"As a man of action he doesn't go in for brooding, but, like Sophocles wants to learn by suffering," enthuses Klaus Roth, Professor of Chemistry at the Free University Berlin. He is, therefore, the ideal candidate. "He's without fear, embraces risk, is ready to suffer, he's enthusiastic with a dash of healthy masochism." While it's true that his actions are often dogged by bad luck, he follows his goals tenaciously and holds on to his optimism and curiosity even in adversity. To sum up: "Donald Duck is the ideal PhD candidate for chemistry!" writes Roth in the magazine Chemie in unserer Zeit. His column regularly picks up curiosities in the world of science, but always has a serious point to make. With the help of comics he wants to make chemistry attractive to a young readership, says Roth.

Duck, as Roth goes on to write, "is no lightweight so he applies to ETH“. To ETH? No, it's not Zurich's technical university but the "Entenhausen Technical University". "Every team working at ETH is organised as an independent limited company. Within the framework of a performance-oriented funding, ETH guarantees a maximum of 20 per cent of the basic funding and the rest has to be drummed up from third parties. This means that every group is permanently under pressure from the 'ETH internal-evaluation-execution-commission'," is how Roth describes the intellectual lab–a mixture, by the way, of various existing university concepts.

Duck's professor desperately needs third party funds, "because without them, one is only second-class. No third-party funds, no funds from the ETH budget; no budget funds, no employees; no employees, no publications; no publications, no reputation; no reputation, no third-party funds; no third-party funds, and so on and so on." But Duck's professor hits the jackpot. The owner of a big venture capital fund–none other than Dagobert Duck himself–agrees to help him out. A visit to the ETH is planned and the nervous professor, aiming to please, decides to spring-clean the entire lab. But Donald Duck has other priorities. He doesn't want to compete for private money with clean floors but with a brilliant discovery; he energetically applies himself to inorganic solid state physics. "Carefully grind finely dispersed amorphous sulphur and nanoparticles of active carbon are being skilfully mixed, using mortar and pestle," goes the story and, "then we witness a flash of scientific enlightenment. Duck discovers his passion for oxidising agents; he is especially smitten by potassium nitrate."

Academic mobbing, a negative assessment report from ERA (Entenhausen's Research Association), suspicion of fraud and missing lab log entries characterise Donald Duck's future undertaking as cand. chem. Donald Duck at ETH. Finally, summary dismissal by the Scientific Advisory Board of the Co. Ltd. and Duck and the professor are out on the street. "All just an unfortunate chain of adverse circumstances combined with outside pressure force Donald Duck to the premature curtailment of a promising scientific career. A heavy blow from which the scientific community will not quickly recover," is the analysis of the chemistry professor from Berlin.

“The Soul of Science"; a bestseller from the house of Walt Disney. Picture: Egmont Ehapa Publications. large

"The Soul of Science", a comic book from the house of Walt Disney, was published by Gladstone in 1987 (the German version "Seele der Wissenschaft" was published in 1998 by Egmont Ehapa Berlin) has been used on numerous occasions to illustrate scientists' experiences. The characters have also been the subject of scientific investigation–albeit without result. At any rate, Roth's column would be ideal material for publication in the Annals of Improbable Research, the magazine of the Ig Nobel Prize Founders.(2) ...