Posted on behalf of Materials Girl

I never had chemistry, biology, or magic sets growing up, but still ended up aspiring to work in the field of science. Before the specific concept of “maxillofacial surgeon” was coherent to a 7-year-old, my calling in life was to perform surgery of some sort. Dissecting a myriad of formaldehyde-infused specimens in high school reinforced this idea (horrible fun, literally).

Then, the realities of med school – or horrors, if you will – became apparent, along with the recognition that mild squeamishness and fear of causing damage are characteristics that hardly behoove a surgeon. I realized that extreme mental strain is only justified for a passion (or a necessity, such as certain GE classes) – a category that medical school did not fall into, despite a potentially lucrative career on the far-off horizon.

So, I suppose this suggests the question that many of us have mused over: Why am I a chemist (or a materials engineer)? It’s generally safe to say that the motivation is not money, hours of writing proposals, the “thrill” of sitting around lab waiting for a reaction to complete, needing to redo that 57-step process, or whatever else plagues the followers of chemistry. A genuine thrill does exist, however. Why else would we subject ourselves to something that the general public may react poorly to? (“I abhorred high school chemistry and never took it again!”, “Is ‘mat sci’ mathematical sciences?”, “I could never work in a smelly lab all day!”, etc…)

Currently, as a lowly chemist in the making, my thrills primarily lie with the daily influx/deluge of information. In the future, I hope to turn that knowledge into innovative discoveries, or to pass it along to other generations to do the same. More recently, since becoming more aware of the publishing world, I’ve also pondered whether being an editor for a scientific journal would be a satisfying career choice. There are many options, but I’m not sure yet where my current path will take me.

Olive Heffernan

In this week’s Nature, Jeff Tollefson reports on the claims that a White House science advisor edited a congressional testimony by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the public health impacts of climate change.

First reported last week by the Associated Press, the story has since been picked up by Juliet Eilperin in The Washington Post, in The Boston Globe and in The Wall Street Journal (which takes a different line, reporting that the CDC director says that the testimony wasn’t diluted).

Although White House spokesperson Dana Perino initially denied claims that Julie Gerberding’s testimony had been watered down, it eventually became clear that it had been chopped from 12 to six pages.

Bush’s chief science advisor, John Marburger, said the edits were made in order to align the testimony with the findings of the reports released earlier this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But concerned scientists and Democrats believe that the White House was suppressing science at odds with its policy positions.

According to Eilperin “White House officials eliminated several successive pages of Gerberding’s testimony” including a statement that the “CDC considers climate change a serious public concern”.

Tollefson reports in Nature that the missing material "focused on a range of potential public- health impacts related to climate change. These included the effects of heat waves, air pollution, extreme weather and infectious diseases.”

Read the whole story in Nature here.