Now Accepting Nominations for the 2012 Chemmy Awards
January 3rd, 2013
Happy New Year!
The close of 2012 means that we must decide who will take home the ChemBark Chemmy Awards for excellence (and the opposite) in chemistry. This year’s categories are the same as the last two years’:
Outstanding Achievement/Paper in Organic or Biochemistry
Outstanding Achievement/Paper in Physical, Materials, Inorganic, or Analytical
News Story of the Year
Chemical Hero(ine) of the Year
Chemical Villain of the Year
Accident of the Year
The award winners will be announced later in the month. Please use the comments to make nominations. Here are some of my preliminary thoughts on contenders:
Breslow and the Spacedinos duplication scandal
ACS Publications vs. Jenica Rogers and other Librarians
The settlement of ACS v. Leadscope
Arsenic Death
UCLA/Harran/Sangji
What say you?
January 3rd, 2013 at 11:01 PM
I’m down with putting Bengu Sezen on the Chemical Heroine nomination list, for her scientific perseverance.
January 4th, 2013 at 3:19 AM
I nominate space dinos for facepalm of the year.
January 4th, 2013 at 3:21 AM
I was worried for a moment that we’d fallen out – I thought that “Arsenic Death” was a slightly tasteless was of describing this story: http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2012/09/southampton-university-poisoning-thallium-arsenic
January 4th, 2013 at 9:12 AM
Why don’t you give this guy the ‘News story of the year’ award or ‘chemical here of the year’? Though most of the reports were on stuff that appeared to be biochemistry to me. Not that I followed the scince-fraud site (it was biochem…), but it seems connected to your interests and now that the guy has been shut down and exposed along with being sued, he’ll need all the good publicity he can get to have a job in science in the future (never mind academia).
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/owner-of-science-fraud-site-suspended-for-legal-threats-identifies-himself-talks-about-next-steps/
January 4th, 2013 at 9:16 AM
Actually, Paul Brookes already has tenure… For some reason I thought it was a postdoc writing that blog. Projection.
January 4th, 2013 at 5:50 PM
I’ll put in for something that ScienceGeist will surely second: where’s the Mars Curiosity rover in all this? Sure, you could chalk it up to “space” or “astronomy,” but it’s actually a roving chemical lab that Dick Zare himself issues statements for!
Outstanding achievement in biochem could well be G-Protein coupled receptors – also a flash-point for the chemblogosphere…
No discussion of chemistry personae could be complete without the NYT’s Nick Kristof, chemophobia and all.
Also of note: honest reporting on the PhD glut in sciences (thanks, CJ!), the ACS graduate ed recommendations (4 years…really?), and how about K.C. Nicolaou’s $6 million ticket to Rice?
January 5th, 2013 at 5:09 AM
Paula Stephan was Science Careers person of the year (if talking about PhDs and the job market plus the way of doing science in universities).
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2012_12_21/caredit.a1200140
January 8th, 2013 at 8:57 AM
Curiosity is a chemist, built by engineers and launched into space by astronomers, physicists and computer scientists.
January 11th, 2013 at 5:05 AM
ACS for villain of the year. Between Leadscope and the battles against librarians, they sure come out looking quite nasty.
January 11th, 2013 at 8:45 AM
Look, even Forbes has now written about that ‘Science-Fraud’ cite (which I admit I only glanced at a couple of times before it got shut down). Now you have to give this guy some kind of award.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/2013/01/09/a-barrage-of-legal-threats-shuts-down-whistleblower-site-science-fraud/
January 14th, 2013 at 9:46 AM
Villain of the Year – That lady from the ACS who has a seven figure salary and berates struggling scientists for expressing caution to their offspring regarding a career in chemistry.