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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The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Does anyone else have a difficult time trying to separate “good science” from “bad science”?  I’m a very black and white person.  I love facts and truths and logic, and that drives most of my family crazy.  Perhaps that’s why I struggle with identifying bad science; there’s seemingly no clear-cut, concise way of identifying junk that ends up published.  To be clear, I’m not talking about retractions for blatant disregard for scientific ethics.  I’d classify these situations (e.g., the Xenobe controversy, Sames’ retractions, Bell Labs, etc.) as “ugly.”  I’m particularly concerned with cases where during a presentation everyone sort of looks at each other, raises his/her eyebrows, frowns, and collectively mumbles, “Hmm.”

It seems the term “junk science” has been in use in the legal profession since the 1980’s.  Yet, despite its existence, “junk science” is actually an ambiguous concept.  In 1998, legal experts Edmond and Mercer attempted to conquer this beast by identifying “good science,” then considering outlying cases “bad.”  Here’s what they considered “the good”:

“’Good science’ is usually described as dependent upon qualities such as falsifiable hypotheses, replication, verification, peer-review and publication, general acceptance, consensus, communalism, universalism, organized skepticism, neutrality, experiment/empiricism, objectivity, dispassionate observation, naturalistic explanation, and use of the scientific method.”

Does this list really mean that everything else is considered “junk”?  I can think of a few brilliant studies that used trial and error methods in lieu of the scientific method.  Conversely, I’m aware of peer-reviewers who simply check the “publish” box without actually reading the manuscript.  As is argued on several other blogs, identifying “junk science” is a very gray area.

Perhaps one way to define junk science is to take the Jacobellis v. Ohio approach.  In a 1964 US Supreme Court case involving obscenity, Justice Stewart Potter wrote in his opinion, “I shall not today attempt to define the kinds of material I understand to be [pornography]…but I know it when I see it.”  Clearly the same frame of thought can be applied to junk science.  I am less inclined to accept the Jacobellis approach because it offers nothing tangble.

There must be some empirical qualities that set the good from the bad.  Despite all the skills I’ve learned with a mere decade of lab experience, I am disheartened to admit that I honestly never perfected the skill of detecting bad science.  So, like a responsible, up-and-coming assistant professor of chemistry, I went crawling through the literature to determine what separates the good from the bad.  Below is a list of a few things I learned.

In the spirit of Jeff Foxworthy, science might be “junk” if…

Researchers are more concerned with holding press conferences than publishing results in reputable, peer-reviewed journals. One might assume that “breakthroughs” ought to be showcased in the most prestigious journals after being subjected to a rigorous peer review process.  Fast tracking all the way to the press conference phase certainly raises some flags about credibility.  I’ve seen this phenomenon happen first-hand, and when the science is questionable, the ensuing public announcement can get really ugly (and entertaining, for that matter).

Something about the research seems off kilter. If you think something doesn’t feel right, you might be correct.  Although going with your gut will only get you so far, analysis guides such as “Tipsheet: For Reporting on Drugs, Devices and Medical Technologies” help identify specific areas for journalists to consider when examining the veracity of medical therapies.  Cook and co-workers suggested that similar checklists might likewise serve the general scientific community when evaluating the credibility of reported work.

Conflicts of interest are not explicitly disclosed. In these cases, scientific integrity might be compromised for financial, political, or other external motivations.  In developing this article, I encountered journals, funding agencies, and governing bodies that require authors to declare any potential conflicts of interest while publishing or applying for grants.  Although editors and referees try to uphold strict transparency policies, authors can still fail to report external influences and biasing.  These cases essentially touch every facet of research–cancer, testing pesticides (Berkley Scientif. J. 2009, 13, 32-34), and even drug development.  The onus is put on the audience to look into the author’s sources of funding.

The flow of logic doesn’t make any sense. Junk science may have gaping holes in experimental descriptions or proposed models.  Fortunately, overly simplistic and inaccurate scientific explanations usually evoke sharp criticism from the scientific experts.  Credible “debunkers” often attack the logic of an issue by (for example) discrediting cited authoritative opinions, identifying assumptions, and/or offering overlooked hypotheses.

Colleagues in the field are widely skeptical of the work. Mix it up with your cohorts.  A simple, “Hey, what did you think about the most recent (insert name of researcher here) article in JOC,” can shed some light on the context of published or presented findings.  “[He] hasn’t published anything reproducible in the past 20 years,” my PI once said.  “I sincerely doubt that this latest paper is anything new.”

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How Can Science Embrace Web 2.0: A Response to Rudy Baum

(This post is in response to the May 10 editorial in C&E News.  For the response to the April 19 editorial, click here)

First, I want to thank Rudy Baum, editor-in-chief of C&E News, for taking the time to respond to my commentary.  I know he probably has other issues he’d rather talk about on his editorial page, and I appreciate the engagement in this dialogue.

I’d like to continue the dialogue here and I hope to keep this conversation going – at least informally – for a long time.

Mr. Baum and I seem to agree that Web 2.0 is a part of science now; however, we may disagree on the merits of SciW2.0.  If you don’t believe SciW2.0 has arrived, consider that the fact that you are even privy to this conversation.  Not only do I have a W2.0 platform upon which I can comment on C&E News editorials, but within days the comments were populated with a who’s who of SciW2.0 leaders offering their opinions and helping shape the conversation.  And the conversation became so loud that it prompted an editor-in-chief to write an entire editorial in response to, essentially, a nobody in the chemistry world (let’s face it.  I certainly don’t count myself in the elite of chemistry, blind or not).  That all of these things can happen within a month – and without any face-to-face meetings between any of the players – proves the establishment of SciW2.0 as a communication tool.

Now, before we continue, I want to re-link to this blog post on Nature‘s Nascent blog.  In my opinion, this post is a must read for anyone who wants to engage this discussion.  It is a nice overview of SciW2.0, its strengths and especially its weaknesses.  Why there’s resistance to SciW2.0, why academic and industry leaders aren’t all buying in, and why he’s committed to making SciW2.0 successful.  It really is mandatory, and I’ll wait for you to click over and read it now.

(lounge music break)

While severely cautioning people about SciW2.0 (but not denouncing), Baum seems to want to walk a fine line.  It’s dangerous, it’s not a panacea, he reads blogs, he’s not an opponent of all W2.0, he agrees with author Jaron Lanier when he warns scientists not to adopt W2.0 ideals, and he finds proponents of W2.0 overenthusiastic.  Perhaps he is just cautioning scientists against ‘irrational exuberance’ when it comes to buying in to SciW2.0.  And those warnings would be well heeded (although I doubt we’re anywhere near the irrationally exuberant days of SciW2.0).  My question for Baum is: if he doesn’t think SciW2.0 is a panacea, does he think the current model for scientific communication (peer-reviewed journals) is a utopia?  And if not, what would he suggest happen differently?

As to his comment about the panacea of W2.0 and how it ‘changes everything’ as he says W2.0 proponents adamantly claim, I suspect he’s referring to Don Tapscott’s and Anthony Williams’ book Wikinomic: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.  I haven’t read it, so I can’t comment on it.  But I would imagine, as is true in other areas of life, when people mention ‘everything,’ they rarely mean things like cutting edge academic and scientific research.  Rather, I imagine people mean ‘everyday things,’ usually for everyday people.  I’ll link here to notes by Will Richardson on W2.0 and how it’s changing politics, government, journalism, and business, and how it is starting to change education.  So while it seems to be changing certain industries, I’ll admit that it’s not changing everything.  In fact, I don’t think any of the commenters on the other post thought so, either.  Pop science is not the same as pop culture and does not think the same way.  Comments made in one arena are not necessarily transferable to the other arena.

But rather than getting into a hair-splitting contest over who used what words and who meant what, I propose to move the conversation forward in a different direction.  My open question: What should SciW2.0 look like, and how will we know it’s successful?

W2.0 is ultimately a communication tool.  It harnesses the power and dexterity of the internet and allows people to communicate with each other in ways never before possible and on timescales never before possible.  In certain circles (politics, pop culture), if you’re not actively following the W2.0 scene, you’re way behind and have nothing to bring to the table.  Not so in SciW2.0.  If you’re following SciW2.0, you’re reading about and reacting to people’s analysis of things that happened in the past.  Missing a week or two won’t put you behind, because by and large you’ve already read the same papers and seen the same announcements.

I doubt that SciW2.0 will become an instant data/paper communicating tool for hard science anytime soon the way it has in other aspects of life.  I agree with the reasoning by Timo Hannay in the Nascent link:

[E]ven if the direct financial cost of sharing this information is low, the cost in terms of scooped findings, rejected papers and grant applications, and perhaps even diminished reputation could be very high. … It’s sad, but most scientists don’t publish in order to share results with their peers, they do so in order to secure grant funding and promotions. We know this because when we provide ways of sharing information that do not affect their likelihood of getting funding or promotions – such as preprint servers for biologists – most don’t use them.

There will always be a place for reactionary SciW2.0.  Communities of people talking about science and sharing ideas and information cannot hurt anyone.  But because there’s rarely breaking news coverage on SciW2.0 (see Totally Synthetic’s sodium hydride oxidation post for an example of breaking news coverage), the majority of chemists don’t seem to find the need to tune in regularly.

Before we’ll get large numbers of people on board, in my opinion, might we need to make SciW2.0 less reactionary and more innovative?   I think we’ve started seeing bits and pieces of that scattered throughout, and that might be how we make it more appealing to the science community at large.  I mentioned in the comments previously that ACS had their NanoTube contest, which asked users to upload original videos explaining ‘What is Nano’ in an clear and entertaining way.  Perhaps this is the way science utilizes W2.0 in a productive manner.  Demystifying aspects of science to make it accessible to anyone curious about science, but perhaps without the training.

But, as the Nascent link alludes to, other types of crowd sourcing have not been as successful.  Nature‘s open peer-review system posted a small number of ‘opt in’ papers online and asked the crowd to review and comment on them before being accepted to the journal.  The open peer-review process happened concurrently with the ‘typical’ closed, anonymous peer-review process.  As noted if you listen to the audio version of the talk, it added no apparent value, but a lot more work for the Nature folks, so they abandoned the experiment.  I suspect it was just ahead of its time.

We may look to the results of a current crowd sourcing experiment to see if the time is right yet.  The Haystack, one of CENtral Science’s child blogs, reports on the expansion of the Pool for Open Innovation against Neglected Tropical Diseases.  In this experiment, scientists dump patented information into an open pool, and different users around the world are able to access the data to try to make progress on treatments for neglected diseases.  It will be interesting to watch that story unfold over the next few years.

I guess I don’t really know what SciW2.0 needs to look like to be successful. … But I bet I know a way to get some of the brightest minds in the field together to think about it communally!   I’d love to hear from people what their ideas are for the future of SciW2.0 and how to make it more commonplace in the field.

Finally, I’d like to say to Baum (and everyone else reading), if you haven’t read Who Moved My Cheese?, then pick it up from the library on the way home tonight and read it.  It will take maybe an hour, and it can be read in the easy chair after dinner while watching 24 if you’d like.  The cheese is moving, Rudy, I just don’t know where to, yet.

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The most recycled waste

The most recycled waste is not glass, aluminum cans, plastic, or electronics, according to the EPA’s Municipal Solid Waste Report, last compiled with 2008 data, which I was referred to from a recent Scientific American article.   It is car batteries, almost all of which are recycled.  I actually have wondered what happens when they die, but I’m so glad to know that they ARE recycled.   Just a nice tidbit of knowledge for you there.   Recycling is more or less on the rise overall (see graph from the EPA report), thank goodness, despite the persistent folk out there who firmly believe that recycling has no net benefit and therefore don’t even try.

Recycling is obviously on the minds of environmentally-conscious chemists (and other people, I hear other people exist) – but when you think of recycling and trying to green up your daily work life, what do you think of?  Recyclable catalyst, acetone recycling, reading articles on your computer screen instead of on paper (including opting-out of C&EN’s print issues which, consequently, has decreased the degree to which I use it as a procrastination tool and the depth in which I read the non-science concentrates).  But what do YOU do?  I’m really curious to know.  Do you just shrug and carry on?

Guilt about the waste that we generate – and I can only attest to synthetic organic chemists and those who deal with tissue culture when it comes to the byproducts of science – is so, so heavy on my shoulders.  I’m not a crunchy tree-hugger (despite being a vegetarian, yes), but I AM uncomfortable with generating a crapload of waste in order to obtain a few pieces of paper – a couple JACS articles, a Ph.D., etc.  I know I’m not the only one that is frustrated to burn through so much physical material in the name of progress and intellectual/industrial pursuit.  But what else can you and I do, besides cut down on our chromatography, not use disposable items, recycle our acetone and keep all of our data and journals electronic?   How about big corporations?  Are they making efforts at sustainability so that they can claim they are, or to actually conserve resources?  Does it even matter?  Take for example the new SunChips bag released by Frito-Lay/PepsiCo, the first compostable chip bag ever.  It’s a start, no?

[I didn't mean for my first post to be so depressing!  It's an honor to be here and I hope to bring you more lively topics in the future.  Both the Chemistry Blog (naturally) and Chemical Crystallinity are on a list of top chemistry blogs for students; I don't know why this list was generated from the particular source it is hosted on, but it is pretty reasonable.]

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Is Chemistry Incompatible with Web 2.0?

(This post is in response to the April 19 editorial in C&E News.  For the response to the May 10 editorial, click here)

A recent ChemJobber post notes that C&E News Editor-in-Chief Rudy Baum‘s editorials sometimes have a tendency to approach the controversial – and sometimes the purely political.  I wanted to discuss this weeks editorial which threatens to call into question much of my online existence (sorry, Mitch.  If Rudy’s right, I think you’re about to spontaneously e-implode).

In this week’s editorial, “The Limits of Web 2.0,” Baum decries the cliché “information wants to be free” for both its out-of-context usage (the full quote says information wants to be expensive because it is valuable and free because the cost of information dissemination is shrinking almost hourly – thus a struggle) and for its lunacy (information can’t wish for anything – it’s inanimate).  Rather, Baum says that it’s people who wish that information would be free.  I’d amend Baum’s correction slightly.  People really want information to be free and readily accessible.  I’d argue public libraries have long made most information “free,” if you were willing to do the legwork to get it.

But the bulk of Baum’s editorial promotes Jaron Lanier’s book You are Not a Gadget: A Manefesto, and summarizes Lanier’s main points, namely that the wisdom of crowds can be dangerous and science should be loath to adopt web 2.0 ideals.  Lanier points out that around the turn of century, a “torrent (a word hijacked by the web 2.0 crowd -ed.) of petty designs sometimes called web 2.0″ flooded the web.  And through the use of web 2.0, we apparently are losing sight of the trees for the forest, er, the taggers for the cloud.

Baum writes in his editorial (cross-posted for free on the web 2.0 CENtral Science blog, natch), “The essence of what Lanier is saying is that individuals are important and that we’re losing sight of that at our own peril in elevating the wisdom of the crowd to a higher plane than the creativity of a single person.”  That is, we are valuing the cloud more than the individuals, when the cloud can’t exist – and has no meaning - without the existence of the individuals.  Lanier notes that collective intelligence can be used well, but only when guided by individuals who can direct the course of the hive mind and help steer clear of common groupthink pitfalls.

But the most interesting quote comes near then end, when Baum quotes Lanier as saying that scientific communities “achieve quality through a cooperative process that includes checks and balances, and ultimately rests on a foundation of goodwill and ‘blind’ elitism.”  I’m not really sure what that means…

But to Lanier’s thesis that science ought to be wary of embracing web 2.0 and its ideals, I find it interesting that Baum writes his editorial at C&E News, the magazine of the ACS, whose flagship publication, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, has featured a JACSβ page for some time now.  The same C&E News whose blog has become so popular that it had to split off into several child blogs.  Where each post for each ACS article has links to share the article on one of several social networking sites.  Where scientists can now browse their favorite article on their iphones with ACSMobile.  While perhaps late to the party in some areas, the American Chemical Society has certainly ‘logged on’ to web 2.0 as a way to export content to the web-savvy scientist.

Plus, we have our own Mitch, a one man walking encapsulation of web 2.0.  His most successful application is, in my opinion, the chemical forums, which typically sees between 8,000 and 11,000 visitors per day.  This blog seems to be a big hit, and his ChemFeeds is a one-stop source for your aggregated list of your favorite journals’ graphical abstracts.  All this innovation on Mitch’s part earned him an interview with David Bradley (of ScienceBase) in his chemistry WebMagazine, Reactive Reports.

There’s also the Chemistry Reddit as another outlet of chemistry news and notes.

In the inaugural issue of Nature Chemistry, the Nature Publishing Group recounted how they have completely bought into web 2.0 as a means of science communication – each issue of Nature Chemistry even features a roundup of their favorite posts from the chemical blogosphere (which reminds me, to the left, Mitch has also created an aggregated rss feed of several popular chemistry blogs).

And, of course, web 2.0 in the sciences has been discussed in the blogs several times over the years.  We have over 3 pages of posts categorized Web 2.0, mostly Mitch’s posts on new web 2.0 platforms he’s developed.  Jean-Claude Bradley writes about web 2.0 in response to a very interesting post at Nascent, a blog from the folks at Nature.

So, all of these prove that web 2.0 has been talked about many times in the context of science.  Has it worked?  With the exception of blogs, sadly I’m inclined to say no.  At least not yet.  And even with blogs (with the possible exception of All Things Metathesis, and In the Pipeline, though Derek isn’t allowed to talk about his work b/c of intellectual property issues), not a lot of academic or industry leaders are prone to blogging.  It’s not like we’re reading Phil Baran’s blog and getting inside his head on a daily basis.

Sure, there is a subculture of people who are active on the web 2.0 scene, but it surely hasn’t taken off as a medium for all chemists to enjoy.  It theoretically should.  Chemists are always benefited from communal sharing of results and information.  But there are still (and probably always will be) people who seem reluctant to join the new technological paradigm.  I like the way Timo Hannay words it in his post on Nascent,

“But it’s not up to the doubters to ‘get it’, it is up to those of us who support these developments to demonstrate their value. And if we can’t then they don’t deserve to be adopted and we don’t deserve to be heard.”

Especially if there are people at the position of Editor-in-Chief for arguably the top chemistry magazine denouncing the web 2.0 movement, clearly it has a ways to go before it will be appreciated by all to the point where web 2.0 is ‘taken for granted,’ where we don’t even realize what we’re doing when we post results and opinions via web 2.0 technologies.

Let’s get moving!

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Peer review and the new media

I attended a Macintosh Users Group recently. (Yes, I am a Mac user.) This meeting was unusual. Natali Del Conte, a tech writer for CNet and CBS, was the featured speaker. She talked about being authentic, social networking, and how technology has changed how we get information. She argued that gone are the days that information is simply pushed to us and that Walter Cronkite is the most trusted name in news.

A detail I have come to think more about is what we know. I remember that stomach acid was thought to cause ulcers, but Marshall and Warren have received a Nobel prize for their discovery of the role of Heliobacter pylori and its role in peptic ulcers.

Mitch (Feb 08) and azmanam (Feb 02) have posted on congressional misunderstanding of science and false or poor science reporting, respectively, but I don’t think chemists are as cognizant of the accuracy or correctness of textbooks or peer reviewed papers. There have been a few cases in which errors have entered the chemistry world.

I wrote the the archivist at the Oregon State University Library inquiring about whether there was any correspondence regarding a paper Pauling published (there wasn’t). I wondered what the referees may have said.  Now, I have been thinking how this is like the comments to a blog post. One of the really interesting things about the new media, is errors can be pointed out. They can be argued and open to everyone.

I have been thinking about how our ideas of atomic theory have evolved. In doing so, I have been reading a fascinating series of transcripts from recordings deposited at the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics.

It was interesting that some people thought Niels Bohr had confused the literature with his papers. However, overall, what I liked was how these transcripts contained the personalities of the scientists, their interests, and in some cases their ideas (or biases) about topics being discussed. I felt these transcripts from leading scientists were like our modern internet (although generally without the details of the science).

Our modern internet has no rules. It can be difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff. We need to learn who to follow and who to ignore. Peer reviewed journals only give the filtered result. The referees reports are confidential. Comments are not published except in blogs. Now that science is moving toward electronic publication, would a new model for scientific publication improve the scientific world?

Just to note that this is not unusual in chemistry. Organic Synthesis has long provided a kind of review for a select set of procedures. I don’t foresee H.C. Brown’s papers becoming ignored, but independent reports could prove useful. Similarly, critical steps to improving yields  would be helpful. You can find examples of this in the Organic Chemistry Forums.

Should online journals allow comments? Would it be useful? How could it be done? Would it be science?

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TheChemBlog Closes Shop

Kyle Finchsigmate

One of the pioneering chemistry blogs closed their doors earlier this month. As a brethren to the class of 2006 [1], I feel the need to pay homage to the great Kyle Finchsigmate’s influential chemical blog. TheChemBlog came online in June of ’06 and with his anonymity still intact he was able to get away with his potty-mouth antics in a way to be informative, cutting, and always entertaining.

All good chemistry blogs have a mix of literature reviews, opinion, and funny life as chemists posts. If you examine his early writing they focused mainly on dissecting the chemical literature. The blog served as a vehicle for his wry sense of humor and to develop his capacity to analyze literature and communicate his insights to the chemical community. I mention this only because an examination of his final posts at the blog reveals a complete lack of the literature reviews, and I think this switch is telling for why he closed the doors.

All that being said, I am sure we will hear from Kyle again. As Web 2.0 platforms continue to expand and evolve everywhere in our lives, it will only be a matter of time until Kyle finds a new one to his liking. With the recent very promising blogs Chemical Crystallinity and Chiral Jones he leaves a chemical blogosphere that I believe is in good hands.

Mitch

[1] In 2006 this blog was started and known as the ChemicalForums Blog; it was January 2008 when we moved to this domain.

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On the subject of safety goggles

As azmanam pointed out, Chemjobber’s post about Lab Essentials made it onto the most recent issue of Nature Chemistry–hooray! Well, kind of. One of my comments about comfy eyewears somehow got a mention as well. Now, I didn’t imagine my debut in the Nature publications quite this way. But if I have to be known as the Asian girl with the flat nose, I might as well use this chance to elaborate on the cause that is dear to my heart.

I’ve worn glasses for as long as I could remembered, but my journey to finding a pair to wear in lab has been a rocky one. I must not be alone in this: it’s so hard to find a pair of safety glasses that fits well! My problems are:

1. The plastic part that is supposed to sit on the bridge of my nose isn’t really long enough to touch it; instead, the goggles sit suspended above my face. I have a flat nose; I’ve learned there are more important things in life to be upset about.
2. Since the goggles can’t sit on my nose, the bottom edge of the lenses digs into my cheeks for support. I get the most awful imprint on my face and it starts to hurt after a couple hours
3. Because they are ill-fitted, they fall off all the time when I’m in the middle of doing something

Do I get your attention now, PPE manufacturer? (hint)

When I first started taking chemistry as an undergrad, I was told to fish out a pair of safety goggles from the big box my TA provided. Over the next few years, I had tried on my fair share of safety goggles. Some of them were rocking the retro vibe like this, some others were the more simple style like this, and the others were the nice adjustable length like the one shown above.

The variety was nice. But I never liked any of them. I hated wearing safety goggles/glasses because none of them actually fits me. I don’t know how long it would take PPE companies to figure out that chemistry students with flat nose everywhere (including, but not exclusively, the Asian kids) are resenting wearing goggles!

I think we can agree that safety goggles are among the most important part of personal protection equipments. It’s a must for novice and experienced chemists alike. I would think that fit and comfort are significant factors in designing these because of their proximity to your face. As an undergrad, I didn’t have much of a choice of the types of goggles I could wear, so I just went with whatever that was provided to me. Let me assure you the fun of my chemistry experience was greatly diminished because of the discomfort of wearing one of these.

We’ve always had problems with freshmen (even older students) not wearing their goggles in teaching lab. Aside from laziness and carelessness, I think a big factor of it is comfort. We can promote better safety habit simply by showing students that in the same way we select glove sizes that fit us, it is possible and important to do the same for safety goggles.

And really, we have nitiles gloves in 5 sizes and like 20 different colors; I think it’s possible to add supportive nosepiece to safety goggles.

Noel

Note: I currently use a pair of AOS goggles with rubber nosepiece that I am reasonably happy with. It still falls my cheeks sometimes (as the rubber nosepiece is still quite shallow) but is a significant improvement from previous experience.

Note #2:  Nature Chemistry–if you need guest writers, you know where to find me.

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Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009 Analyzed

Ada Yonath

Thomas Steitz

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

As already announced biologists walked away with this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry once again, this time for work in determining the structure of Ribosomes. Read here for more and more information. We at Chemistry Blog like to quantitate and analyze like any good chemist. But how do we quantitate how badly chemists were denied? Easily, we have ChemFeeds.

ChemFeeds is my little graphical abstracts portal. It tracks 39 chemistry journals. It isn’t an all inclusive list of all chemistry journals, but it is a good representative cross-section: ChemComm, JACS, CrystEngComm, DaltonTrans, JOC, JNatProd, InorgChem, Macromolecules, OrgBiomolChem, OrgLett, Organometallics, JChemInfComSci, JOPCA, JOPCB, JOPCC, PhysChemChemPhys, Analyst, JAAS, ACS NANO, AdvFunctMater, AdvMater, ChemMater, JMaterChem, Langmuir, NanoLett, Small, Biochemistry, Biomacromolecules, ChemResToxicol, IntergrBiol, JCombChem, JMedChem, JProteomeRes, MolPharm, EnergyEnvironSci, GreenChem, JEnvironMonit, NewJChem, SoftMatter.

The database for ChemFeeds is a little shy of a year old. If we search the ChemFeeds database for the occurrence of ribosome we get 7 abstracts in the last year. If we search for GFP we get 2 hits (subtracting the Nobel lectures). What about if we search for other topics most chemists thought deserved a Nobel nod and make a table (chemists love tables).

The analysis shows that although chemists do not concern themselves with GFP or ribosomes, they are still well represented in Google and on some level deserve recognition for their reach. Dye-sensitized solar cells are the new in thing in chemistry, but from an energy perspective they make up a very small percentage of what we as humanity derive our energy (i.e. oil, nuclear, hydrothermal), but it almost makes it past 1,000,000 in Google hits. Radical polymerization, an important reaction used everywhere, but perhaps too established to get a Nobel but then again CCD cameras got the nod. Cross coupling, the most popular subject amongst chemists and can only be ignored by the Nobel committee for so long. Single molecule studies obviously strongly represented in the current literature and is more far reaching in Google than cross-coupling reactions, so that field will be ripe for a Nobel.

As chemists we would like to see the Nobel chemistry prize go to a chemist. Our Nobel hopefuls may be a measurable magnitude more chemically interesting, as measured by ChemFeeds, but there is more work for them to do until these topics become world renowned (which seems to be the dominant prerequisite these days).

Update: You can finally MySQL query the ChemFeeds database yourself: Search ChemFeeds

Mitch

P.S. I get 215,000 Google hits searching for my name exactly, Mitch Andre Garcia, but it doesn’t mean I’m winning a Nobel; although it probably does mean I should spend less time online.

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