foundation. Stuart first connected with Wedler during the pandemic and invited him to give a talk for the chemistry department's weekly seminar series in October 2021. The two stayed in touch and an opportunity arose to include a camp as part of the grant's broader impacts for making lab research more accessible.

"Blind people are typically excluded from chemistry because it's such a heavy visual science," Stuart said. "I want them to know that where those doors have previously been closed, they can open them, they can go through them and they can be a part of it."

Wedler said that as a high schooler, a NASA program working with blind and sighted scientists to build and launch a small rocket left a lasting impression on him. He hopes the same will be true for these students.

"I left that program saying, 'All these people who've told me that I shouldn't study honors chemistry, that I shouldn't go on to study chemistry in college are wrong. I'm going to do it,'" he said.

There are about 15 blind people with a Ph.D. in chemistry and Wedler is one of them.

"I want them to leave saying, 'I can do whatever I want to do, no matter how visual society makes it seem," he said.

Angelica, a student at the Washington State School for the Blind, said she loves science but often doesn't get hands-on experiences in school like she did at the camp.

"I want to be a chemist now," she shared during the group's morning break while they were snacking on banana and butterscotch candies. "Learning about the physics and mechanics of actual chemistry and science has been pretty cool."

Tori, another student from the Washington State School for the Blind, said she had been looking forward to the camp for weeks. She loves science because it requires both creativity and structure. Though she doesn't have a sense of smell, her graduate assistant described the smell to her and she was able to feel the flask get warmer, then cooler as the chemical reaction completed.

Nicole Javaly, a Ph.D. student in Stuart's lab, said the group was doing experiments that undergrads at PSU would do in a general chemistry lab and it got her thinking about what they could incorporate from the camp to make labs more accessible for visually impaired students.

"If you have a sighted assistant, it's a very doable thing to do, which is exciting because that's often not the assumption," she said.

Wedler and Stuart said it will take both students being their own advocate about what they need and what works for them as well as building the infrastructure to better support students and instructors.

Stuart said if students walked away from the camp knowing that they can pursue a career in science, it was a success. And if they choose chemistry at PSU, all the better.