Dangerous Chemistry Sets

From: SMBC – Fear Itself

~Mitch

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Chemists Purposely Withholding Information

I once saw an undergraduate setting up a reflux in my lab, and I could tell immediately it wasn’t going to work. The undergraduate didn’t take enough precautions to ensure that the liquid wouldn’t leak out from the joint connecting the round bottom flask and the condenser. I debated whether I should say anything, but decided that the reagents weren’t expensive enough to warrant my involvement. I also knew that once he made this mistake he would never make it again. The next morning when he came into lab his reagents were a black char at the bottom of his flask. Apparently, chemists not freely sharing all their techniques has historical precedences as professor Martyn Poliakoff explains below.

Mitch

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A Chemist Doing Biology

My postdoctoral research has just begun (started 1.5 months ago) and it will heavily rely on using mice. Thus far I have imaged, dissected, injected, xenografted, castrated, you name it and I’ve already done it or will be doing it to mice. As chemists we are sheltered from the bloody side of science. Sure some chemists on the biological side may have done cell culture or a gel here and there, but most chemists don’t handle things that bite you while your injecting the nanoparticles you made to monitor the progress of the cancer you gave them weeks earlier. Because of this I will be making a series of posts tagged a Chemist Doing Biology chronicling my adventures into Biology.

Brief background: I am a Chemist not a Biologist, my PhD was equal measures of nuclear/radio-chemistry, materials chemistry, organic synthesis, and electronic circuit design (sigh). My new research group is all chemists even though we are in the Pharmacology department. My first task in the group, take the graduate student’s Gd-encapsulated nanoparticles and inject them into mice. Then extract the lymph nodes and get ICP-AES data. A daunting task for a chemist to accomplish, especially with no biologists in the group or anyone having in vivo experience.

Fortunately, I found a happy biology graduate student willing to take her research time to teach me how to do the injection/dissection of the poor mice. When the day arrives, the chemistry graduate student and I whisk the biologist down to the animal cages. We gown up, bring our nanoparticles and chemical reagents in a box, we show the biologist the mice and proceed to the procedure room. We give the mice anesthesia, hand the biologist our nanoparticles and hope for the best. It is at this moment where the disconnect between hardcore Biologists and hardcore Chemists becomes evident.

Biologist, “Can you hand me the syringe?”

Chemists, “They don’t keep the syringes in the procedural room?”

Biologist, “No. Where are your surgical tools, I thought you wanted to extract the lymph nodes?”

Chemists, “I thought you would bring the surgical equipment since you were going to show us how to dissect?”

Biologist, “That’s not how it works. All my mice are immune compromised, so I don’t want to risk using my equipment with wild type mice.”

Mitch to the chemistry grad student in my best postdoc voice, “Well, you better go find some equipment if you want to get your experiment done today.”

Grad student flies out in search of a miracle. I do my best to laugh off the situation with the biologist. The biologist is taking it well, but I was definitely embarrassed. After 10 minutes the chemistry graduate student returns with syringes, needles, scissors, and cutting blades.

Biologist picks up scissors, “These are not surgical scissors, these are to cut paper I can’t use these.” Looks at our cutting blades, “Is that a box cutter? That definitely won’t work on something as small as a mouse. You’re going to have to order real surgical equipment.”

Although that day went horribly wrong at least we learned what would be needed for the next attempt. Last month we used our new surgical tools and performed the dissection of the mice as we originally planned with the biologist. The data from that experiment is amazing and compliments the graduate student’s in vitro work beautifully. The paper is already done and waiting for the PI to submit to Angew.

Next Time: My first tail vein injection and the story of the fainting biologist.

Mitch

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Art On A Chip

Albert Folch from Lab on a Chip released a cool artsy project this past Friday that the journal has been working on. Defined bluntly, the project is a collaborative flickr account to share the pictures of your science.  The general theme is miniaturization, and of course dyed water on chips. The images already stored there are appealing to the eye and some are displayed below.

Droplet-scale estrogen assays in breast tissue, blood, and serum. A picture of the first microfluidic device (25 × 12.5 mm) applied to the extraction and quantification of estrogen in 1 l samples of breast tissue homogenate, whole blood and serum (Mais Jebrail, University of Toronto).

Cells on a micropallet array. Four 3T3 fibroblast cells are constrained to individual polymer pedestals (micropallets) on a glass substrate. Each micropallet can be released individually from the system using a high-powered laser (Nicholas Gunn, UC Irvine)

My only two real issues with the project are….

1) I wish I had thought of the idea. Although, if anyone is interested in making a more generic project along similar lines I’m game.

2) I have no idea how to add pictures to the “joint” flickr account! The announcement from Lab Chip, Introducing LOC: Art on a Chip, gave no instructions on how to do it. It isn’t like I’m totally naive with regards to technology, I have my own flickr account, I just don’t understand how one goes about adding pictures to someone else’s account. Check this post for an update when some nice person in the comments section finally explains the process to me, or when I find the magic button.

The Announcement: Introducing LOC: Art on a Chip

Mitch

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Something Deeply Wrong With Chemistry

An example of what is currently wrong with chemistry culture, even though it is dated.

Future chemistry faculty will have to be twice as smart, work with twice the efficiency, and reach the correct positions of influence if they want this type of unhealthy cultural attitudes to finally be put to rest. This is my goal at least.

Update 1: Guido Koch now.

Update 2: The underlying macroeconomic cause for why professors can get away with this behavior.

Update 3: This story has really struck a cord, thank you for sharing this link and supplying our first 20,000 visitor day!

Update 4: A transcribed letter from Robert Tjian

From now on, I or someone designated by me will take attendance at group meetings starting at 9:10 am. If you are not there, I will not sign your salary sheets. Also, if you haven’t noticed the number of people working on weekends and nights in the lab is the worst I’ve seen in my 17 years. The frequency of vacation, time taken off and other non-lab activities is bordering on the ridiculous. In case you forgot, the standard amount of time you are supposed to take is 2 weeks a year total, including Christmas. If there isn’t a substantial improvement in the next few months, I’ll have to think of some draconian measures to “motivate” you. I also want to say that the average lab citizenship and community spirit of keeping the lab in functioning order is at an all-time low. Few people seem to care about fixing broken equipment and making sure things in the lab run smoothly. If the lab were extremely productive and everyone was totally focused on their work, I might understand the slovenliness but productivity is abysmal and if we continue along this path we will surely reach mediocrity in no time.

Finally, those of you who are “lame ducks” because you have a job and are thinking of your own nibs, so long as you are here you are still full-fledged members of this lab, which means participating in all aspects of the lab (i.e. group meetings, Asilomar, postdoc seminars, etc.)

I realize that this memo won’t solve all the problems. so I am going to schedule a meeting with each one of you starting this Saturday and Sunday and continuing on weekends until I’ve had a chance to speak with everyone and to give you a formal evaluation. Sign up for an appointment time on the sheet outside my door.

This is the first time I’ve had to actually write a memo of this type and I hope
it’s the last time.

Robert Tjian

Update 5: Erick Carreira responds in an interview with Christopher Shea from The Boston Globe, vaguely claims the letter may have been a joke (link: Chemist who ordered night and weekend work replies to critics). Selected quote below:

I wonder whether you would think it fair to be judged on the basis of a letter 14 years old, especially when the comments and rash judgments are made without knowledge of the context or the circumstances surrounding the individuals involved. Indeed how does anyone out who is so quick to pass judgement and who is coming to conclusions know that it is not part of a 14-year old joke (or satire as you state) that backfired? …

Update 6: Comparatively tame letters from Paul Gassman and Albert Meyers, but they have some good information in them about standard expectations.

If you have similar letters you would like to share send them in. Any identifying information can be removed upon request.

Mitch

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Nature Has a Graphical Abstracts Problem

Or I should say, it had a problem. The most annoying thing about Nature journals, not including Nature Chemistry, is they do not have a graphical abstract associated with their rss feed or even in their Table of Contents. However, I made a hack to view Nature with an associated graphical abstract over at ChemFeeds.

link: Nature via ChemFeeds

I also went ahead and made it for all the other Nature journals.

• Nature
• Nature Chemistry (actually already had this one, but including it for completeness.)
• Nature Physics
• Nature Neuroscience
• Nature Nanotechnology
• Nature Cell Biology
• Nature Medicine
• Nature Methods
• Nature Biotechnology
• Nature Immunology
• Nature Materials
• Nature Chemical Biology
• Nature Genetics

If you happen to be a Nature lover you can see them all with this link: All Nature.

If some of the feeds don’t have many abstracts within them it is because they are very new and more abstracts will be added automatically as Nature updates their AOP feeds.

Update: PNAS ADDED!

Update 2: Science Added.

Mitch

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Most Popular Chemistry Papers 2010 (1/3)

There are finally enough people visiting ChemFeeds (~150/day) that metrics like most accessed chemistry paper might actually be statistically significant information. So below I present the top two most clicked on abstracts from ChemFeeds for the first third of 2010.

First Place: Emil Knoevenagel and the Roots of Aminocatalysis
by Benjamin List in Angewandte Chemie International Edition
(DOI: 10.1002/anie.200906900)

2nd Place: Total Synthesis of the N,C-Coupled Naphthylisoquinoline Alkaloids Ancistrocladinium A and B and Related Analogues
by Gerhard Bringmann, Tanja Gulder†, Barbara Hertlein, Yasmin Hemberger and Frank Meyer in Journal of American Chemical Society
(DOI: 10.1021/ja9097687)

Some Notes on the metrics. This information probably says more about the people visiting ChemFeeds than the quality of the papers. It would appear ChemFeeds visitors skewer heavily towards the organic synthetics. Perhaps with the recent addition of being able to click on category feeds like all materials and all physical feeds it’ll balance out.

Mitch

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ACS Member Dues

It is that time of the year for me when I need to dole out the cash to renew my ACS membership. For the first time I have to pay the full membership price of $145. The process is made more complicated than usual since I need to switch from the graduate student member rate to the full member rate and there is no button available to do it from the website. :sigh:

So with member dues on the brain I went to investigate why they are set at $145. In 1986 the dues were $70 and it was decided to set all future dues to that inflation corrected price. $145 may seem like a lot of money but the ACS Committee on Budget and Finance’s website points out that it is a very middle of the road amount when compared to other scientific societies.

However, that is not a fair comparison to make. Whenever the topic of executive compensation comes up at ACS we’re always reminded that ACS is a huge publishing house connected to a nonprofit, thus salaries and benefits of the top executives are matched to norms in the publishing industry. In one case it is fair to compare something to scientific society norms, in the other case we have to include the norms of a publishing house.

Out of my own curiosity I dug into the numbers behind member dues and have found that total dues were $15,500,000 and brought in $2,200,000 in net revenue for 2009. So how much does the society make per year? Do we make enough as a society to forgo paying dues into 3 digits? Below is a table showing the finances of the society, I’ve also included the income payed out to the top executives for comparison

The society made enough net revenue in 2009 to easily refund 1/3 of our member dues, but it would never do that as I’ll explain. If you look at the table and try to match the society’s executive incomes to performance you will have a hard time, if you can see a pattern please let me know. In 2008 as the society’s net assets decreased in value by 72% the income of the executives increased. As the total revenue of the society brought in slowly increased, the executive income increased faster. As the net revenue of the society has remained flat, besides the small peak in 2009, the executive income increased. So how exactly is the salary and benefits of the top executives valued, it seems disconnected from normal metrics of financial health?

The society will hire an outside firm to decide what the compensation should be. The firm will take into consideration that ACS is a publishing house and a non-profit. The firm will also consider the health of the global economy and other factors and will set certain benchmarks for the executives to meet in order to get bonuses on top of their paychecks. So the reason their income seems decoupled from performance is because the benchmarks they must meet are already coupled to the passions and whims of the national economy.

I will argue that this road for ACS is unhealthy.

If I ask any top executive at ACS what their job is, I’m sure they will tell me that their job is to return as much value back to ACS members while generating as much revenue they can for the society. The society will indirectly self-select individuals that can maximize that function. But this leads to the horrible disease of group-thinking. I have no doubt that Rudy Baum actually dislikes open-access, but I also have no doubt that ACS has indirectly placed people in positions of influence who will maximize the function of revenue vs. value.

I have faith that the net revenues made by the society for 2009 will be used for a good purpose. Maybe it’ll be put towards shoring up the losses in net assets, maybe it’ll be used to make the budget for next year more affordable. However, I do know it will never be given back to members as a rebate on their membership dues. A rebate would be considered an expense and would decrease net revenue the society made the following year and thus decrease bonuses.

There is no clear answer to what would make my favorite chemistry club healthier and more affordable, but the current tethering of compensation and salaries to the same wonderful metrics that financial institutions use seems illogical.

Mitch

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NSF Reauthorization

The bill that will reauthorize the NSF had a markup by the subcommittee on Research and Science Education. Since what happens in the policy world can have repercussions in the science world here is a list of policy changes to NSF that caught my eye.

The Bill: NSF Reauthorization 2010
• 5% of the NSF research budget has to be used for high-risk high-reward proposals. (SEC. 201. SUPPORT FOR POTENTIALLY TRANSFORMATIVE RESEARCH)

The Amendments: NSF Reauthorization Amendments 2010

Daniel Lipinski (D-IL)

• Wants NSF to give cash prizes to high-risk, high-reward research challenges. (SEC. 207. PRIZE REWARDS)
• The prizes will range from 1 million to 3 million

I don’t care what the topic turns out to be, but for that much money Chemistry Blog will organize and field an open team for the competition. How the NSF goes about and implements these contests will be interesting to see.

The NSF Reauthorization will be wrapped into the America COMPETES Act and likely will be voted on by the full House of Representatives before May 31st. The America COMPETES Act shouldn’t suffer any major hurdles for passage.

Mitch

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