Organic Rap : Education: Whiz kid lectures premed students in chemistry with a song and dance routine.

No one calls him the Fresh Prince of Westwood.

But UCLA chemistry whiz kid Gabe Green, who enrolled in college at 11 and is an accomplished pianist, accordionist, guitarist, singer, songwriter and tap dancer, has added an unlikely element to his already full table of talents: rap master.

Green, a skinny, 18-year-old graduate teaching assistant, writes tongue-in-cheek rap songs that double as organic chemistry lectures and performs them to a thumping recorded beat with dance steps picked up from MC Hammer videos.

Green has become such a hot ticket in the chemistry department that he cannot keep up with the invitations. This past week in an introductory organic chemistry class, he bounded down the lecture hall stairs on cue, whipped off his tortoise-shell glasses and got busy.

“Yo, my name’s Dry Ice but if it’s OK with you, I’d like to be known as CO2,” he began, breaking into a dance.

The surprised crowd of stressed-out premed students cheered wildly, especially when their instructor, chemistry lecturer Betty Luceigh joined in on choruses of “Synthesize that ether, premed!”

Despite his foray into rap, Green, who lives in Sherman Oaks with his parents, is anything but hip. At least not by this decade’s standards.

He had early training in classical music, and has preferred the popular tunes of the 1920s and ‘30s since he was 9. In imitation of one of his heroes, Rudy Vallee, he slicks down his hair and wears wide, colorful ties, and in homage to another, Al Jolson, warbles to add a flourish to song lyrics.

When he performs for a chemistry class, he eschews such rapper trademarks as oversize glasses and finger rings for a plastic model of a benzene molecule on a thick faux gold neck chain.

Green already had written numerous chemistry-related songs using tunes from an earlier era--including “Can’t Help Being a Nucleophile” set to the melody of “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine,” and “Brominate Your Benzene With Some FeBr 3”setto “Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody”--and performed at chemistry department functions when he wrote his first chemistry rap last fall.

Although Green once wrote a lyric that accused rappers of “driving nails into music’s coffin,” he figured rap would reach more students, make them laugh and even help them memorize the material.

“If I did songs like ‘Let’s Put Out the Lights and Go to Sleep,’ which is a Rudy Vallee song, . . . it wouldn’t be that well known,” he said. “So I bought several rap records and tried to see what this thing is all about and . . . to get hip to hip hop.”

Green’s parody of a hit by rap rage Vanilla Ice--but without any references to chemistry--has gotten national radio play. He is avidly exploring the possibility of a career as an entertainer while pursuing a doctorate in biochemistry.

His most recent scientific rap, which uses music by Vanilla Ice and details the chemical processes of substitution and elimination, includes such lines as:

Some compounds might get involved

With the liquids in which they’re dissolved

Bromide leaves to make a plus charge

The stability of which is quite large

Thus t-butyl (no surprise)

In methanol will solvolyze

Green changes Vanilla Ice’s trademark line, “Word to your mother!” to “Word to your chem prof!”

Luceigh, who has won honors for distinguished teaching, said she invited Green to lighten the atmosphere in the notoriously difficult class. Green also uses his chemistry songs, rap and non-rap alike, in the undergraduate discussion sessions that he leads as part of his teaching assistant duties.

The oddity that his audiences are usually his age or older is not lost on Green. He said it was easier being the youngest student on a university campus than it was being the smartest student at a Beverly Hills junior high school.

His mother, Laurie Green, who with his father, Irving, owns a West Hollywood art gallery, said the other junior high students taunted Gabe by calling him “a brain” and by “tearing up his books.”

Tested as a genius with an IQ of 158 while in kindergarten, Green began memorizing the 2,500-page Physician’s Desk Reference at 8--he can still cite it--and at 13 became the second-youngest student ever to enroll at UCLA, after he completed two years at Cal State Los Angeles, officials said.

Now, Green said, he has many friends as well as fans on campus. He first drew crowds by playing the accordion and crooning 1920s songs along a heavily traveled part of campus known as Bruin Walk. Then he won a spot in last year’s campus Spring Sing, where his performance of a 1930 ditty titled “Kitty From Kansas City” brought chants of “Gabe! Gabe! Gabe!”

That got him noticed by comedian Joe Piscopo. Piscopo invited Green to appear in an HBO special that aired last November and led to a feature spot on the television show “Entertainment Tonight.”

In addition, he has been interviewed by offbeat radio personality Dr. Demento, who has aired his songs nationally. A Green parody of Vanilla Ice’s big hit “Ice Ice Baby,” retitled “Ice Age Baby,” was a Demento “pick of the week” in March.

Demento said he was attracted by Green’s cleverness. “He has a little bit of what Cole Porter had and Allan Sherman had and ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic has,” Demento said. “These are all people who had a knack for rhymes and wordplay and the turn of phrase.”

Demento also praised Green’s facility with rap. “Although he says he despises rap, he does it pretty well,” the radio show host said.

Green acknowledges that rap, which often has defiant or even obscene lyrics, is “an unlikely diversion” for someone who describes himself as “the world’s youngest old-timer.”

“People today who call themselves entertainers . . . can’t live up to that without . . . a lot of electronics and special effects,” said Green, who knows how to drive but prefers not to. “Rudy Vallee and Al Jolson are just not appreciated these days, and they really ought to be because they were fantastic entertainers.”

Shy and polite offstage, Green is transformed while performing. As he sings, his eyes widen expressively, his smile gleams and his normally squeaky speaking voice lowers to a rich baritone.

Green said he does not want to be pigeonholed as a rapper or novelty artist and hopes to find a market for the ballads he writes and to reintroduce music lovers to classic American music. But he does not plan to abandon chemistry--his doctoral project involves looking for a way to more readily synthesize an antiviral drug that could be used for treating AIDS.

Asked about his future, Green offered, as he often does, a lyric from one of the thousands of songs he has memorized. “There’s a song that says, ‘I’ll go where life leads me.’ ”