ChemBark

Part of the fun of having a blog is monitoring its traffic, and more traffic equals more fun. I say this because, eventually, someone is going to read this blog and finally create a respectable chemistry journal where all of the correspondence—including letters to the editor, original submissions, referee reports, responses to referees, editorial decisions, and reader comments—is signed and available online. That post was from 2007. What is the delay, people? Let’s make this happen.

Long ago, I had the fanciful idea of running an ad for ChemBark in C&EN. What better way could there be to reach out to so many chemists? Unfortunately, I quickly learned that I couldn’t even afford a single line in those mind-numbing walls of text at the end of the magazine. If you want an ad in the middle of the magazine, the minimum you’ll have to shell out is $3,560 according to this notice (16 April 2012, p. 54).

And what kind of magic was I expecting from an ad in C&EN, anyway? Oh yes…all 150,000+ readers would be so intrigued by a URL under a head shot of Ed the Dog that they would race to their computers and hit the site. Once they had the chance to read my biting criticism of Swiss department stores and admire my poor skills at Photoshop, they’d fall in love and become addicted to blogs, for sure!

Ummm, no. And it is through such a lens that I have wondered what other advertisers have hoped to achieve with expensive print ads—especially those who list random compounds they have available. I think my bewilderment hit an all-time high last month when this ad from Quanta BioDesign was published in back-to-back issues:

“Non-Quenching Fluorescein!” certainly grabbed my attention, and the first thing I felt compelled to do was look at the structure to see what was different about this fluorescein. That is when I noticed something was terribly wrong. At least, I think.

That’s not fluorescein, right? It has a methylene group where an oxygen should be. Wait, is that why this molecule is special? Wait, that shouldn’t even exist…it would tautomerize (such that one of the methylene hydrogens would move to the carbonyl group to make the ring system aromatic).

I was confused, so I went to the Web site and searched for Product #10885. It turns out, there is no product #10885.

So, let me get this straight…this company paid $6,150 (x at least 2 weeks) to run an ad with a wacky structure for a product that doesn’t exist?! I wish I had that kind of money to throw away. I’d save up and get Ed on the back cover.

I have found so many errors in ads run in C&EN that I could probably make a decent living proofreading them on commission. And I sometimes wonder how much money a chemistry blog could make if it wanted to get serious about selling ads. C&EN has a weekly circulation of ~164k and lists a rate of $6,150 for the ad above. Could a blogger like Derek Lowe, who reports traffic of 15-20k pageviews per day, make $615 from running that ad? Seems reasonable to me, and I’d just as well see people throw money at Derek.

Someone should run the experiment, but it won’t be happening here anytime soon. I purposely make sure I’m losing money on this site in an attempt to show I’m not in this for financial gain. That said, just to be on the safe side, I have still reported the blog to my employer as a potential conflict of interest. My job provides me with access to nice things like journals, which are useful to the blog and would cost a pretty penny if I were a professional journalist working from home. I think you can mount a reasonable argument that a revenue-free ChemBark meshes well with the educational mission of a non-profit research university.

Incidentally, the “ads” that you see running on ChemBark are fake. Several weeks ago, I added space for a 150 x 150 pixel image to the left sidebar and a 500 x 80 pixel image to the footer of the page. The ads that you have seen in these positions—for instance, the one linking to the assistant editor position listed at Nature Chemistry—have all been designed by me, for fun. They were neither solicited nor purchased, and I will continue to use these ads to link to things I like. Click them and warm yourself with the knowledge that no one is making a penny.

Commenter Eugene has been leaving comments on ChemBark since before it was ChemBark. Last month, he posted some interesting thoughts in the thread about professors who pose for publicity shots doing lab work. I have copied his comment here in its entirety:

Once your group gets to a certain size, you do not really have to worry about the cost of failure anymore. The successes more than make up for it. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just the way it is and not enough chemistry professors who want to be big shots but are at middling chemical departments realize it.

What I mean is someone like Robert Langer takes credit for the successful grad students and the succesful companies, and there are just so many of them, that the ones who fail are forgotten about in light of the success. The better you can manage everything, the bigger your empire will be. Plus it helps to be in a university that attracts students who are very motivated.

If you’re in charge of a small group, then the failure of a graduate student to get any papers will be magnified since you don’t have too many offsetting grad students that are publication machines. In fact, you might have none. I’ve seen a few profs with medium-sized groups that were taking off, but were blinded by their own hubris, forgot that they were not in a top ten school, and decided to ‘fire’ two or three students or postdocs who weren’t performing well enough (not getting a Jackass or Andjewandte or not coming in on the weekend). Not only does this cause potential students in a non top ten school avoid you (since they care more about lifestyle and not monastic scientific pursuit), but it magnifies the failures of your remaining students (should they happen) as your own failures. Automatically, you’re now an average scientist for the rest of your career and not Robert Langer. Not that there is anything wrong with that, as you can do very good science and pay more attention to individual students, but that’s not what some of the more ambitious types wanted before they cannibilized their group. The lesson is get big as fast as possible with as many driven types as possible and then just sit back and manage your success. You have to get rid of someone who creates a bad group dynamic or is lazy or just plain stupid of course, but once it starts being every second person who works for you, then you’re not doing it right (unless you’re in a really crappy department). Once you’re going, you can move to better and better departments and become bigger and bigger and have to worry about failure even less.

The same effect used to work in pharma. If you’re the CEO of a start-up, when your drug fails, your failure is huge. You’re out of business. If you’re the CEO of a big pharma company and a few candidates fail Phase II, it’s no biggie because you’re got good phase III data on that one cholesterol lowering candidate that will pay the cost of failure for the others.

That’s some biting analysis, filled with all of the cynicism and bitterness one expects of a recent product of graduate school in chemistry. Of course, none of the analysis had to do with the topic of that post—pictures of professors working in labs—so just to make sure Eugene’s thoughts didn’t get lost in the shuffle of the other thread, I wanted to unpack them here.

While it’s more than a bit cynical, the point that Eugene makes about large groups’ affording their PIs protection from a degree of failure is absolutely correct. PIs are judged by the magnitude and number of their accomplishments, not by unspectacular failures. In all of the farkakte metrics used to judge research productivity (e.g., paper count, h-index, total citations), I have never seen someone divide the metrics of accomplishment by the number of graduate students and postdocs required to achieve them. The situation is not unique to chemistry. Reggie Jackson is remembered as one of baseball’s greatest hitters, despite the fact that he holds the dubious honor of being the MLB’s all-time leader in career strikeouts. But people don’t remember the 2,597 strikeouts; they remember the handful of home runs he hit in the clutch.

Getting back to chemistry, let me start by stating that I think it’s great when professors establish themselves to the point that they have the flexibility to fail. It is a deserved product of success, and everyone should be so fortunate in their jobs. Getting to this point probably also helps take the heat off of students in the lab. And when students “fail” (or flounder or whatever), I don’t think you can blame the PI solely (or even primarily). A lot of factors influence these outcomes, ranging from things that can be controlled (intelligence, lab skills, motivation, work ethic, design of experiments) to those that can’t (bad luck, family issues, medical issues).

What worries me about “superlabs” is that by their design, one or more students is probably destined to be ignored not because of his or her personal failings in lab, but because the number of available professor-hours in a year is limited. Eugene is making the point that professors in superlabs need only pay attention to a fraction of their students because their accomplishments will be enough to support the machinery of the superlab and ensure its continued existence. In this model, a professor actively makes a decision to ignore some students. That idea is extraordinarily cynical, but I am not at all sure it can be ruled out.

My view is that one needn’t adopt as cynical a view to show what is effectively the same outcome. That is, I will assume that professors want to pay attention to all of their students, but sometimes, they just can’t. I assume that professors sleep, eat, commute, attend to personal hygiene, spend time with their families, watch television, and do other “normal” stuff we expect of human beings. These activities require time, and together, probably account for more than half of the day. Even if you are going to spend the entire balance of time performing “work”, there is a lot of work to get done. You’ve got to teach, prepare for class, hold office hours, write grants, write reports, serve on committees, go to departmental meetings, meet with speakers, referee papers, keep up with the literature, travel to conferences, give talks, and write letters of recommendation. I am sure I have missed some things, but that is already a lot of stuff and it doesn’t even begin to address advising students—or ancillary work such as consulting or running start-ups. It is an absolute miracle that people can do all of these things and run groups of 10+ students and postdocs, let alone 30+ or 40+. In these cases, it’s almost inevitable that some students will fall by the wayside.

In an era where we have a surplus of freshly minted chemists and a dearth of jobs, I think our field should consider whether it wants to encourage the model of superlabs run by single professors. I personally like the idea of incorporating senior investigators into these research groups to serve as “minibosses” that can provide hands-on expertise and advising. In defense of Langer’s superlab, which might be the biggest in all of chemistry, it is my understanding that he does employ a group of senior scientists as lieutenants to oversee his various subgroups. But, by and large, I don’t think this idea is very common in chemistry. I think a lot of people feel the money for one senior scientist is better spent on multiple students and postdocs, and the delegation of authority is something many professors loathe to accept. While every lab is different, as time goes on, professors’ increasingly jammed schedules are bound to take a toll on advising. Graduate schools must watch out for their students, because many overextended professors will not.

A video of a new wheelchair has been making the rounds this week, and it’s pretty cool. The device allows you to either sit or stand while moving:

The first thing that crossed my mind on seeing this video is how useful such a device would be for someone disabled who wanted to work in a lab. Yes, there are adaptations you can make to laboratories such that someone in a (seated) wheelchair can work, but I have never actually seen a facility with them. And what is to be done about shared instrumentation? Do the able-bodied people in the lab have to work on lower benches, or does the student in the wheelchair need to find a way to elevate himself?

It doesn’t require a stretch of the imagination to see how a wheelchair-bound student could be very successful in computational research without too much difficulty, but it seems like a disabled student who aspires to conduct “wet” chemistry would have a much more difficult time. The experimental work typical of graduate school is inherently solitary, and even with modifications like reduced-height hoods, a wheelchair-bound student is still going to run into all sorts of problems that will hinder independence. For instance, how do you insert samples into an NMR spectrometer? How do you reach the top shelf in the stockroom? How do you swap out an expired nitrogen cylinder? How can you carry things from building to building?

If you are an aspiring basketball player or construction worker, a spinal-cord injury means giving up your dreams. The cold, hard facts dictate that you will not be able to contribute to these endeavors in a significant way. But as far as chemistry goes, being in a wheelchair doesn’t fatally disqualify someone from being a professor or industrial group leader. You can still think, write, talk, and teach just as well in a chair as you can standing. What’s tough is that in order to earn your way into such a position, you are going to have to tackle two phases of solitary, physically-demanding experimental work as a graduate student and postdoc.

In all my years in academia, never have I encountered a single wheelchair-bound undergraduate chemistry major, graduate student in chemistry (experimental or computational), postdoc, or professor under the age of 80. I have heard of one chemist (Todd Blumenkopf of Pfizer) who went through graduate school and a postdoc in wet labs (Berkeley, then Irvine). That isn’t to say there aren’t other examples, but they seem to be very, very rare.

It seems like anyone who wants to be a group leader in an experimental field is going to have to find a way to perform lab work. Maybe assistive devices like the TekRMD will open the door for a class of people who would otherwise be reluctant to attempt to climb the ivory tower or industrial ladder.

A hearty “thank you” goes out to Alex, a concerned reader from the East Coast who sent a link to this interesting video. It is an investigative report about unlocked chemistry labs and the ease with which a terrorist could steal hazardous materials:

The concerns of the report are valid and important, even if the presentation is a bit sensationalistic and uninformed at times. (NITROGEN, OMG!)

In grad school in Massachusetts, one thing that struck me as weird was how we were required to keep our hazardous waste cabinet locked at all times, while the labs and stockrooms could be left wide open. What magically happened when the 4L jug of mixed organic solvents moved from the hood in my (unlocked) bay to the cabinet in the hallway such that a lock was now required?

We always thought the rule was designed to stymie terrorists searching for materials to make a “dirty bomb”, but the fact of the matter is that most of the nastiest reagents have already been quenched once they make their way into a waste container. The stockrooms and hoods are what I’d be concerned about. I can recall a number of lab cleanups where people reported finding particularly nasty things that nobody knew were there, and hence, nobody would have reported as missing. These included radioactive salts and a small quantity of ricin in an unlocked freezer.

Keeping all doors locked shut will be a major inconvenience for some labs, but it is probably just a matter of time until everyone is required to do so. The current situation is a time bomb.

Link to original site.

This delightful cover of The Band Perry’s “If I Die Young” is hopelessly stuck in my head:

While listening to this song play on repeat for the 368th time, I was particularly taken by the stanza:

A penny for my thoughts, oh no, I’ll sell ‘em for a dollar
They’re worth so much more after I’m a goner
And maybe then you’ll hear the words I been singin’
Funny when you’re dead how people start listenin’

It is interesting how it can take the death of someone young to make us address a problem that we all knew existed. In chemistry, Sheri Sangji’s accident made many people stop and think about certain specific subjects concerning lab safety. Her death sparked considerable discussion online, in print, and in person regarding procedures for dispensing pyrophoric compounds, and as I’ve stated here before, the accident had a direct impact on Caltech’s reinforcement of a policy that lab coats are mandatory for bench work. If there is any consolation to be found in the death of Ms. Sangji, it will rest with the awareness her story created about issues of safety training.

Of course, what is sad about these deaths is that we—as a community—almost always forget any “lessons learned” with the passage of time. Sangji died three years ago, and the level of attention paid to safety in academia is still atrocious. You don’t need to search far in most academic labs to find someone working with hazardous compounds without a lab coat. I was really impressed when in 2010, Caltech’s chemistry division held what it billed as its “first annual Safety Day”. Perhaps in response to the Sangji accident, the program included a breakout demonstration on “Working with Pyrophorics: Syringe, canula, quenching techniques”. Unfortunately, 2011 has come and gone and a “second annual” session never materialized. It would be nice if we could get to a place where our community didn’t need a constant stream of fresh corpses to remind it how to behave.

I have little doubt that when the Harran/UCLA case is finally resolved—most likely with a settlement that includes little more than a slap on the wrist as punishment—that the academic community will forget the episode and revert to its usual ways. This has already happened once in the Sangji story, which was an afterthought before the arrest warrant was issued for Harran.

But the world of chemistry has seen this before. When I was a freshman at NYU, my organic professor brought in an article from the New York Times titled “Lethal Chemistry at Harvard”. The story detailed the death of Jason Altom, a graduate student who committed suicide and blamed his death on pressures of graduate school specific to Harvard and his advisor. After Altom’s death, the chemistry department at Harvard vowed to improve the environment it fostered for grad students. They expanded the mental health services available, paid attention to recommendations of the students’ “Quality of Life” committee, and revamped the thesis committee structure so that students would interact with professors other than just their advisors.

I enrolled at Harvard for grad school several years later, and in my time there, the department (i) rolled back many of the mental health benefits, (ii) changed the “Quality of Life” committee to the “GPC” (Graduate student and Postdoc Committee?) and paid minimal attention to it, and (iii) did little to correct the culture of isolation. At Harvard, each research group was/is more-or-less an island physically and socially. The architecture sequesters each lab group to its own area, while the institutional culture does the same socially. The opportunities to interact with professors other than your advisor are few and far between. There are few, if any, joint students among labs, and interlab interactions are commonly limited to people who’ve met in first-year classes. The “student center” so highly touted in 1999 (actually known as the Department Center) serves not as a place for students to unwind so much as a neutral location for standard departmental events. While positive changes did come out of the Altom tragedy, they were largely ornamental and did nothing to change the culture of the organization.

And that’s the problem. Changing the culture of an institution—especially one as intractable as chemical academia—is extraordinarily difficult. But so long as we forgo meaningful changes in favor of cosmetic ones that we don’t even bother to sustain anyway, we will continue to experience frustration and tragedy. One wonders what magnitude of disruption is necessary for our community to commit itself to improvement. Apparently, it is much greater than the death of a twenty-something student.

It always surprises me how companies will happily spend thousands of dollars to run printed ads with inventories of chemical structures. These structures are unsearchable by computer, and is there anyone out there who thumbs through science magazines on the lookout for fine chemicals?

“Wow! That 1-bromo-3-methylbutane looks fantastic. I’m calling these guys right away!”

Maybe such a response has occurred once or twice in the past decade, but this approach seems like a shot in the dark. I imagine most people who find themselves in need of 1-bromo-3-methylbutane turn to the catalog of their favorite vendor, the Available Chemicals Directory, or Google.

While the following ad certainly fits the profile (C&EN, 1/23/2012, p. 31), it bothered me for a different reason:

I can’t understand why you would go through the trouble of paying thousands of dollars to run an ad and not bother to proofread the thing. Let’s start from the bottom right corner and move clockwise, shall we?

1. Coumarin. Great. I have no problems here.

2. O-Anisaldehyde. This is a rather common error in style, but it is still an error. If the “O” is meant to signify “ortho,” then it should be written as a lowercase letter, even if it begins a sentence. It should also be italicized. A capital “O” written like that in a name usually signifies substitution on oxygen.

3. 2-Hydroxy-benzaldehyde. There are two problems here. First, you don’t need a hyphen after “Hydroxy.” Second, if you are going to use common names like o-anisaldehyde, then why not call salicylaldehyde by its common name? Alternately, you could have called the previous compound “2-methoxybenzaldehyde.” Basically, why not be consistent?

4. 5-Helo-salicylic aldehyde. <Facepalm> Now I guess it’s OK to use a common name? More importantly, what the hell is a “helo” group? The period after the “Cl” is also a nice touch.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. If I were in the advertising department at GPhS, I’d take $200 from the budget to buy a copy of the ACS Style Guide and pay for an eye exam.

When the quality of your advertisements is this poor, do you think people might question the quality of your other products?

Just a thought.