[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is December’s article]

An oral history of pharma layoffs, the wonders of beer and some embarrassing artwork.

What do chemists do after they’ve just been laid off from their job in the pharmaceutical/chemical industry? Chemjobber is trying to gather useful information from people who have been through redundancy to “hear as much advice as possible for people who will be laid off”. Since the Layoff Project launch in mid-October, at the time of writing Chemjobber has been contacted by six people willing to tell their story. These have ranged from someone with 30 years’ experience to someone ‘freshly out of school’, and from someone clearly having an understandably tough time adjusting to life without “being able to discuss chemistry” to someone whose personal circumstances changed so drastically they could easily put the loss of work into perspective.

Wort. Mash. India pale ale. German wheat beer. You probably expect to see words like these in a blog post about beer, but how about gibberellic acid, enzyme inactivation, dextrin oligomers (with structures!) and isomerization? Regular Blogroll readers won’t be surprised to learn that the blogpost in question is by Martin Lersch, of Khymos. In his ~2,500 word post ‘Wonders of extraction: Brewing beer’, he takes readers through a thorough look at the first two steps of brewing beer: mashing and wort boiling. In his words, these “are really quite sophisticated extractions”.

And finally…what better way to decorate a new chemistry lab than to frost some pictures of molecules onto the glass doors, and onto a funky yellow glass artwork? Well, if you go ahead and decide to decorate your lab with molecular structures, perhaps you should check out at ChemBark what happened when Georgia Tech did this. If you don’t like five-valent carbon or triply bonded bridge head atoms on fused rings, you have been warned!

[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is October’s article]

Funding woes spark indignation and ire, but excellence sparks inspiration.

The release of the new research portfolio of the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) in July dismayed many chemists (see Chemistry World for some of that dismay) but it angered synthetic organic chemists the most. They are due to be among the first to feel the pinch of reduced funding. Rather than take this lying down, Paul Clarke of York University started off with a blog post at Sheer Lunacy that soon ended up with letters to national newspapers, cabinet ministers and the prime minister.

In response, EPSRC chief executive David Delpy argues that organic synthesis has received “a greater proportion of EPSRC support than most other areas in [its] physical sciences portfolio” and that this will be reduced so they can increase funding in other important areas. But of particular annoyance to Clarke and other organic chemists was the lack of consultation: it seems the EPSRC’s definition of ‘consultation’ is different from, among others, the RSC’s, with president David Phillips writing to Delpy outlining his concerns. The issue is so contentious that the Periodic Table of Videos crew made a video called Angry Chemists.

From angry organic chemists to inspirational ones…Dr Freddy, on Synthetic Remarks, implores Phil Baran (Scripps) to “Slow down, Phil”. Poor Dr Freddy offers this plea, because “mortals have no chance to keep up with you” and they “need a break” from Baran’s relentlessly high-profile publications! Dr Freddy suggests Baran should ‘do a Heck’: “Invent an awesome reaction, publish, disappear from the face of the Earth for some 20+ years, only to return to pick up the Nobel prize.” In a nice post-script, Baran himself commented on the post, humbly suggesting that it was his students who deserve the credit.

[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is September’s article]

A worrying tale of misconduct, a consideration of ‘chemical intuition’ and a very useful reference finder.

How can we distil more than five thousand words, spread across a series of blogposts, that themselves distil 167 pages of information about the misconduct of Columbia graduate student Bengu Sezen? (And I was never any good at distillations in the lab…) The series comes from ChemBark, which has doggedly (pun only slightly intended) pursued this case for some time. In obtaining the documents, under a Freedom of Information Act request, ChemBark has uncovered a fascinating story that deserves to be widely read, if only to act as a warning. Starting with ‘finicky or sensitive’ reactions, that only seemed to work with Sezen in the lab, and progressing through doctored spectra before ending with retracted JACS papers, the whole story is bewildering and depressing. The documents themselves can be downloaded, and the posts are still ongoing at the time of writing and include a discussion on the role and responsibility of Sezen’s advisor Dalibor Sames. For a summary of the case, take a look at Chemical & Engineering News.

What is chemical intuition? The question is posed — but maybe not fully answered — at the Curious Wavefunction. Is intuition, however we define it, more important in chemistry than in physics? Wavefunction thinks so, but Google doesn’t agree: ‘chemical intuition’ gets only ~31,000 hits, compared with ~135,000 for its physical counterpart. In any case, the post goes on to suggest some tips that Waveform has noticed from great chemists down the years. Don’t ignore the obvious (like colour and smell), get a feel for energetics, stay in touch with the basics, and learn from other fields.

And finally…the editorial team just love the reference resolver developed by Alex Zhurakovskyi — just type/paste in the reference in almost any style you like, and bingo! You’re directed straight to the article.

[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is August’s article]

Named reactions represent a fascinating subsection of chemistry, so we eagerly awaited the answers to Derek Lowe’s ‘Name Reactions You’ve Never Run’ blogpost. Lowe starts things off with the confession of a colleague who, despite years of experience, has never run a Diels–Alder reaction and continues with his own admission “I’ve never done a straight aldol condensation”, nor a Fischer indole synthesis. The comments thread was soon filled with people happily admitting which famous reactions have passed them by.

Who could fail to click on a blogpost with the title ‘Is earwax an organocatalyst?’. We certainly couldn’t and were rewarded with an informative post on the Chemistry Blog by Chemjobber, picking up on a Newscripts item by Steve Ritter in Chemical and Engineering News (89, 56; 2011). Way back in 1960 — in the days before blogs — budding chemist Charles Johnson discovered that his earwax accelerated the process of making colourful lake pigments. In his later life, as an undergraduate student, Johnson further found that earwax worked as a catalyst to make trans-stilbene, “although his professor didn’t seem impressed.” Chemjobber reminds us of Dylan Stiles’s blogpost on the now-defunct Tenderbutton in which he took a TLC of his earwax, which Chemjobber describes as “one of the initial triumphs of the chemblogosphere”. Who knew such an unpleasant substance was so interesting?

And finally… Mary Carmichael got so fed up with seeing marketing spiel that uses the phrase ‘chemical-free’ to describe products that she started a blog, ‘F No, “Chemical Free!”’. Among the products named and shamed so far are “chemical free sunblock and bug spray” and even a chemistry set that offers “60 fun activities with no chemicals”. That doesn’t sound like much fun to us.

[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is July’s article]

“What would happen, hypothetically, if a baby mouse could grow up eating only deuterated food and water? Could you make an unusually heavy mouse?” asked Sharon Neufeldt in an entertaining post on her ‘I can has science?’ blog. Assuming that the elemental make-up of a mouse is pretty similar to that of a human, Neufeldt estimates it would be 10% heavier — but not “a fat mouse, just a more dense mouse.” Of course, those readers familiar with the kinetic isotope effect and cellular function will realize that the poor, if hypothetical, heavy mouse would not last long with all its hydrogen atoms swapped for deuterium. As Neufeldt discusses, “a carbon-deuterium bond can be 6.5 times slower to break than a carbon-hydrogen bond”, which could have pretty drastic consequences to your mouse “cells won’t be able to function properly and [the mouse] will start to die.”

But what about enriching the mouse with ¹³C? The smaller kinetic isotope effect might help the mouse’s health, but the weight gain wouldn’t be anywhere near as striking at a mere 1.5%. Neufeldt also points out another flaw in her plan: it would cost over $600 a day to feed her mouse on commercially available ¹³C-labelled glucose. At that price, she said she might as well treat the mouse to three meals a day at her favourite French restaurant.

One of the most positive and publicly visible uses of chemistry has to be in art conservation and restoration so it’s great to see that Chemical & Engineering News’ Sarah Everts has launched a new blog on this topic, called Artful Science. Posts have so far covered topics as different as the chemistry behind fading blue pigments, the isotope techniques used to discover whether the influx of South American silver really did cause the ‘Price Revolution’, and using DNA from ancient Maori cloaks to track feather trade routes.

[As mentioned in this post, we’re posting the monthly blogroll column here on the Sceptical Chymist. This is a slightly longer version of June’s article]

Embracing rational irrationality and a 200th birthday celebration.

“When we hear ‘chemicals’ we think death, harm, cancer, birth defects, danger, pain, poison, pollution, hazardous waste, Love Canal, Bhopal. Oh, joy!” This was part of a letter addressed to ‘chemists’ from ‘the public’ to celebrate the International Year of Chemistry, written ironically by David Ropeik as part of his guest blog for Scientific American. I’m sure you’ll forgive us for not chuckling as we read, much less ROFL’ing. Ropeik’s point, if bluntly made, was that chemists need to address the fact that the public has real fears about their exposure to ‘chemicals’. Whether or not those fears are entirely rational, he argues, chemists should embrace them as part of a wider dialogue if they are to get the public to appreciate the benefits of chemistry.

Quite a few people on Twitter thought Ropeik was at best guilty of ignoring his own advice by successfully alienating the community he was trying to advise. But KJHaxton on Endless Possibilities was able to see past the “chemist bash centred on the notion that [the IYC] exists solely to convince the generally ignorant public […] that chemistry is in fact a Very Good Thing.” Haxton concludes that the IYC “is about far more than overcoming so-called chemophobia, let’s not allow one blog post to make it so.” Neil Gussman on The Chemical Heritage blog took the advice on board: “[chemistry needs] the reality check Ropiek provided: the most powerful tools do the most damage when misused.” Magdeline Lum, however, leapt to the Defence of Chemists at Philosophically Disturbed because the “public know plenty about chemistry. They may not recognise their existing knowledge as chemistry knowledge but this doesn’t make them ignorant.”

And finally… showing chemistry in a more positive light, Google used the 200th anniversary of Robert Bunsen’s birth to create a great ‘doodle’ of the eponymous burner that brightened everyone’s day. Of course, there was more to Bunsen than just a burner, as we were quick to point out here on the Sceptical Chymist, and Michelle Francl even showed us the link between Bunsen and quantum mechanics at the Culture of Chemistry.