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What movie prop would people expect to be fake but is actually real?

This just might be the absolute nerdiest and most extreme example of dedication to scientific accuracy I have ever witnessed on screen. From 1976 to 1983 there was a series on TV called Quincy M.E. where medical examiner Dr. R. Quincy (played by Jack Klugman) in the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office solved crimes using his extensive scientific expertise, kind of a precursor to (and model for) the later series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
Quincy had a lab (run by his trusty lab tech Sam Fujiyama (played by Robert Ito) equipped with a comprehensive array of advanced scientific equipment. But rather than having a collection of “sciency-looking” props and going through the motions of using them to gather clues, these were ALL THE REAL THING, i.e. fully functional, expensive, high tech instruments, and actually used correctly during the show.

To accomplish all this, they hired an actual forensics technician from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office with a scientific masters degree, Marc Scott Taylor, as a technical advisor to run and maintain all the complicated instrumentation on set.

Then, in 1978 during the third season, Robert Ito was unavailable for some reason to play Sam so they brought Marc in as a replacement to perform the on-screen analyses. From then on, he had a recurring role as Mark the lab tech along side Sam for the rest of the series.

Now that’s dedication to realism!

Oh, but there’s more!

As chemistry graduate students at the time, our entire lab couldn’t wait to watch each week and see what new mystery would be realistically solved in the lab by Quincy and Sam. As an example of the show’s realistic use of actual working instrumentation, in Season 3-Episode 20 (“Requiem for the Living,” 1978), a dying crime boss holds Quincy and Sam hostage to force them to find out how he was poisoned. They determine that someone injected a small amount of the super toxic chemical, nickel carbonyl, under the door of his apartment thinking that they had committed the perfect crime since nickel carbonyl is unstable and leaves little trace after some time. It shows them using an atomic absorption spectrometer to detect the nickel and an infrared spectrometer to detect the stretching vibrations of the carbonyl groups.

But the absolute, MOST MIND-BENDING EXAMPLE of scientific uber-realism, has to be in Season 5-Episode 1 (“No Way to Treat a Flower,” 1979) where Quincy has to figure out why people who are smoking pot from a particular dealer are dying. It turns out that the person growing the marijuana had been treating the plants with colchicine, a chemical that acts as a super growth enhancer. Colchicine was used during World War II to make industrial hemp plants, a variety of cannabis sativa that produces little to no THC, grow faster to make more rope for the war effort. It also works on the THC-producing variety but, in the show, the colchicine remaining in the pot was lethal. They isolated a small amount and identified it using a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer which works on the same principle as a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine.

Now, it just so happened that one of the students in our lab at the time was working on a new synthetic organic chemistry method to make chemical ring systems similar to the ones in colchicine and he was using it repeatedly to actually synthesize colchicine as a test of its synthetic effectiveness and therefore had seen the NMR spectrum so many times that he knew it like the back of his hand. As they slowly printed out the spectrum, he was commenting on the signals he was seeing, saying, “Oh, that’s interesting. Those look like the methoxy groups on the A-ring and C-ring. Wait a minute! Is that the methyl peak for the acetyl group??!? And…and that’s…OH…MY…GOD! That’s the real compound!”

Someone, probably Marc, with approval of the producer, had gone to the incredible trouble of obtaining an actual sample of colchicine for the show despite the fact that 99.9999% of the viewers wouldn’t have a clue what they were seeing.

Now THAT’S dedication to scientific authenticity!! I doubt we’ll ever see that level of realism on a show again.