Posted on behalf of the Prospective Professor

When I started the process of finding a job, I assumed that the most challenging aspect would be the endless grilling during the interviews. I imagined that during my individual meetings with faculty members they would challenge my basic chemistry and biology knowledge, test me on my familiarity with their work and just generally attempt to check the integrity of my fundamental scientific knowledge. I expected that the proposal defense seminar (or “chalk talk”) would be filled with impossible questions, many that could only warrant the answer, “That’s an interesting question, I will have to look into that” (read as, I have NO idea).

I’m happy to report that the experience was nothing like this. People were excited to meet me and tell me about their department. Most started the meeting by saying, “Do you have any questions about our department that I could answer for you?” It was in less than 50% of the cases that we actually got around to talking about science. And while I wouldn’t call the “chalk talks” easy, I can honestly say that it was only on the rare occasion when I didn’t have an answer to a question or that I felt that people were “testing” me instead of being genuinely curious about my ideas.

It turns out that despite the huge amount of concern I poured into the interviews, I hadn’t recognized what would be the most challenging aspect of the job hunt: Deciding which job to accept.

There are so many factors to consider ranging from the quality and number of grad students, to instrumentation availability and collegiality of the faculty. I have to take into account the start-up and salary offers, teaching requirements, fundability of the institution, space availability, and the mission of the department. Next, I must decide if a chemistry department, biochemistry department or medical school would best fulfill all of my needs. And this is before I start to ponder the more personal issues such as location, cost of living, and personal relationships. How do I weigh each of these issues so that they are represented adequately in my final choice?

…

If I knew the answer to this question, I would have already made my decision!

If you’re living in the United States (or if you’re following the race to the White House from another country/overseas), you’ve probably noticed that – while the presidential candidates have talked about a broad range of important issues – they haven’t spent a great deal of time discussing scientific topics/science policy… You might be interested to learn that ScienceDebate2008.com, a grassroots organization, has been calling for – and has apparently now organized – a presidential debate on science and technology.

While it’s not clear which presidential candidates will attend the debate (April 18th in Philadelphia), I think it could be pretty interesting: science/scientific policy is certainly not the most important issue for many Americans, but I’d personally like to learn more about the candidates’ positions on funding, scientific education, and some of the other topics listed on the ScienceDebate2008.com website.

I’ve been thinking about this topic for a few days, and I’ve come up with a few questions I thought I’d throw out to our readers:

What scientific issue(s) could potentially swing your vote one way or another? For example, could you vote for someone who didn’t ‘believe’ in evolution, or would that be an instant ‘thumbs down’? What about a candidate who mandated that abstinence-only programs were the only kinds of sexual education allowed in public junior high/high schools? What ‘hot button’ issue is so important to you that it would cause you to re-think who will get your vote?

With that in mind, what question (or questions) do you think need(s) to be asked during this debate for it to be useful to the scientific community? Should a prominent scientist be asked to co-host the debate? If so, who has the intellect and the charisma to do it (well)?

Let’s say you won the election and were going to be the next president. What big (science-related) changes/initiatives would you make/fund in your first year in office? For example, would you try to double the NIH and/or NSF budget(s) over the next five years? Maybe you would boost NASA’s budget so that we can put a man/woman on Mars in our lifetime? Would you cut back on research related to bio-terrorism or spend more on this topic? (For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that you’re so popular/persuasive that you could convince any relevant governmental bodies to do whatever you recommended…)

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

Happy new year to everyone! I hope you were all able to take off a few days from lab-work/school-work/work and catch up on sleep, read a few good books, and decompress a bit…

It’s been a long time since I’ve blogged, but I just wanted to tell you some great news – I’m very happy to announce that Stuart Cantrill will be the chief editor of Nature Chemistry (set to launch in early 2009)…

Some of you may have noticed that NPG is now searching for editors to join Stuart at Nature Chemistry, as well as a chemistry editor to take his place at Nature Nanotechnology…

If you have any questions about what life is like as an editor, please feel free to post it here and one (or more) of us will let you know our thoughts…

Hope you all had a great break!

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

I only have time for a quick post, as I’m about to run off to a meeting – but I was in a baby gear/toy store yesterday, and I’m sorry to report that the children’s chemistry sets were in the “Science & Magic” section.

That pairing really threw me for a loop – I guess any sufficiently advanced technology really is indistinguishable from magic…

Joshua

Joshua Finkelstein (Senior Editor, Nature)

[Editor’s note: another guest blogger has joined our team…]

Last summer, I took some time off before starting at my current position as a medicinal chemist at a large pharmaceutical company near Boston. I was out on the town (on a rather warm summer night) with my former Harvard comrades, one of whom had just successfully defended his Ph.D.

The topic of conversation naturally drifted towards everyone’s future intentions, and a familiar division became readily apparent – many of the younger graduate students intended to pursue careers in academia, while most of the older graduate students were considering other uses for a Ph.D. in chemistry. Upon hearing that my future job was in a pharmaceutical company, one of the younger graduate students exclaimed, “But you aren’t going to have control over your own research!” indicating that independence was of the utmost importance to her.

She was right: since the company pays my salary, the management decides which topics I spend my time on. But there is quite a bit of freedom in how I approach the problems they ask me to solve and there can be a great deal of creativity (and satisfaction) involved with the process. Is it any different in academia?

In my experience, not really. Most graduate students end up working on projects that their advisor is interested in, and their advisor often chooses to work on a topic that can he/she can obtain funding for (either from the government, industry, or non-profit groups). A small number of grants are “unrestricted,” but most grants are intended to be used on whatever the funding source deems particularly important. Everything works fine, until the day you have an idea that no one wants to fund. Most people get around this through a difficult compromise – they work on something that is close, but not exactly what they want to do, while a few brave souls set up labs in their garages with varying degrees of success.

Independence is a really good thing. Some amazing discoveries have come from qualified people or groups that were allowed to truly explore their own ideas, free of external bias or constraints. One clear example of the power of this concept exists in the context of popular music. During the 20th century there was an explosion of diverse musical genres that continues today. Many factors contributed to this process, but one of the most important was the fact that musical instruments and recording equipment gradually became cheaper while at the same time becoming more widely available. This made music accessible to anyone who had a desire to pick up an instrument and create music. Moreover, they could use their own recording equipment to communicate their ideas to interested parties. Today, with the advent of computers and digital recording, musicians can make home recordings of a rather high quality and easily share their songs on the internet. It is truly an exciting time to be a musician.

In terms of accessibility and expense, chemistry, and most modern sciences in general, are way behind music. A budding rock star can buy a $200 guitar at a local retailer and record songs at home, but when I think of chemistry, I think of $600,000 NMRs and $100,000 LCMS stacks installed in the hallowed halls of the worlds great schools. I consider myself extremely lucky to have access to such amazing equipment. But many scientists don’t.

While modern science is more technologically complex than music, I see no fundamental limitation to increasing the accessibility and reducing the cost of doing research. I think this is one of the great challenges facing science. Inexpensive scientific instruments would empower new scientists, give more independence to existing researchers, and lead to an increase in creativity in scientific research.

In my future columns for The Sceptical Chymist, I hope to look at chemistry and science in a new way – one that focuses more on breakthroughs in the efficiency, cost, and accessibility of the discipline rather than new pieces of expensive knowledge for assimilation. If the tools of science were made available to more people, perhaps they would be more frequently applied to problems of great interest to our society.

About the author: Jeff Johannes is a medicinal chemist at a major pharmaceutical company in the Boston area. He currently plays an Epiphone Les Paul named “Grimace.”