ChemBark

This is going to get ugly.

The United Kingdom’s EPSRC—akin to the NSF in the United States—is going to slash the funding of research in synthetic organic chemistry.  In response, the country’s synthetic organic chemists have taken to the streets and set fire to several buildings written a short letter to Prime Minister David Cameron expressing their frustration.

This battle has been shaping up for a long time, and it looks as though it is finally coming to a head.   I think there are tenable arguments in support of both sides of the issue; any decision simply boils down to where your priorities lie.

On the anti-synthesis side, you have those who feel that organic synthesis has reached an area of diminishing returns.  Proponents of the cuts will argue that organic synthesis is a mature field where new advances are modest and unlikely to have major industrial applications.  You also have those who believe that total synthesis—which still seems to constitute a major focus of research in this field—is a largely fruitless exercise where molecules ostensibly made for potential therapeutic activity are actually made just for the sake of making nasty-looking molecules.

While many people do question whether organic synthesis is still interesting, the strongest argument against it probably runs closer to a cost-benefit analysis…  Yes, synthesis can be interesting, but science funding is a zero-sum game and there are other areas of research that are more interesting and/or valuable to society.  I have to think that the recent downturn in the pharmaceutical industry—including the shuttering of Pfizer’s R&D operation in Sandwich—probably strengthens this argument.  The supporters of the budget realignment can argue that we should scale down the training of synthetic chemists now that there are fewer jobs for them.  There are also people who believe that the demise of natural products synthesis in academia has been unreasonably delayed by the historical popularity of the field and the large population of practicing synthetic chemists who stand to benefit by protecting it (e.g., making sure grants for it get funded, etc.)

On the pro-synthesis (anti-realignment) side, you have those who defend the field by pointing out its historical importance, its sustained popularity, its direct applicability to industry, and its potential application in medicine.  With respect to the new criteria for funding, pro-synthesis people can argue the chemistry projects that should be funded are the ones that represent the best science—regardless of the sub-field.  In other words, the synthetic projects that were funded in the past were funded because they were the best projects proposed.  Slashing funding to synthesis will leave these talented chemists out in the cold and will lead to the funding of scientifically inferior projects in other sub-disciplines of chemistry.

Another argument against the realignment in funding is that politicians are messing with scientific funding based on possible misperceptions about various projects’ potential economic value.  The letter to Cameron stresses that the government is overlooking the many contributions of organic synthesis to the UK’s economy.  It should also be noted that EPSRC’s definition of “synthetic organic chemistry” goes beyond total synthesis to include areas like supramolecular chemistry.

It’ll be interesting to see how this battle ends.  If one thing is certain, it is that governments are becoming less shy about dictating how science funding is allocated.  That is, legislators are getting more involved in selecting what types of projects can (and can’t) be funded.  Many people feel that the decision of what science projects to fund should be left to scientists, who are experts in their fields, but the fact of the matter is that science funding is an appropriation of taxpayer money.  Legislators—who are elected by the taxpayers to act in their proxy—definitely have the authority to place specific constraints on science funding and are not necessarily acting against the best interests of society by limiting how this money is spent.

If nothing else, this latest news provides yet another reason for chemists not to ignore the broader public when it comes to justifying their work and communicating its value.

I recently watched Ken Burns’ documentary on the Lewis and Clark expedition, and it was truly excellent.  Perhaps the thing that I found most interesting from the film was an entry that expedition leader Merriweather Lewis made in his journal on the occasion of his 31st birthday:

This day I completed my thirty first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. but since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existance, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.

I turned 31 this month, and over the course of the past year, I’ve felt many of the same sentiments as Lewis.  If I dropped dead tomorrow, there is no question in my mind that I would have had a net negative impact on the world.  I’ve essentially been in school for my entire life, chewing through a variety of taxpayer money in the form of (free) public education, competitive scholarships & fellowships, and grant money.  There’s also the many man-hours of time I’ve sapped from the workforce by way of the training provided by my parents, teachers, and mentors.  In contrast, my contributions to the world (e.g., teaching and a smattering of research papers) have been fairly insignificant.  My body of published research has little chance of helping anyone besides, perhaps, a couple of random souls in the future who are (more than likely) also working on projects of little importance to society at large.

Perhaps this waste and my unease can be written off as unavoidable costs of growing up, but the funny thing is that—unless one actively puts his mind to doing so—it seems pretty difficult to break out of such a cycle.  I mean, look around you.  How much of academic research truly excites you?  What percentage of papers in today’s journals will be especially helpful for more than twenty people, ever?  How many will go completely uncited—or even unread?  Is this what you want to spend your life doing?

I’ve asked this question before, but I’ll ask it again:  What is the greatest achievement in chemistry of the past 10 years?  20 years?  30 years?  Genome sequencing techniques, maybe?  Gleevec?  If that’s all we can bring to the table over such a long period, we’re in trouble.  Lack of production—not in terms of insipid papers, but in terms of compelling advances that benefit society—is going to make it increasingly difficult to justify our current level of taxpayer funding.  If steep budget cuts can happen to NASA’s human spaceflight program, they sure as hell can happen to chemistry.  We’ll probably find this out if we keep spinning our wheels.

Is there hope on the horizon?  I don’t know.  It seems like most of the cattle coming out of the barn are heading right down the same path as those before them.  Many areas of modern research have been tapped almost dry scientifically, but people continue to line up to fight over the scraps.  The academic system of chemistry has become some weird game where there are all of these expectations of what you should be doing.  These expectations keep people busy doing a whole lot of nothing, like publishing a bunch of boring/worthless papers to get more money so they can publish more boring/worthless papers.

What is the point of getting an academic job—or any job in research, for that matter—if you are not going to work on problems that stand to provide significant benefits to mankind?  Part of me understands why washed up professors continue to work on overfarmed land—they were there first.  What I can’t understand is how freshly minted assistant professors can start out working on crap projects.  Why bother?  I assume it’s simply because these people want the status of being a professor, so perhaps hiring committees are to blame?

Or maybe it’s the funding agencies?  I am not advocating cutting back on the funding of scientific research, but you can count me among the people who believe that we need to modify the way we fund this research.  I’d like to see fewer people rewarded for “playing the game” and producing a whole lot of insipid garbage rather than those who have got bold new ideas, even if they are associated with decreased chances of “success”.

Industry has its own problems.  Pharma is neck-deep in an area of diminishing returns for how it discovers drugs, and the industry is shedding weight like a cancer patient.  Of course, not everyone seems to care.  Grad students continue to pile into total synthesis labs, and our flagship news weekly runs pieces titled “Chemistry: Alive and Well”.  Chemistry is alive, but is it really well? 

I’m not as concerned that we’re in the doldrums as I am that no one seems especially motivated to get out.  But who am I kidding?  I’m sure as hell not going to change the broken system.  People have been saying things like “pharma is broken” and “total synthesis is dead” for years, but nothing has stopped their slow march into oblivion.  The only thing I can control is what I do, and I’d prefer not to spend the rest of my life polishing turds.

Getting back to Merriweather Lewis…the Corps of Discovery’s expedition would go down in history as one of the greatest feats of human exploration and of immense national importance to his fledgling country.  In taking such a grand risk, Lewis unquestionably achieved his goal of “advanc[ing] the information of the succeeding generation”.  Unfortunately, he never reached his predicted lifespan of 62.  Rather, Lewis put a bullet in his head at the ripe old age of 35.

There is a virtual conference on “The Future of Women in Chemistry and Science” today at 11 am (EST). You can watch it here.

Some big names will be speaking, including ACS president Nancy Jackson, ACS executive director Madeleine Jacobs, Caltech prof Jackie Barton, MIT prof Milly Dresselhaus, Wisconsin prof Laura Kiessling, Carbon-Based Curiosities blogger Jes Sherman, and origin-of-life superstar Felisa Wolfe-Simon.

Depending on what is said, I may just decide to grab the third-rail of scientific politics and write a follow up post later this week.

What a fantastic State of the Union address by the president.  In case you missed it, the word of the night was “innovation”.  You will recall that the word popped up repeatedly during our December roundtable on jobs and the future of chemistry.  It’s nice to hear the same sentiment rattling around the nerve center of our government.

When you are the economy in the lead, the only way to maintain your distance from the field is to continually develop new technology.  Doing so “grows the pie” such that you can sustain your own growth in the face of rising competition.  If we fail to grow the pie, other countries will eventually eat into our slice.

From the speech:

Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik¸ we had no idea how we’d beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t there yet. NASA didn’t even exist.  But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.

This is our generation’s Sputnik moment. Two years ago, I said that we needed to reach a level of research and development we haven’t seen since the height of the Space Race. In a few weeks, I will be sending a budget to Congress that helps us meet that goal.  We’ll invest in biomedical research, information technology, and especially clean energy technology – an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.

While there is certainly an undertone of gloom in this passage, I’d probably have been more explicit.  The truth is that if the solution to cheap energy is not developed in the United States, we are going to have big problems in maintaining our world superiority.  Big problems.  To me, research on clean energy technology is every bit as much about national security as it is about helping our economy or the environment.

Of course, the hard part falls to us: the people in the trenches.  That’s an exciting (and humbling) responsibility.  Speaking of excitement, I nearly soiled my pants when a mere 15 minutes into his speech, Obama let loose with this:

That’s what Americans have done for over two hundred years: reinvented ourselves. And to spur on more success stories like the Allen Brothers, we’ve begun to reinvent our energy policy. We’re not just handing out money. We’re issuing a challenge.  We’re telling America’s scientists and engineers that if they assemble teams of the best minds in their fields, and focus on the hardest problems in clean energy, we’ll fund the Apollo Projects of our time.

At the California Institute of Technology, they’re developing a way to turn sunlight and water into fuel for our cars.

“Hooooooly Sh’t!!  That’s us!!”  Mom saw it and was pleased.  You can’t ask for much more than that.

The latest issue of Nature is a celebration of 2011 as the year of chemistry.  There are a number of great pieces that went online yesterday, including a comment/editorial by George Whitesides and John Deutch on how chemical academia needs to adapt to a research area that is “mature and fully embedded in society.”

I occasionally get kind of depressed about the current state of chemistry.  The latest episode occurred around New Year’s Day, when I got to thinking about what a lousy past decade the world has had.  In terms of chemistry, what have been the monumental achievements of the past 10 years?  20 years?  30 years?  Is it the development of high-throughput sequencing techniques and completion of the Human Genome Project?  Is that the best chemistry has done?  And after that, what else?  Ever since the end of the 1970s, we’ve been talking about the need to ween ourselves off of oil, but chemists have yet to find an effective solution.  Research into another great chemical problem, the origin of life, is borderline non-existent relative to other sub-disciplines (e.g., organic synthesis).  And despite all of the attention given to organic synthesis since the 1960s, we still have a ridiculously hard time making compounds that biology pumps out with ease.  Something is wrong with us.

That last paragraph is mine—I don’t want to put any words into Whitesides and Deutch’s mouths—although they also use their editorial to make a case that academic chemistry needs to change the way it does business.  Here are a couple of choice quotes from the piece:

Academic chemistry is established, and with its maturity has come an increasingly incurious and risk-averse attitude. So, what’s next? …’Business as usual’ is not an option. To solve new problems, chemistry must be braver in its research choices and in how it organizes them.

Under the short-term constraints of capitalism, industry has largely retreated from long-term research.

‘Solving practical problems’ is often claimed to vulgarize science. It does not: many of chemistry’s fundamental discoveries were made in the course of developing practical technologies — catalysis and polymer science, for instance, had their origins in industry. And such problems are often more challenging than the questions fashionable among academic chemists, driven as they are not by unfettered curiosity but by a conservative peer-review system — the spigot that regulates the flow of government funds.

Chemists must remember where the money comes from. Citizens reluctantly allow governments to collect taxes and to spend a minuscule fraction of that money on science, in the faith that by doing so, research will ultimately generate a better world: better health, less conflict, interesting jobs for their children. If that faith falters, the investment will slow or stop.

[E]ven the best academic chemists have a Prussian-like loyalty to the status quo. Universities that consider themselves the most innovative and radical in their thinking, and that should be in the forefront, are in the rear, defending already familiar and well-established fields.

[A]cademic chemistry is overpopulated. The proliferation of PhD programmes resulted in a demand for research funds that exceeded the (much-expanded) supply, and the imbalance of supply and demand contributed to a peer-review system that protects established fields at the expense of new ideas. These PhD programmes produced too few new ideas and too many average scientists, and neither provided novel solutions to problems (or jobs), nor caught the attention of the public.

Whitesides & Deutch go on to make suggestions for how to proceed:

To make fundamental discoveries, an approach that starts with practical problems, and uses them to reveal unsolved fundamental problems, will work at least as well as (and arguably better than) one that starts with the familiar questions of familiar disciplines.

Chemistry should cluster its teaching and research around the exciting and uncertain future rather than the ossified historical past.

[P]rofessors should teach students the tools of curiosity. An independent, engaged student, exploring as a colleague in a promising area, will do better work than a simple apprentice.

Chemistry must also change its coursework, to include…’non-science’ subjects — especially economics and corporate finance and manufacturing — useful in generating practical technologies.

Don’t just rely on the quotes I’ve pulled; go read the piece for yourself.  I find that I agree with Whitesides & Deutch almost entirely.  (In the interest of full disclosure, I worked for George in grad school.  Feel free to call me a sycophant, but I think that anyone who regualrly sat in our group meetings when I was at Harvard would disagree with such an assessment.  When I disagree with someone, I will usually let them know.  Regular readers of this blog are keenly aware that I am not shy about voicing dissent.  In the present case, I stand in total agreement with the authors.)

Their editorial is not an exhaustive list of everything that is wrong with chemical academia, but it covers a lot of what’s wrong with it.  In my view, the especially sad thing is that the situation isn’t getting any better.  These problems are ingrained deep within the culture of our field.   I am inclined to believe that the best solution to the problem might be to start from scratch in a developing country.  While funding would certainly become an issue, from an institutional standpoint, I think it’d be easier to build a working system than to repair a broken one.