Michael Young is in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of Toledo and works in the areas of supramolecular and organometallic chemistry.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I love the idea of creating new things, and when I discovered synthetic chemistry I couldn’t help but turn my love of doodling ideas into drawing (and later developing) new molecules.

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

I’d probably be a composer or a chef. Basically something where I can create new things that improve the lives of others.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

My group is currently working on new strategies to use supramolecular principles for improving regioselectivity and activity in organometallic chemistry. The hope is that this will provide exciting opportunities for synthetic chemists to access new synthetic space, and maybe even develop some functional therapeutics.

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

Alexander Borodin. His ability to be both a successful chemist and musician has always been inspirational to me.

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

Earlier today I set up an iron-catalyzed reduction of an aromatic amine. Prior to that I had run a Rosenmund von Braun reaction, as well as an amine C–H functionalization reaction that we’re currently developing.

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

I would take Brave New World by Aldous Huxley to read, and Get Acoustic by The Megas to listen to.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions — and why?

Stephen Buchwald — everyone I know who has met him describes him as one of the most amicable chemists they’ve ever met, and his chemistry is intellectually stimulating. Also, I’d like to see what new comments he has about his cats, although that might require an eighth question.

Double-blind peer review is now an option for manuscripts submitted to Nature Chemistry – this post from a couple of weeks ago mentioned that it was coming and provided some links for further reading.

Authors who wish to choose this option should check the box ‘Yes I do want to participate in double-blind peer review’ during the submission procedure, and ensure their manuscript is prepared in a way that does not give away their identity. Below are some instructions on how to go about ensuring that your manuscript is ready for double-blind peer review. A PDF of these instructions can also be found here.

1. Do not include names or affiliations anywhere in the manuscript file or in any of the supplementary information files. This information should be included in the cover letter and it is important that you state very clearly in which order the authors should appear on the paper in the event of publication.

2. Ensure that there is no author information in the metadata of any of the submitted files. This information is usually added automatically from the identity information on your computer. In many commonly used programmes, such as Microsoft Word, author information is displayed (and can be edited) in the ‘File’ tab under ‘Properties’.

3. When referring to your own previously published work within the paper, use neutral terminology: that is, replace phrases like ‘we have previously reported that…’ with ‘it has previously been reported that…’ or similar.

4. Do not include unpublished work in the reference list. It is a requirement of submission, however, that you alert us to any related manuscripts from your group that are under consideration or in press at other journals, or are being written up for submission to other journals. Copies of these manuscripts should be clearly marked and included as separate files with your submission.

5. The Acknowledgments section and the Author information section (including the author contributions statement, to whom requests for correspondence and materials should be addressed, and any competing financial interests statement) should be included in the cover letter and not in the manuscript file. This information should be added back into the manuscript only after the peer-review process is complete and the paper is accepted for publication.

A PDF version of a one-page guide-to-authors summary for initial submissions to Nature Chemistry can also be found here.

Back in April of this year, a manuscript popped up in our submission system from two chemists we know well from Twitter/the chemistry blogosphere — Chemjobber and Alex Goldberg. The paper, entitled A comprehensive overview of chemical-free consumer products is perhaps best summarised by quoting (with permission from the authors) from the cover letter that came with it:

“We have completed an exhaustive study of common products that are marketed as ‘chemical-free’ and have prepared a detailed analysis of those products that are appropriately labeled as such. In brief, there aren’t many. In briefer, see the body text of our manuscript. We believe that the popular use of the term ‘chemical-free’ is of great interest (and of even greater malaise) among chemists of all backgrounds, that our findings are generally applicable and our analysis robust enough. In addition, though this topic is frequently discussed in many circles in the chemistry community, no peer-reviewed study to our knowledge has been reported on this topic at this length. For these reasons, we consider Nature Chemistry to be the appropriate journal for publication of our manuscript. We hope that this article serves as a practical resource for chemical education and science advocacy and that the examples described therein provide useful guidance for appropriate marketing and labeling practices.”

Chemjobber and Alex go on to suggest who would (and would not) be appropriate reviewers:

“As potential referees from a cross-section of the field of chemistry, we propose Dr Carmen Drahl (Chemical & Engineering News), Dr Derek Lowe (Vertex Pharmaceuticals), Prof. Paul Bracher (St. Louis University), and the Chemical-Free Bear (On Twitter somewhere), all of whom are experts in the field of chemical-free chemistry. We request that you exclude as possible referees the editors of the Chemical Free Kids Facebook page, and all of the 3000+ individuals who have ‘Liked’ it.”

Because we still have print copies of the journal, we figured that we couldn’t publish this paper in the journal itself as that would have meant using chemicals… and that just didn’t seem right for a chemical-free paper — so alas, it didn’t make the cut. That said, however, we don’t get submissions like this every day… ones that first make us laugh and then make us think, so we thought long and hard about what we could do. With many thanks to our production team for assembling the PDF file, we’ve decided to post the manuscript here on our blog, in what is essentially Nature Chemistry format (just click on the image below to download the full pdf). If you feel like reviewing the manuscript, please leave your chemical-free comments on this blog post.

Occasionally our cover art ends up in nice frames and adorns office or corridor walls at various universities. The Leigh group at the University of Manchester took a different approach, however. Take a look at the curtains for their safety showers!

Any other creative uses of journal covers out there?

[Photos courtesy of Guillaume De Bo]

Mike Tarselli is a Principal Scientist at Biomedisyn, where he develops drugs to combat neural diseases.

1. What made you want to be a chemist?

Like many other scientists, two great teachers pointed me in that direction. The first, Mr. Vito, joyfully bounced around the room as he drew fantastically intricate chemical structures for my high school biology class. The second, Dr. Adams, inspired everyone with his enthusiasm for teaching sophomore organic chemistry.

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

No question – I’d be a professional musician. It’s been my passion since I was four years old. I still have a pipe dream to one day perform at Carnegie Hall.

3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?

At Biomedisyn, we’re developing natural product-inspired molecules to help treat neurodegenerative disorders. As the population ages, we’ll need better treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and a variety of other challenging diseases.

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

Tough choice. Probably Leonardo da Vinci, whose “non-traditional” career in science, art, and engineering fascinates me.

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

I work for a small company; I’m in lab every day! We mostly run reactions med chemists might find familiar: alkylations, cyclizations, deprotections, oxidations, and (of course) daily Pd cross-couplings.

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

For the book, let’s take Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. I strive towards his style, which matches a light, playful tone with serious scientific undercurrent. I’ll cheat a little and bring two albums: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue and They Might Be Giants Severe Tire Damage.

7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions – and why?

Let’s hear from Alois Furstner, an organometallic chemist from the Max Planck. I find his work with gold catalysis and metathesis refreshing and exciting.

Today we published an Editorial describing how Nature Chemistry (@NatureChemistry) has used Twitter over the past 4 years. The topic of the Editorial was something I had been mulling over for a while, but the format is something that wasn’t planned until I sat down to write it. An Editorial about Twitter? Well, why not write it in a series of tweets (some team members even joked about doing it this way before I sat down to write the thing)? As it turns out, I couldn’t resist the challenge…

And what were the challenges exactly? Well, each tweet (including any mentions or links) obviously had to be 140 characters or fewer. That was a rule that couldn’t be broken. Other considerations were a little more subtle: I wanted each tweet to more-or-less stand alone and make sense in its own right. Typically an Editorial has a main theme that builds and builds as you read it, and the writer can usually depend on the reader remembering what they read in the previous sentence or paragraph to put the current point in context. That wasn’t the case here, yet I did want the Editorial to flow — well, as much as 42 individual statements can…

Another concern was repetition; I didn’t want each tweet to start with ‘We use Twitter to…’ — something that would have been so easy to do (but would have been so boring to read). And while the Editorial does use the words ‘Twitter’ and ‘tweet’ quite a bit, that was pretty much unavoidable. The final challenge, and it might seem ridiculous considering the topic, was for the Editorial to fill one printed page in the journal. Yep, a printed page. Filled. With tweets. Before writing this particular Editorial, I looked at previous examples in the journal and came up with a rough estimate of the number of tweets that it would take to fill a page. 40-45 looked like the magic number, and it would be better to write more and cut later, rather than shoehorn new ones in at a later stage. Once it became clear that the final figure might be 42, there was an opportunity (well, compulsion) to finish with a reference to Douglas Adams.

It’s worth mentioning the time scale on which Editorials are written for the journal. Today — the day the Editorial was published — is March 20th. Content for our April issue had to be finalized for ‘press day’ — the day the final PDFs get made up and sent off to the printers; that was March 6th. The date by which the Editorial had to be given to the production team for copy-editing and layout was March 1st. Working back from that, I wanted to make sure that my team had plenty of time to tell me just what a bad idea this was and that I should just write a normal editorial and so, with that in mind, the first draft was written on the weekend of 16/17th February (yep, a weekend, for those paying attention). So, that’s more than one month between putting pen to paper (fingers to keyboard) and the date of publication. That explains some of the date ranges given in the Editorial and why some of the numbers that are quoted will have changed if you look them up now.

The version that was handed over to our production team consisted of a title, standfirst, Wordle, and 42 tweets in the main body of the article. It turned out to be 22 lines too long. Ouch. Look at the picture of the proof to see what needed to be done to cut it down to size. 4-line tweets were cut to 3 and a couple of tweets were removed completely. Click through to the larger version of the image to see exactly what changes were made. And it was on the second page so you can’t see it, but #overlyhonestmethods had to be cut from the hashtag tweet (it didn’t play nice with line breaks).

The ’42’ ending still works; one tweet for the title, one for the standfirst and 40 for the main text (you could argue that the original version was actually 44 tweets and the published one is genuinely 42 tweets in total). We still had problems with orphans and widows in the pdf version, so we shifted some of the tweets around. If you compare the proof to the published version (and you care that much) you can figure out what was moved where. Yes, it’s somewhat bizarre that an Editorial about how we use a web 2.0 tool is dictated — to some extent — by old-fashioned typesetting issues, but there you go.

Once the Editorial was finalized and it was too late to make changes, other examples of how we use Twitter obviously sprang to mind. It’s not just the one book review that came about because of interactions on Twitter. Declan Fleming (@declanfleming) reviewed Itch for us (review here; subscription required) after I contacted him about it through Twitter and after getting to know Jamie Gallagher (@JamieBGall) on Twitter, we asked him to review the 2012 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures for us — (review here; subscription required).

The intention from the beginning was to tweet the whole thing, as we did today — and that’s the first (and probably the last) time we’ll do something like this. We hope you enjoyed it, or at least found it interesting!

Stuart (Chief Editor, Nature Chemistry)