ChemBark

Earlier this week, I sent a questionnaire to the two current candidates for ACS President-Elect. The first candidate to respond is Tom Barton, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at Iowa State University. I have posted his responses below, in full.

Thank you, Professor Barton, for responding and engaging the online community of chemists on these matters of great importance to the society!

Response of Prof. Tom Barton, Candidate for ACS President-Elect

Hi Paul,

Thanks for giving me an opportunity to take a shot at these important questions.  You will see in my responses that I don’t have the complete picture on any of them.  If elected I would plan on spending a significant portion of the first year getting that picture and probing membership on their views on these and other concerns.

Tom

1. What are your thoughts on the ACS vs. Leadscope case?  Do you believe that society records pertaining to the lawsuit—including legal fees—should be made public?

For those who are not up to date on this case, as I wasn’t when first asked about it, there is an excellent summary by Marianna Bettman, an Ohio law professor to be found at http://www.legallyspeakingohio.com/2012/09/merit-decision-am-chem-soc-v-leadscope-thumbs-up-on-unfair-competition-claim-thumbs-down-on-defamation-claim/.  I found it to be an excellent discussion.  As only a candidate, I do not know the intimate details of how and why ACS got into this, nor of the situation that they face at the moment.   Thus, I must reply with the general statement that I have always believed and always have acted on the principle that openness is the best policy.  In my lifetime, the most dramatic examples of the dangers of secretiveness were perhaps in the behavior of the Atomic Energy Commission, who wrongly believed and operated under the premise of “the public doesn’t need to know”, when in fact the public had a desperate need to know.  There are many more examples where secretive behavior by parts of government ultimately created situations far worse than complete openness would have produced.  Thus, as ACS president I would want to see all the history and strive to make all that was pertinent and not legally encumbered available to the entire ACS membership.  Yes, that includes legal fees.

2. What is your stance on the ACS’s executive compensation packages?

I have received a number of enquiries as to my views in this arena, and conclude that a lot of people feel rather strongly about this issue.   In tracking down the actual numbers I found different ones in different sources but they are all awe-inspiring.  It is important to remember that executive compensation operates within a market.  If your compensation is not competitive, there is real risk that you can lose the type of talent that you need for the organization to succeed.  That said, the membership of ACS has every right to request and get an explanation for the magnitude of these salaries.  There is an annual process by which the salaries are set and thus, the ACS can provide the rationale(s) involved and report to membership (via C&EN) why the salaries are what they are.  Said report should provide examples from similar societies, keeping in mind that ACS is not only the world’s largest scientific society, but certainly the most complex (and D.C. is hardly the least expensive place to live).  I would support a policy that in the future, salary histories of all employees making over some minimal level would be annually reported to the membership in C&EN.  Again, this is a simple matter of openness.  If one is not prepared to justify how one is spending someone else’s money, one should not spend it in that fashion.

I would add that where I have worked for the past 45 years, Iowa State University, all faculty and staff salaries are published annually in the newspaper (now on paper’s website).  The only time this has bothered me is when I was not included because my salary did not reach the minimum!

Lastly I would note that I do not see the logic in giving everyone a bonus every year.  The only reasonable justification for a bonus is that the employee exceeded your expectations.  If you are giving bonuses every year, you need to rethink your expectations.  Once again, if there are good reasons, all that is needed is to inform membership of them

3. What is your stance regarding the fees that ACS publications charges companies and universities to access journals?

I don’t have the data to take a reasoned stance on this at this time.  I’ll have to get it, however, as I have had a couple of interesting emails about this in the past few days, which have caused me to have some potential concerns.  It is hardly unreasonable for users to be concerned about the costs of necessary materials, and ACS needs to be sensitive to the real fiscal constraints in the budgets of their members/subscribers.  Using profits resulting from ACS publications to fund other parts of the operations, considered to be of significant value, up to a point seems reasonable to me.  I can see no reason not to inform membership of the details, specifics and magnitudes, and then try to get feedback via the local sections.  Once again it is a simple matter of openness.  If you are not proud to tell people what you are doing with the money, you need to rethink what you are doing with the money.  Actually I imagine that ACS has an admirable story to tell here.  As I said, I don’t have enough information to provide a detailed answer at this time, and that is largely because such information is difficult to obtain.  There clearly is considerable concern about pricing out there (e.g. www.attemptingelegance.com and www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/02/acs ) but “tiered pricing”, “value-based pricing” and confidential negotiations with individual institutions have made it difficult to see a clearly defined pricing picture.  One group truly stands out as having serious problems and that is small liberal-arts colleges with quite small chemistry departments, who have to pay what to them are very large sums of money to subscribe to the number of credible chemistry journals required for ACS accreditation.  With the fiscal situations of these institutions being often dire, it has become difficult if not impossible for them to comply.  I strongly believe that we need to work on a solution to this problem.  I also believe that there must be solutions, as our reason for existence is to serve our members.

A question I have, and have not yet found an answer, is has there been an accounting of the actual costs of publication now versus the pre”technology-revolutionized” costs.  Surely the costs have been lowered by electronic publishing, and one might have expected that to be reflected in subscription costs.  Maybe it has been, or perhaps the loss of revenue from individual subscriptions has more than offset any savings.  I don’t know, and I’m sure many members would like to see a C&EN article addressing this situation.

4. What one specific item would you, as ACS President, make your first priority to improve the public perception of chemistry?

I would prepare a series of profound video vignettes of the great successes of chemistry which have benefitted the world (and the U.S. economy) to be shown via every possible media outlet, and to be used for workshops for Congressional legislative staffs.   The purpose is to help the general public, and quite importantly, lawmakers understand that support of chemistry is an investment with a long history of success.  This is of course not a new idea, but is the best one of which I know.  A key will be how to find affordable ways to get the message out.  Purchasing commercial broadcast time is very expensive, so leveraging new media like social media and the blogosphere would have to part of the answer.  While I don’t consider the public’s perception of chemistry to be quite the problem that once was the case, this effort to get the word out that ours is an enabling science will always be with us.

5. What one specific item would you, as ACS President, make your first priority to improve the employment situation for chemists?

I realize that it is comforting to hope that there is one silver bullet or some magic pill that will make everything alright again, but it just isn’t going to happen.  In recent months I have spoken and written about my belief that it is entrepreneurship which has the best chance of building a new employment base for chemistry in America.  However, for this narrowly focused question I would try to address the issues that have caused and are still causing our jobs to depart our country.  Although I am usually loath to address a problem with a meeting, I would propose a summit meeting of the industrial leaders of chemistry to develop a list of factors that make leaving America attractive; kiss off the ones we really can’t deal with (e.g. lower wages elsewhere) and get to work on the ones we can.  Understand that lower labor costs are not the only issues in this game.  As I discussed a bit on my website, there is no surer route to moving jobs out of America than to impose unreasonable regulations on American industry.  This may be an unpopular subject to raise, and I am sure will engender some cries of anguish, but if there is anything within the bounds of ethical behavior that can be done to produce and protect jobs for American chemists, we must do it.  The health of the American chemical industry is of utmost importance to us and we must not forget this.

6. What is your favorite element and why? 

Hey! I thought the softball question is supposed to come at the beginning of an interview.  That having been said, I’ll answer it.  Silicon.  Why?  Because it is so close to carbon, yet so far away in its behavior.  I am particularly enchanted by the richness of its thermochemistry as compared to that of carbon.  For example, the isomerization of the carbene analog, R₂Si:, to a silene analog of an olefin, RHSi=C<_, is essentially isothermal!  Or that SiH₄ thermally decomposes to H₂  +  :SiH₂  in a single concerted step.  Compare these observations with the drastically different cases in organic chemistry.

Note: Any response provided by Prof. Barton’s opponent in this election, Prof. Luis Echegoyen, will be posted within a day of its receipt.

I was away last week, and I’m still processing all of the recent developments in the Patrick Harran case. Harran, a chemistry professor at UCLA, is facing three felony charges in the wake of the death of Sheri Sangji in a lab accident involving t-butyllithum. Last week, the Los Angeles district attorney dropped charges against UCLA in exchange for its acceptance of responsibility for the safety conditions in the Harran lab and the establishment of an improved safety program. The agreement does not immediately affect the case against Harran, whose legal team filed a seperate motion to quash the charges against him because the state safety investigator allegedly committed murder as a juvenile (WTF?!). The court will rule on the motion next month.

I started drafting this post by jotting down a list of thoughts on the case, but they were too muddled to be of value. The situation is a mess, and what trumps my frustration in our legal system is my frustration in the culture of our profession.

You’d have hoped that the academic community would have straightened up in the wake of such a tragic accident. The circumstances of how Sangji died are horrifying: the fire covered 50% of her body in burns; the flesh in her hands burned off leaving exposed tendons; her abdominal wall was destroyed; she took 18 agonizing days to die. It was brutal:

If you watch that video, produced by California Watch and The Center for Public Integrity, you’ll find this statement from Jim Kaufman of The Laboratory Safety Institute:

This was a tsunami throughout academia that criminal charges were being filed against the university. I think that good things are going to come as a result of this and that Sheri Sangji’s death will not be in vain.

Allow me to preface my next statement by apologizing to the Sangji family for my lack of tact, but I am afraid that Sheri did die in vain. Harran can be punished to the fullest extent of the law and UCLA can throw all sorts of money at safety initiatives, but those actions are not solutions to the underlying problem here. The most important issue is that thousands of young, inexperienced researchers in university labs are performing chemical research with a gross lack of understanding of the hazards of their work. And, to me, it appears that the Sangji story has done little to change that.

Earlier this week, I took an informal survey of some of my colleagues by posing the following question:

t-butyllithium reacts violently with air. The guy in the hood next to you spills a solution of it on himself and catches on fire. What should you do?

The majority of people I asked responded they should find a fire blanket and smother the flames. (Recall, this is roughly what the first labmate to treat Sangji did.) If a person said to “use the safety shower”, in about half of cases I could knock them off this (correct) idea by saying “but tBuLi reacts violently with water.” Just a couple of people had the confidence to insist that while it might seem counter-intuitive, the shower is the best option because the tBuLi will react quickly (probably before you even reach the shower) and the large volume of water will suppress the fire and dissipate the heat.

The extent of our systemic ignorance floored me given the relatively high level of news coverage devoted to Sangji’s accident. I realized that while I (personally) have been exposed to a lot of information about the case through paying attention to C&EN and blogs, the majority of people around here seem to know little or nothing about the accident. In spite of the extensive news coverage and publicity, we (as a community) have largely failed to effectively incorporate any “lessons learned” from the accident into our training.

We’ve got a lot of work to do to fix the culture of safety in academia. It’s a shame we never seized the opportunity presented by Sheri Sangji’s death.

One of my favorite chemistry demonstrations is the addition of concentrated sulfuric acid to sugar, but who in his right mind would handle concentrated sulfuric acid without gloves?

Um, this guy:

No one appeared to get hurt, but I would not endorse the chap’s claim that “if this will get on your hands, you have about [a minute and 10 seconds] until it takes to really react to wash it off”.

B.S.

Stay safe, kids.

Today is Laboratory Personal Protective Equipment Day.

Why? Because Chemjobber said so, and that is good enough for me. He even set up a Tumblr for the occasion to make everything official.

This was my contribution to the Lab PPE Day photo album:

That is the Nomex lab coat I wrote about here and my favorite model of safety glasses, N-Specs (Northern Safety, Frankfort, NY). I am also demonstrating the one-glove rule, which I wish more chemists would heed, but I’ve already ranted on that subject.

In lab-coat-related news, Thursday is the deadline that a judge has set for Patrick Harran and prosecutors to reach a plea agreement in the case surrounding the death of Sheri Sangji. This process has dragged on for months, and the judge seems to have become fed up with granting delays of Harran’s arraignment. If a plea agreement is not reached, the case would probably move to trial.

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.

A concerned labmate brought my attention to a chemical abomination on last week’s episode of the increasingly unpopular television show House, M.D.

Thanks to a very special friend of mine, we can all enjoy video footage of what Hollywood writers believe constitutes a realistic demonstration for a high school chemistry class:

Marvelous, isn’t it? Notice how the teacher isn’t wearing a single piece of personal protective equipment—no gloves, no goggles, no lab coat—whilst working in front of a poster that reads “LAB SAFETY RULES”.

Who knows what this demonstration was supposed to be, but the last time I checked, HF wasn’t combustible. In fact, its NFPA 704 flammability rating is zero. Oh well, I doubt the flame coming out of the Bunsen burner is real anyway, seeing as how the dude just picked up the metal with his bare hands. The limp gas line and the fact that the blue flame doesn’t deflect upward when it is tilted are also nice pieces of laziness on the part of the production staff.

If you plan to replicate this experiment at home, I suggest that you work with hydrofluoric acid in plastic containers instead of glass ones. HF is a great etchant for glass and many other materials that contain silicon. Furthermore, if you have an accident and get HF on your skin or in your lungs, you are going to be in a world of hurt. That stuff is nasty and goes right for the calcium in your body. In the event of an accident, you should apply calcium gluconate gel to the affected areas of your skin and seek medical attention immediately. Preferably, not from Dr. Gregory House.