First of all, I hope you'll all excuse the somewhat overreaching title of this post - the coincidental timing of this and the previous post, however, seemed to merit some comparison.

Second of all (and the point of this post): The National Academy of Science has elected 72 new members and 18 foreign associates (which is the maximum that can be elected in any given year, apparently), of which a pleasantly surprising number are chemists (such as Frances Arnold, Steven Boxer, Steven Buchwald, Ken Dill, Michael Grunstein, Eric Jacobsen, and Tim Swager). Go chemists! It is perhaps worth noting, however, that only a small number of these folks have mustaches (which bodes well for Ken Dill; to be explained later).

The NAS site also tells us that 'election is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer'. What do you guys think? Are you more impressed by someone who is in the HHMI? Or someone who's won a Cope Award, the Priestley Medal, or the Nakanishi Prize? How do you think the Kavli Prize will stack up (to be awarded for the first time in May)? Do you think NAS membership (or, in fact, most of these awards) would be more or less impressive if the rationale for who was picked was more transparent? Or do you find that the people doing great work come to be well-known and well-respected regardless of these external trappings?

In any case, it's clear that chemists are doing some moving and shaking (and shaving) these days. Congratulations to the new NAS members.

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

This is just a quick note to say that Albert Hofmann, the chemist who first discovered LSD, has died at the grand old age of 102. He was something of a legend among modern-day medicinal chemists, not least because he decided to test out his discovery on himself.

You can find a report on his life on the Great Beyond blog.

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 01:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

What is it that chemists really have on the brain? To answer the question, try clicking on this link to a book review in the New York Times, and have a look at the molecular structure to see if anything leaps out at you.

So what did you see? If you're anything like the chemist that wrote in to the New York Times to complain, you'll have spotted that some of the carbon atoms appear to have formed five bonds. Fair enough. But did you notice that the molecule is actually spelling out the word 'sex'?

Credit goes to the Newsmakers section of Science for telling this story of a chemist who was prepared to admit that he missed the point. I have to say, I think I'd have missed the point of the graphic too...

Andy

Andrew Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

Posted by amitchinson at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

My curiosity! Born with a strong dose of curiosity, I found early in life that this drive addicted me to chemistry. I found that no matter how many problems were solved, their solutions led to so many more new questions. That feature alone has made chemistry an insatiably exciting hobby, my “best friend”, and a lifetime career.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

Probably a landscape architect. Firstly, I enjoy performing physical work. Secondly, I intuitively enjoy thinking about the unique function, dynamics and possible benefits that architecture contributes to structure at the pico-, nano- and micro-scale level. I believe one should expect to find similar issues at the macroscopic level. Undoubtedly, that is why I enjoy horticulture/gardening so much as a hobby.

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

Chemistry is so pervasive in life; the environment, our health, society and even our presence in the universe. As practitioners of such a ubiquitous discipline it is our responsibility to be certain that our efforts are positive and for the good of all these issues.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Undoubtedly, John Dalton, Manchester, England (1766- 1844). I have always admired his courage, vision and commitment that led to his “New System of Chemical Philosophy” (1808). His vision and efforts launched our traditional chemistry platform from which all chemists have enjoyed, enhanced and derived benefits. I toast to Dalton on each of my birthdays since we share the same birthday (September 5), however, 172 years apart.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

I conducted a dendrimer synthesis and a photochemical experiment within the past six months. I was curiosity driven by why a particular nanoscale dendrimer we had synthesized exhibited extraordinary fluorescence properties yet possessed no traditional fluorescent chromophores. At this time, these fluorescent properties have been confirmed; however, I still do not have a complete answer as to why they exhibit fluorescence.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

My favorite book is The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. I never cease to be amazed by his extraordinary discipline, articulation and keen observations on all aspects of life. My favorite CD would contain all the compositions/works of Wolfgang Mozart. I always seem to find fresh inspirations, excitement, new ideas and fulfillment in the presence of his unique notes, scales, musical patterns and sounds.

Donald A. Tomalia is Director of The National Dendrimer & Nanotechnology Center and Distinguished Research Scientist/Professor at Central Michigan University. He is engaged in research with a focus on nanomaterial synthesis (i.e., dendrimers, metal nanoclusters, etc.), their nano-stoichiometries, nano-sterics and the identification of nanoperiodic reactivity and assembly patterns associated with these well defined nanomaterials to produce higher complexity.

Posted by Alison Stoddart at 05:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Each Friday, the Nature Chemistry website will be updated with three new research highlights about interesting work that has caught the attention of the editors, here is this week's line up:

Heterogeneous catalysis:
Scanning transmission electron tomography is used to create 3D images of active sites in nanoscale catalysts

Surface chemistry:
Subsurface carbon and hydrogen have an important role in selective palladium-catalysed alkyne hydrogenation

Alkaloid biogenesis:
Indole alkaloids extracted from closely related fungi lead to questions about how their biochemical pathways have evolved

The highlights are free to access, but you need to have a (free) nature.com account.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 04:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apologies for not posting in Journal journeys as much as I would have hoped - the one overwhelming feature of setting up a new journal is that it leaves very little time to blog...

I did want to take 10 minutes, however, to let you know that Nature Chemistry now has an editorial team - although it's not complete just yet (we're also looking for someone to be based in the Tokyo office). Brief editor bios (and their stunning headshots) can be found here on the new Nature Chemistry website. Each editor will also write their own Reactions piece in the coming weeks, so that you'll get to know them a little better - and perhaps I'll even get around to writing one myself sometime soon.

As part of the new website, we'll also be publishing three new research highlights each Friday*, covering what we think are important papers appearing in the literature. These will be freely available on the Nature Chemistry website (although you may have to register for a nature.com account to access them).

*The first batch go live - with the new website - on a Thursday, not a Friday, because as I have learned, never push a new product live on a Friday... it doesn't give you too much room for error before the weekend hits...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 06:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

In case you weren't aware, today is 'World Laboratory Day'. This website tells us that "World Laboratory Day celebrates the place where great discoveries, inventions, and medical cures are born. It's also where mad scientists dwell." I was actually going to go in a completely different direction upon hearing the name of the holiday - something more to do with celebrating your international collaborators, thanking that company 3,000 miles away for making the small molecule you want to do assays with, or sharing the candy that someone brought back from a recent conference overseas... I also have to take issue with the poor grammar of the sentence (gosh, I really have become a nerd!), which suggests to me that mad scientists dwell in World Laboratory Day, which seems a bit unusual (unless World Laboratory Day is frozen in time like Brigadoon, perhaps? Ok, enough randomness.).

Although a lot of screen time is given to mad scientists in movies, TV shows, and even the news (nothing says 'Watch the 11:00 news' like a scientist raving about time machines or cloning him/herself), I don't see a lot of true scientific content devoted to these beloved figures. For example, a friend of mine suggested there could be a journal just for research from mad scientists (plots to take over the world, new kinds of poisons, etc., which would have the side benefit of making it extremely easy to fight terrorism (by arresting all the corresponding authors)), but there could also be conference sessions or entire conferences devoted to 'Ways to create living matter using a corpse's brain' or 'How to accidentally change the size of your family members so that they get lost in your back yard and hilarity ensues'. What about special grants programs for people working on cloning dinosaurs into frog eggs, or switching faces back and forth? Really, I think this is a whole section of the science community we've been ignoring for too long. Unfortunately, most of these ideas don't really tie in to chemistry very well... perhaps we chemists are just too normal for all that silliness?

Anyway, I'm off to see if I can find some nice European chocolate. Hooray for globalization!

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Retread

Well of course they don't, but the proteins we know the most about (because they can be crystallized and their structure determined by X-ray diffraction) do have a shape. Sperm whale myoglobin, the first protein to have its 3-dimensional structure determined, showed that this couldn't be the whole story. Sperm whales (air breathing mammals after all) use their myoglobin to carry oxygen during their hour-long dives down to 1000 meters. Kendrew and Perutz's crystal structure showed no way for oxygen to find its way in to the embedded porphyrin ring. Amazingly, the 153 amino acids of myoglobin must themselves breathe to let the oxygen in.

All it takes to denature (seriously change its tertiary structure so it is no longer functional) a protein of 100 amino acids is 10 kcal/mole (Voet & Voet - Biochemistry 3rd Edition p. 258). That's two hydrogen bonds - not much.

Sight your eye at the alpha carbon of one of the amino acids of this protein, looking toward the carbonyl carbon. There are three conformational energy minima the carbonyl can adopt. That's potentially 3^99 = 10^48 conformations (clearly an overestimate because of self intersection, but still, a huge number). Yet to be crystallizable, this protein must choose just one of them, and it must be lower in energy by 2 hydrogen bonds than all the rest.

In addition, to get to this single structure, the protein can't possibly sample all the conformations available to it. The rotation barrier of ethane is 12 kJ/mole and a barrier of 73 kJ/mole allows a rotation rate of 1 per second, and every 6 kJ changes the barrier by a factor of 10 at 25 deg C (Clayden et al. Organic Chemistry pp. 450-1). So the maximum rate of rotation of ethane is 10^11 per second (at a body temperature of around 37 deg C) rather than 10^10 at 25 deg C. This is clearly an upper bound on the rotation rate as the mass attached to the alpha carbons of a protein will make the rotation far slower, but let it pass (that's why I chose ethane in the first place). That's 10^37 seconds to sample the conformations available, far longer than the age of the universe. This is the Levinthal paradox.

So for the crystallizable proteins (all of biological interest so far) one conformation out of all those available must be more stable (but only by two hydrogen bonds) than all the rest, and the particular conformation must be findable quickly (or we'd all be dead).

How likely is this for a 'random' sequence of amino acids. We'll probably never know (but we might if we're lucky). This is the subject of the next post...

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 07:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The new chemistry podcast from Nature is now live! - and can be found here.

In this episode of Chempod, we get caught up in catalysis, discover drawbacks to some Alzheimer's drug candidates, and bring you a round up of the best of the American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans.

(...and I make my podcasting debut - please be gentle...)

Enjoy!

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 07:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hey everyone, our May issue is now online. Check it out!

In the review in this issue about reactive oxygen species, Christine Winterbourn makes an interesting comment. She says:

"The early days [in free radical research] were notable for healthy and at times vigorous debate on how free radical chemistry could be rationalized with biological observations. Such debate is still needed today."

This comment made me think about something I read a couple of months ago in a plane magazine*, which was an interview with Gary Taubes. In describing his new book, he says:

"If I had my druthers, I'd have the public health authorities institute something more akin to the legal system to decide what we know is so and what we don't. They'd get a jury made up of 12 exceedingly good scientists, none of whom have worked in the fields of nutrition, obesity and chronic disease. Teams of competing experts would present the evidence for or against a particular belief - say, the healthfulness of low-fat diets, or whether salt causes hypertension. The jury would be able to cross-examine witnesses - i.e., those researchers who believed their studies provided some useful evidence. And then maybe the jury would deliberate for as long as it took to give an answer. If they didn't believe some particular piece of advice was justified, but they couldn't say it wasn't, they'd suggest what experiments had to be done to know for sure."

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

*Sadly, I don't remember the airline, so can't reference this properly. Feel free to tell me!

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I enjoyed chemistry at school and was fortunate to have an inspirational chemistry teacher, Mr. Cullingworth, who always showed that there was something more, something new, something unexpected to be discovered and learnt. My parents were also very committed in enabling me to go to university and I, therefore, received a lot of support from home.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

I have never seriously thought of doing anything other than what I do. If I had not studied chemistry at university I might have applied to study medicine, but I suspect that I would always have been drawn towards teaching and research. Second guitarist with “The Best Band You Never Heard in Your life” would have been fun and profitable, but I have shown no evidence of any musical talent so I guess that has passed me by, for now.

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

Chemistry is highly multi-faceted, impacts across many disciplines and is relevant to so many of today’s major problems in health, energy and sustainability. Obviously, chemists contribute by carrying out front-line research in their chosen areas, but it is also vitally important, especially for academics, to retain their enthusiasm and commitment to undergraduate teaching. It is in our undergraduate teaching that we inspire students to take up the challenge and be the scientists of the future.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

Charles Darwin. A very, very clever theory which has as much impact today as it did when it was first published.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

About 20 years ago! One of my PhD students was having problems isolating and purifying a functionalised aza crown and I showed him how to recrystallise this material properly. The student had been struggling for many days and, as I recall, I solved the problem in about 5 minutes. I decided to leave experimental work on a high.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

I would cheat: I would sell the CD and book to someone else stuck on their island, and buy a hard drive for music. First would be live opera recordings of Parsifal, Ring Cycle, Meistersinger, and Tristan and Isolde (Wagner), Marriage of Figaro (Mozart), Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Shostakovich), Khovanschina (Moussorgsky) and Palestrina (Pftizner), followed by the collected works of Todd Rundgren, Frank Zappa and Jorma Kaukonen, with a smattering of Van der Graaf Generator. Is this enough?

OK, if I had one CD “Hot Rats” by Zappa; book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. Since the latter would be highly depressing reading on a desert island I would probably have to change this to “Hard Times” by Dickens.

Martin Schröder is in the School of Chemistry at the University of Nottingham and works on metal coordination chemistry with particular emphasis on metals in unusual oxidation states, assembly of porous nanostructures, and metal cation and anion complexation.

Posted by Alison Stoddart at 05:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of the Rookie Rocky

In the world of marketing, brands are arguably as valuable as anything else. The idea is that a distinguished brand promises the quality of service or goods that can meet the customers' expectations.

In the world of scientific research, I wonder if it’s pretty much the same. Recently, I have been struggling to get a paper published, and it seems to take more effort to satisfy the reviewers and editors than ever before, even though I wrote the paper in exactly same way as I have for many years. The message I get is: now you can breeze through the process no more. The reviewers question everything and the editors seem to be a lot more cautious about their concerns.

As a result, I’ve started wondering whether I got an easy ride under the established "brands" of my PhD and Post-Doc supervisors. Would my work have been published had I worked for myself or someone just like me - a newly independent academic? To qualify this question, I think almost all reviewers and editors, of course including those excellent ones at Nature journals, are fair. They do not judge the merit of a manuscript by whether a novice or a Nobel laureate generated it. Good papers are good no matter who wrote it, which is something I really like about science. The trick comes when a paper is not that good, nor that bad – that’s when the marketing effects may factor in. An established scientist would certainly have a strong publishing record that backs his/her credibility, which is something that rookies have to earn. It is just like we founded a start-up company, and the first thing we need to do is to familiarize potential customers with our new brand. Continuing the analogy, it is quite reasonable that people would choose to buy Coke or Pepsi rather than Rocky-Cola. That is not something we should complain about. In some ways, I feel this is rather nice as it will provide a window to aspire to higher standards: Hopefully one day I will have my own brand that compares with those of scientists I admire, and Rocky-Cola will be something that people really enjoy.

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I was particularly struck by a recent paper from the Kozmin group on the mechanism of action of bistramide A. This very interesting natural product demonstrates promising anticancer activity, but is also highly toxic when delivered to mice. Interestingly, two other members of this family of compounds known as bistramides D and K, which both lack an enone moiety that is present in bistramide A, have been shown to be much less toxic while maintaining promising levels of anticancer activity in a mouse xenograft model.

The mechanism of action of this family of natural products has been hotly debated, but a few years ago the Kozmin group identified actin as the potentially therapeutically-relevant cellular target. This hypothesis was strongly supported by this group's recent discovery and high resolution X-ray characterization of a bistramide A/actin complex. However, the mechanistic role, if any, of the conspicuous enone moiety of bistramide A could not be determined from this structure because this portion of the crystal was highly disordered.

In their recent PNAS paper, Kozmin and coworkers harnessed the remarkable efficiency and flexibility of their previously reported total synthesis of this complex natural product to prepare a series of elegantly designed analogs that collectively revealed the criticality of this enone moiety for potent cell-based growth inhibition. Moreover, consistent with the X-ray structure, these studies demonstrated unambiguously that both the spiroketal and amide subunits of bistramide A are required for high-affinity non-covalent interactions with actin that can lead to the severing of actin filaments. Follow-up studies with mass spectroscopy and a synthesized fluorescent analog collectively demonstrated that the enhanced cell-based activity attributed to the enone is due to covalent modification of the target protein, likely via conjugate addition of a cysteine residue. Collectively, these results support a dual mode of action of bistramide A involving the severing of filamentous actin as well as covalent modification of this protein target.

Interestingly, these results reveal a potential explanation for the increased in vivo toxicity of bistramide A relative to its enone-lacking counterparts. The severing of actin filaments (which does not rely on covalent modifications) may be sufficient to inhibit the proliferation of rapidly dividing tumor cells, whereas the dose-limiting toxicity may be caused by enone-mediated covalent modifications of this ubiquitous protein target. This compelling hypothesis remains to be tested, but this paper clearly demonstrates the critical importance of fundamental understanding of small molecule function to guide the search for more effective and less toxic therapeutics. It also represents a striking demonstration of the tremendous power of an efficient and flexible total synthesis of a complex natural product to enable the execution of illuminating experiments that are otherwise simply not possible.

Marty Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the synthesis and study of small molecules with the capacity to perform higher-order, protein-like functions.

Posted by Catherine Goodman at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Materials Girl

Now that the small flurry of blogging on the ACS meeting has subsided, posting resumes!

Applications for schools/scholarships inevitably want you to discuss how participation in their programs would be beneficial to you, what makes you qualified, etc, etc... Sometimes I really wish they would be more specific and not ask vague, broad questions. For me, the answer can easily be summarized by one word: experience. Unfortunately, no matter how universally true the response, its length is by no means sufficient to create a proper statement.

It seems that all essays in the genre boil down to an inherently dry rehashing of past experience, present thoughts, and future plans. There seem to be few techniques to make the reading of personal statements interesting or even enjoyable*, aside from mentioning specific science, notably work you have done, to attract – hopefully – the interest of admissions staff. Another method would be to take a lighter tone and throw in some humor – however, that may well be unfavorable, considering that scientists should maintain a professional tone. (Or is that just my inexperience speaking?).

Anyone can read a [good] resume** and decipher a decent amount of a person’s abilities – why restate details in an essay and bore the readers? To those who are writing and have written a multitude of applications, what non-academic features did you include to single yourself out? To those reading the essays, what has made applicants stand out past their intellectual accomplishments?

P.S. - When a program claims to be “highly competitive”, what type of quantitative data can generally be assumed to support that statement?

*This is without considering college/undergraduate application essays, which run the gamut from horrendously employed grammar and monotone statements of extracurriculars, to whimsical stories of adventures and unique lessons learned. (Many moons ago, one of mine began with one time I caught an especially large and disgusting cockroach in a library’s restroom. But, for all I know, that one could’ve been the weakest of my essays).

**Therein lies the issue of how to write a succinct, informative resume...

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Retread

The mass of the earth is given by my physics book (Halliday 6th Ed.) as 6 x 10^27 grams. If we made just one molecule of each protein containing n amino acids linked together, when would we run out of material? Make a guess. I found the results surprising.

Assume the earth is made of nothing but hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and sulfur. Clearly not true, but we're going for what mathematicians call an upper bound. If mathematicians can get away with things like "consider a spherical cow" I can get away with this. (The cognoscenti may wish to go for a least upper bound). Proteins are linear chains of 20 different amino acids ranging in mass from glycine at 79 Daltons to tryptophan at 204. When linked together by an amide (peptide) bond, 18 Daltons of mass is lost (water is split out). So figure the average amino acid at 100 Daltons (roughly).

So there are 20 x 20 = 400 distinct proteins of 2 amino acids, 8000 with 3, 160,000 with 4, 3,200,000 with just 5. Shorties like this are called peptides (or polypeptides) and just when you start calling them proteins seems to be a matter of taste.

We're figuring the mass of the typical amino acid at 100 Daltons, but a Dalton doesn't have much mass. It is 1/12 the mass of a single atom of carbon-12, Avogadro's number (about 6 x 10^23) of which have a mass of 12 grams. So one Dalton has a mass of 10^-24 grams (roughly).

The number of distinct proteins containing n amino acids is 20^n. The mass of each protein (in Daltons) is (roughly) 100 x n — depending on the amino acids chosen. The mass of the collection of distinct proteins of length n in grams is (20^n) x (100 x n) x (10^-24). It's clear that we're over 1 gram for the collection at only 24 amino acids (as 20^24 is much larger than 10^-24. How far over? 2^24 x 100 x 24 = 40,265,318,400 = 4 x 10^10 grams.

As noted, the mass of the earth is 6 x 10^27 grams. So we're not too far away at 24 amino acids. Certainly no farther away than another 17 amino acids as 20^17 is much greater than 10^17.

So, the mass of the earth (which isn't all carbon, hydrogen, etc... ) isn't enough to make just one molecule of each of the possible proteins 41 amino acids long. 41 amino acids is a very small protein (some would call it a polypeptide). Just about every protein of biological interest is much larger. The champ is a muscle protein called titin which has 27,000+ amino acids.

So what? It means that chemists will never be able to explore more than a tiny morsel of the space of possible proteins. Perhaps computationally we will (I doubt it), but that's the subject of a future post.

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

When people are asked, “What is your hobby?”, they would probably answer with things like stamp collecting, music, gardening or sports. For me, chemistry is my hobby. I am not fond of complicated mathematical formulae, electric circuits or biological systems. Chemistry is what remains and I feel like I have been brought up with it all around me.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be – and why?

A long-distance truck driver. I like to drive my car and make long journeys. In particular, I am filled with a sense of achievement when I work out the best way to my destination on a road map before driving – although nowadays car navigation systems would direct me automatically!

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

When considering the contribution that chemistry can make to society, industry and human beings, I hope it involves secure and safe goods. Take, for example, organic materials that are produced by the self-assembly of molecules and then decompose after they have played their role – these should be safely adsorbed into a living body or by the environment, without damaging effects. We are now earnestly developing the industrialization of organic nanotubes with this in mind.

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with – and why?

If possible, I would not like to have dinner with any historical figure since we, who are living now, create history by ourselves. There would be no hot topics for conversation between me and the historical figure since our times would be so different.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab – and what was it?

Looking back through my lab notebooks for my last experiment, I found it on October 23, 1995. I performed differential scanning calorimetry on various synthetic lipids with a peptide moiety. In those days, no matter what the outcome was, I wanted to polymerize functional lipids using molecular self-assemblies as a matrix without changing the morphology. However, the notebook ends for some reason or other.

6. if exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

If I could take one book, it would be a highly detailed world atlas. Even though I am exiled on a desert island, I would like to be able to look at the atlas so I could travel the world in my head. For the CD, I would take some American folksongs, like Brothers Four or Peter, Paul & Mary. I used to play folk guitar with sing American and Japanese folksongs in my student days.

Toshimi Shimizu is currently Director of the Nanoarchitectonics Research Center (NARC), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Tsukuba, Japan. His research focuses on the non-covalent synthesis and structural analysis of high-axial-ratio nanostructures through the self-assembly of amphiphilic monomers. In particular, he is now engaged in developing organic nanotube materials.

Posted by Alison Stoddart at 05:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Getting to New Orleans for this meeting has been tricky for some - including the student who drove all the way from Cincinnati, Ohio when the airline he was planning to travel with ceased operations. I think I can top that, however...

Myself and two colleagues from Nature Publishing Group flew with Virgin Atlantic from London on Saturday, arriving in Washington Dulles just after 3 pm. After eventually passing through immigration, we collected our luggage, cleared customs and then rechecked our bags for our onward flight to New Orleans - we had plenty of time, it was now just after 4 pm and our flight was due to leave at 5:30 pm. We were then given 'boarding passes' - and I use this term loosely - and told that seats would be assigned at the gate.

After our second trip on the very odd buses at Dulles - I think they resemble what I suspect people in the 1960s would imagine vehicles of the future to look like - we arrived at our gate, only to be told that we were on standby. Apparently in the dictionary that is used by United Airlines' employees, the word 'confirmed' means something completely different from what most of us would expect it to. Never mind the fact that we had just flown across an ocean, we weren't getting on the flight...

Apparently the plane was a smaller one that it should have been and we were the chosen ones sacrificed for the greater good - if only it had been explained to us so eloquently, perhaps it wouldn't have felt quite so bad. I take that back, it still would have sucked. At this point, we had run into Bruce Gibb - a chemist from the University of New Orleans - who just happened, coincidentally, to be flying back home from a trip to Portland. What was he doing in Washington, I hear you cry... well, he had been scheduled to travel via Denver, but United Airlines had kindly re-routed him through Dulles and then bumped him from the same flight that we were bumped from.

Looking on the bright side, however, our luggage made the flight... (although I thought that in the post 9-11 haze, bags could not fly without their owners - can someone comment on this?). At this point, after I accused them of kidnapping my bags, we were instructed to go to the 'customer service' desk (again, another description that has precious little to do with the reality of the thing) where we would have our flights rescheduled - perhaps for the 9:55 pm flight. Well, glaciers move faster than the line we were waiting in, and we eventually reached the front after roughly four hours... no 9:55 pm flight for us.

United told us that they could fly us to LaGuardia in New York (yes folks, that's the wrong direction!) on Sunday morning and then there was a connecting American Airlines flight to New Orleans that would get us in around 1 pm. Only problem was that they couldn't confirm we'd get seats on that American flight, and we suspected that they were just trying to dump their problem on to another carrier. The only direct flight on which we could get a confirmed seat was the 9:55 pm flight on the Sunday evening - getting us in at around midnight... much too late to set up our stand at the exposition.

During our slow progress in the customer disservice line, we got chatting to Teresa, a senior from Cornell College in Iowa, who was due to receive a travel award (a little ironic don't you think?) at the ACS meeting. The catch was, however, that if she didn't arrive by approximately 5 pm on the Sunday, it would have been forfeited and given to someone else. So, the three of us from NPG, plus Bruce and Teresa decided to give up on United and hire a rental car - what's a 1000+ mile road trip between newly formed friends.

We left Dulles just before midnight on the Saturday and hit the road. Bruce took the first 200-mile, 3-hour driving shift . Teresa was charged with the important job of being a chatty passenger and keeping the driver awake while the others got some (rather uncomfortable) sleep in the back of the Ford Escape. She then repeated her entire life story a second time when I did the second 3-hour driving shift.

So, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, lots of junk food, enough Mountain Dew Code Red to sink a ship, and many games of 'I spy' later, we arrived at New Orleans airport, 17 hours and 1133 miles after leaving Dulles. And miracles do happen, our bags were waiting for us and hadn't been diverted to Timbuktu. And best of all, Teresa made it to the ceremony in time to get her travel award - and no one can say she didn't deserve it at that point!

As Bruce pointed out, it took him longer to get to this ACS meeting than any other - and this one was in his home town! I leave New Orleans on Thursday and as much as I loathe the idea that I must fly United (which I will never do again if I can avoid it), I'd rather not have to do another road trip...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're here in New Orleans at the ACS meeting, time is running out to go to the Nature Publishing Group stand at the expo (booth #1247) to get your free Nature Chemistry lab coat.

In return for signing up for the Nature Chemistry and chemistry@nature.com e-alerts - which will keep you up-to-date with all chemistry content published at NPG - we'll send you a Nature Chemistry lab coat. Some samples of the lab coats are available on the stand, so go and check them out and sign up for yours! (There are limited numbers available, so get there while stocks last!).

There's also a chance to win a free iPod, and who doesn't like iPods, especially free ones...

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 12:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

A quick note: as with most ACS meetings, I came armed with my camera, but this time I'm actually using it. For pictures of the NPG team at (and getting to) the conference, check out the Nature Chemistry group on Facebook... - Stuart

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 07:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

If you are wondering why we've not blogged about the ACS meeting in New Orleans yet, there are a few reasons:

1) There are less editors here than usual
2) United Airlines are incompetent

Where do I begin..?

A group of us from NPG in the UK flew from London to Washington (Dulles) and arrived with plenty of time to spare to make our connection on United to New Orleans, we rechecked our bags, got handed boarding passes – sans seat assignments – and then headed to the gate to get our seats.

We didn't get seats.

I'll will write in more detail later in the week about what happened next, but if I do it now, it will be laced with enough expletives to have me fired from this job and never hired for another one, except perhaps to work in Gordon Ramsey's kitchen.

In the spirit of chemistry publishing, however, let me give you a preview using keywords: LaGuardia, Budget Car Rental, Bruce Gibb, Road Trip!, Travel Awards, Luggage... stay tuned.

Stuart

Stuart Cantrill (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 03:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I grew up around chemistry (and chemists) and developed the usual youthful obsessions with setting things on fire. I also had some inspirational science and chemistry teachers, Mr. Covington and Paul Groves, in junior high and high school. However, I went off to college planning to study anthropology and later linguistics. At the end of my sophomore year I realized I liked chemistry and went on from there (though I still snuck in a few more linguistics classes). The idea that molecules interact at progressively larger scales to give observable objects and effects combined with the perpetually growing number of ways to go about designing and synthesizing interesting molecules continues to fascinate me and a large community of chemists.

2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be - and why?

While I have come to increasingly enjoy cooking as my time in the lab has become less frequent, I don't think I have the fortitude to survive in the food-preparation industry, even with the embrace of scientific apparatus that “molecular gastronomy” has brought. Participating in the production of alcoholic beverages, while an honorable application of chemical principles, would probably have similar difficulties in terms of financial survival and would be hard on an already overworked liver. If I weren't a chemist, I would probably be happiest writing about science and/or food and liquor (especially given the chance to consume interesting varieties of the latter substances).

3. How can chemists best contribute to the world at large?

There are a number of levels on which to consider this one (and I worry that anything I say here will come off as so much hand-waving nonsense). On the most basic level, some of us can make new and useful molecules and materials and others of us can work to understand how new and old molecules interact with each other (and can tell the first group of folks what new types of molecules to make). On a more societal level, I think we somehow need to convince an even greater percentage of the population (1) that what we do as chemists is important and fundamental to our everyday lives and (2) that physics, chemistry and biology are all worth trying to understand on a basic level and that they’re nothing to be scared of. (I’m still working on point 2 myself).

4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with - and why?

If it were mostly a liquid dinner, I would have loved to have had the chance to get Brendan Behan wound up and to enjoy the resulting songs, stories, etc. Benjamin Franklin would probably be a hoot too, and the food would probably be better. If it were someone still alive, I would enjoy the chance to dine with Haruki Murakami and then hang out drinking in smoky Japanese jazz clubs talking about stories.

5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab - and what was it?

In September 2005, I tried out a semi-novel route to some new initiators for free radical polymerization that worked well enough to have a few graduate students follow up and we have so far squeezed a few papers out of it. Mostly I end up doing basic repairs on simple machinery.

6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one CD would you take with you?

If it were the right kind of desert island, Euell Gibbons' Beachcomber's Handbook would be indispensable (even if just for its description of how to make palm wine). Otherwise Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Murakami might strike some concordant notes with the situation. Unless I could somehow get a magical live stream of WFMU, the CD would be a toss-up between the depleted glory of the Pogues' "Rum, Sodomy, & the Lash," the epic black metal of Weakling's "Dead as Dreams," or the otherworldly spirituality of Pharoah Sanders’ “Tauhid,” and then I would really miss a whole bunch of other music (and civilization, too). [And what did I do to earn an island exile anyway?!]

Barney Grubbs is in the Department of Chemistry at Dartmouth College and works on making polymers that really ought to assemble into larger, allegedly more interesting, maybe even someday useful, but still very tiny structures.

Posted by Alison Stoddart at 05:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Materials Girl

I’ll cut to the chase on this one. What are graduate schools and employers looking for the most? Where do they draw the line between the two general characteristics that lead to success – natural aptitude versus natural inclination to work hard? Some graduate programs guarantee admission for students with sufficiently high GPAs. However, a few letters on a transcript can only indicate a student’s true ability to a certain degree. It is an unfortunate truth that a mere handful of blips on the academic radar can tank a history of otherwise good marks.

It has been said that great concern over grades is useless, but it is impossible to never worry. Not all scholars are blessed with the genius chromosome that allows for effortless, perfect academic records. So where does that leave the rest of us poor mortals? Is it just luck in finding someone who wants us? As always, I wonder.

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted on behalf of Retread

This post is pretty philosophic, but it discusses some issues raised by the previous post that shouldn't be ignored. Future posts will be far more chemical.

Do we have any hope of constructing a nice chain of causality for what happens when we throw epidermal growth factor (EGF) at a Hela cell (described in the last post) — e.g., the EGF receptor activates kinases 1 through N, each of which phosphorylates substrates (some of which are other kinases) which eventually phosphorylate the 924 sites on the 2,244 proteins (and in the correct temporal order to boot). I don't think there are enough researchers to do it, or labs to hold them. Even worse, if the results were available, I don't think our minds are strong enough to grasp them.

A big stumbling block would be the multiple degrees of feedback present even with something as simple as phosphorylation and dephosphorylation. Simple ideas of causality and control vanish with feedback (see two posts back — "The Decline of Master Gland..."). Causality is inherently a linear, sequential idea. Even chaos theory is basically causal, although predictability goes out the window.

That's not to say our brains don't do incredibly complex things such as just recognizing people. You never see anyone at exactly the same angle, under the same light, with the same background. People are usually moving, attired differently, etc., etc... Yet our brains in some way compute an invariant that computer science can only dream about permitting instant recognition. As people move about and you interact with them, zillions of new sensory inputs must be absorbed, transformed and matched to the same invariant. Since we do all this unconsciously, we don't think anything of it.

Yet we don't do very well predicting events where feedback is involved (like the stock market where most people lose). Perhaps the next step up in human intelligence is the ability to perceive the various forms of multiloop feedback, the way we recognize faces and people.

Could our brains change that fast? Possibly. Consider the man's best friend vs. the chimp. [Science vol. 298 pp. 1634–1636 (2002)] Chimpanzees are terrible at picking up human cues as to where food is hidden, even when the cues are as obvious as pointing to the food container. Even chimps that eventually perform well, take dozens of trials or more to learn what the cues mean. I find this surprising.

However, puppies (raised with no contact with humans) do much better at this than chimps — anyone owning a dog knows they can read us like a book. Wolf cubs don't do better than the chimps, even cubs raised by humans. This implies that during the process of domestication, dogs have been selected for a set of cognitive and social abilities that allow them to communicate with us. Domestication has only gone on for 10,000–15,000 years (the dawn of agriculture). I find it absolutely incredible that we could have changed the dog's brain in what is basically a microsecond in evolutionary time. Yet we did. Hopefully our brains are as plastic.

Not to be too depressed by this. There clearly are single chains of causality in the cell and chokepoints which we can find and modify. Consider Gleevec. Success stories like this provide employment for legions of chemists.

Posted by Stuart Cantrill at 06:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

If you’re at a party, and a non-chemist asks what your work involves, what do you say? Let’s assume that you get beyond the “I’m a research chemist” stage, and your friend actually wants to hear some details. How do you explain your project in terms that joe public will understand?

I ask this because, having just completed two years as a News & Views editor for Nature, I’ve found that seemingly simple chemical concepts can be misunderstood by scientists from other disciplines. Here’s an example: catalysts. All that most people understand about catalysts is that they speed up reactions. They don’t know – or they have forgotten – that a defining characteristic of catalysts is that they’re used in small quantities.

This lack of insight seems remarkable, especially in biologists, who clearly know a lot about enzymes. But I know from experience that my biologist colleagues don’t know what is meant by ‘a catalytic quantity’ of material. Much less do they understand why a catalytic reaction is preferable to a stoichiometric one (and let’s not get started on the word ‘stoichiometric’). You may think that they’re being remarkably obtuse – but try asking a friend from another discipline about catalysts, and you’ll be surprised at what they don't know.

Does any of this matter? Well, if we want chemistry to have the same respect and recognition as biology, physics and the geosciences (with their headline-grabbing genomes, exoplanets and predictions of climate change), then yes it does. When was the last time a breakthrough in chemistry made it to the front page of a national newspaper?

Frankly, it’s always going to be an uphill battle. We’re never going to see the headline “Catalyst distinguishes between enantiotopic protons” on the front page of the New York Times. In fact, we shouldn’t necessarily expect people to remember everything about chemistry that they were taught at high school - with catalysts being a prime example of this. But we shouldn't give up trying to explain our work. I know from experience that complex concepts, such as enantiotopicity, can be explained to non-chemists in terms they understand. It just takes a little more effort than you might expect.

Andy

Andy Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)

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