Chemistry

The rest of this week, Andre the Chemist and I will be talking about career advice for (relatively) young chemistry professionals. Today, I'm writing about job geography and Andre is responding at his blog (I'll post the link when it is up.) -- CJDear Andre:Hope that you are enjoying your summer -- and that you're getting a good workout on the minor league wrestling circuit (isn't that what unusually large academic chemists do when they're not doing research or writing lecture notes?) Anyway, thanks for doing this dialogue with me. I'm excited to find and discuss our differences (if we have any) on what we think relatively young chemists should be doing to further their careers. I wanted to talk about geography -- and I think you wanted to talk about when chemists should specialize? Either way, I'm excited to hear what you have to say. I know it's been a month, but I wanted to pick some nits about some advice you gave recently to graduates (B.S. and further): ...Go anywhere for a job. This is a big country. There are lots of places. Lots of these places have jobs. Some of these jobs are interesting. When I talk with students about jobs, I always ask if there are any locations in particular they are focusing on. Most students say they are looking at a combination of area X (which is close to where they attended school), area Y (which is close to where they grew up), and/or big city Z (which is any big city where it's fun to be a twenty-something)... (snip) ...If you find a job in Idaho or Oklahoma or West Virginia or Arkansas or New Mexico or Michigan, try it out. You'll still get to see your friends and family. As a college graduate who's employed you'll make enough money to go on trips. You can fly anywhere in the country in a day and you can drive a lot of places. If you move someplace and don't like your job or where you live, you know what? Move someplace else. At least you'll be making money and getting job experience. And I haven't even talked about working in another country.I agree that students tend to fall into the X, Y, Z category, and that they can be relatively unwilling to consider other areas. Personally, I am nearly indifferent to where I live, just as long as I can make the rent and my wife can find a job as well.* But I think that students are making a certain amount of sense:1) The ties of family and friends count for a lot, in terms of happiness. Community takes time (and money!) to build and it makes sense for students to attempt to preserve some social capital by either staying where they are, or going back to where they have been. While community can be developed and friends can be had by moving someplace and meeting people (I can say this, having done it a number of times), I suspect that people (and society in general) are getting worse, not better, at joining communities or integrating newcomers into communities. 2) Perhaps I am wrong, but it seems like we're at a moment in our society where broad prosperity doesn't seem to be spreading across the country. Rather, there are pockets where things are going quite well (Silicon Valley, I'm looking at you) and there are places that seem less prosperous (St. Louis? Baltimore? I don't really want to single a city out.) While I don't doubt that your students' perspectives are skewed by television and that they're not consulting the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the latest on unemployment, do you think that some cities might be better for chemists (Boston, definitely) and some might be worse? I am loathe to give people firm advice on how to prioritize choices for a career**, and I suspect that what you are saying is "don't count any place out!" and I agree, for the most part. But I wonder if we can, through our discussion, come up with a means of determining what might be a good set of priorities that aren't 1) close to home/family or 2) in big city Z. If you put a gun to my head, here's my list:1. Choose places where there are lots of people older/more expe

Gevo, a maker of bio-based isobutanol, is now actually making isobutanol. It says something that a publicly-traded company has been not making its commercial product for some months. The problem was a bug in the production system – technically a microbe – a microbe other than the one (a yeast) that was supposed to be making isobutanol. I spoke with Gevo's CEO Pat Gruber yesterday at the BIO show in Montreal. He was rather forthright about what happened. First, they were running the plant at full scale with their own yeast and had their separation process running. They were producing truckloads of isobutanol. The facility had previously been an ethanol fermentation plant. With the new operating conditions, a dormant microbe sprang to life, contaminating the process. The product was still being made but the company decided to shut down the plant and decontaminate it. “We had to identify the sources of the contaminant, change the pipes, sanitize the equipment, train the staff and modify the operating conditions to favor our yeast,” Gruber recounted. He emphasized that these plants are not sterile like a pharma plant would be. Instead, vectors of contamination are controlled so they stay at very low levels. When I wrote about biobased chemicals last summer, analysts held out Gevo as an example of a success story. It was shortly after the story ran that Gevo stopped its process at its Luverne, Minn. plant due to problems with contamination. The episode shows the kind of growing pains that the industry and its followers are learning to anticipate and accept. Other companies might face different kinds of growing pains – for Gevo there was what is called technical risk. Other firms are making chemicals such as biosuccinic acid. They also face a market risk because for most applications their product is not a drop in raw material, so downstream customers must adopt it. This year is the tenth anniversary of the World Congress for Industrial Technology. Historically, it seems to take about a decade for a new chemical concept to reach commercialization, and then some more time to penetrate new markets. This makes 2013 a very interesting year for the biobased chemical industry. Related Posts:SoloPower, Gevo: Can a capital-light strategy save…Making Markets for Bio-based Fuels and ChemicalsAnd More Coming in Biobased ChemicalsCoke Ups The PlantBottle AnteSay Hello to Two New Microbial Employees

Over at Forbes, John Osborne adds some details to what has been apparent for some time now: the drug industry seems to have no particular friends inside the Obama administration: Earlier this year I listened as a recently departed Obama administration official held forth on the industry and its rather desultory reputation. . .the substance of the remarks, and the apparent candor with which they were delivered, remain fresh in my mind, not least because of the important policy implications that the comments reflect. . . .In part, there’s a lingering misimpression as to how new medicines are developed. While the NIH and its university research grantees make extraordinary discoveries, it is left to for-profit pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to conduct the necessary large scale clinical studies and obtain regulatory approval prior to commercialization. Compare the respective annual spending totals: the NIH budget is around $30 billion, and the industry spends nearly double that amount. While the administration has great affection for universities, non-profit patient groups and government researchers (and it was admirably critical of the sequester’s meat cleaver impact on government sponsored research programs), it does not credit the essential role of industry in bringing discoveries from the bench to the bedside. Terrific. I have to keep reminding myself how puzzled I was when I first came across the "NIH and universities discover all the drugs" mindset, but repeated exposures to it over the last few years have bred antibodies. If anyone from the administration would like to hear what someone who is not a lobbyist, not a CEO, not running for office, and has actually done this sort of work has to say about the topic, well, there are plenty of posts on this blog to refer to (and the comments sections to them are quite lively, too). In fact, I think I'll go ahead and link to a whole lineup of them - that way, when the topic comes up again, and it will, I can just send everyone here: August 2012: A Quick Tour Through Drug Development Reality May 2011: Maybe It Really Is That Hard? March 2011: The NIH Goes For the Gusto Feb 2011: The NIH's New Drug Discovery Center: Heading Into the Swamp? Nov 2010: Where Drugs Come From: The Numbers August 2009: Just Give It to NIH August 2009: Wasted Money, Wasted Time? July 2009: Where Drugs Come From, and How. Once More, With A Roll of the Eyes May 2009: The NIH Takes the Plunge Sep 2007: Drugs From Where? November 2005: University of Drug Discovery? October 2005: The Great Divide September 2004: The NIH in the Clinic September 2004: One More On Basic Research and the Clinic September 2004: A Real-World Can O' Worms September 2004: How Much Basic Research? September 2004: How It Really Works There we go - hours of reading, and all in the service of adding some reality to what is often a discussion full of unicorn burgers. Back to Osborne's piece, though - he goes on to make the point that one of the other sources of trouble with the administration is that the drug industry has continued to be profitable during the economic downturn, which apparently has engendered some suspicion. And now for some 100-proof politics. The last of Osborne's contentions is that the administration (and many legislators as well) see the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit as a huge windfall for the industry, and one that should be rolled back via a rebate program, setting prices back to what gets paid out under the Medicaid program instead. Ah, but opinions differ on this: It’s useful to recall that former Louisiana Congressman and then PhRMA head Billy Tauzin negotiated with the White House in 2009 on behalf of the industry over this very question. Under the resulting deal, the industry agreed to support passage of the ACA and to make certain payments in the form of rebates and fees that amounted to approximately $80 billion over ten years; in exchange the administration agreed to resist those i

Did you have fun playing Wordle Chem Challenge One and Two?This one kicks up the difficulty another notch. I've searched through the Nobel Prize website, and grabbed the press release / presentation speech (pre-1972) for several laureates. Can you piece together who's who?(Note: As in past challenges, I've stripped out the names of the winners, as well as certain non-helpful terms - URL, website, etc.)Entry 1Entry 2Entry 3Entry 4Entry 5Entry 6Entry 7Entry 8Entry 9Think you know 'em? Leave answers in the comments!

Apparently, the Guiding Movement is to upgrade its pledge that all members must make when they join. Currently they vow to: "to love my God, to serve my Queen and my country" That obviously only applies to people of faith and those with a female monarch…and indeed compromises the integrity of those girls without fixed national domicile. So, after consultation the century-old organisation is planning a bit of a rewording, dropping references to both spiritual and earthly autocrats as well as geography it seems. The pledge will now contain the line: "be true to myself and develop my beliefs" Now, being true to oneself is fine and developing one's beliefs is okay (ish), but the latter still smacks of religion, unicorns and fairy dust, couldn't they have made version 2.0 say something like: "be true to myself and develop my understanding of the universe through a rational, evidence-based approach to reality" That would be much more fitting four our age and avoid that crushingly egotistical phrase “develop my beliefs”. BBC News – God vow dropped from Girlguiding UK promise. Guiding pledge 2.0 dismisses God and the Queen is a post from the science blog of David Bradley, author of Deceived Wisdom Subscribe to our Email Newsletter

I know we're only six months into 2013, but I'm calling it:GEARS are the "hot" item to have in your graphical abstract this summer!Source: Chem Rev. 2013, ASAPSource: JACS 2013, 118-121Source: Chem. Sci. 2013, Advance ArticleAnybody know when it became popular to depict cascade / multi-step reactions as Rube Goldberg devices?Readers: Seen any more "industrialized" abstracts? Send 'em my way!

New class of cholesterol-appended alkynylplatinum(II) complexes shows great versatility to respond to external stimuli

Did you have fun playing the first Wordle chemist challenge?I recall garnering some good-natured criticism, when I counted papers, for only including male chemists in the first go-'round. In the spirit of equality, here's three more Wordles for well-known female organic chemists!Entry 6Entry 7Entry 8Submit your answers in the comments!

I've been meaning for some time to put up some new photos on the site, what with the original one being over ten years old by now. So here we are - a progress through time. The beard remains a constant, and I still have the T. S. Eliot paperback that I'm reading in the 1983 shot. That's an old flash column next to me, drying out because I was too lazy to clean it out, and some TLC plates on the bench. I was doing carbohydrate chemistry, forming nitrones and doing cycloadditions, and I'm not at all sure that I've ever done a nitrone reaction since!

I've been meaning for some time to put up some new photos on the site, what with the original one being over ten years old by now. So here we are - a progress through time. The beard remains a constant, and I still have the T. S. Eliot paperback that I'm reading in the 1983 shot. That's an old flash column next to me, drying out because I was too lazy to clean it out, and some TLC plates on the bench. I was doing carbohydrate chemistry, forming nitrones and doing cycloadditions, and I'm not at all sure that I've ever done a nitrone reaction since!