1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I was always fascinated by nature as a child. I studied lake water and plants with a microscope, spent a lot of nights outside watching stars, built small electric circuits and, of course, I had a small chemistry lab in our cellar. I enjoyed all these experiments and what they told me about nature. Later in school I had a very good chemistry teacher who encouraged me to take part in the International Chemistry Olympiad (an international competition for high school kids). The first time I totally failed in our national selection rounds. But I guess that finally tipped the balance towards chemistry. I got ambitious and the more I got involved with chemistry, the more I loved it.

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

Most likely a medical doctor. As a teenager I started to work as a voluntary paramedic and I still do it from time to time. Being able to help people is a very gratifying job, even though it is a very tough job with a lot of responsibility. So I guess if chemistry or natural sciences were not my profession I would have ended up in medicine. Although as a child, to become a cook was also tempting for me. I still love to cook, even though I am probably not as skilled in the kitchen as I am in the chemistry lab.

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

First, as Ronald Breslow once put it, chemistry is the central science. Everything that goes on around us is somehow linked to chemistry. The more and more we learn about the molecular basis of life itself, the development of diseases or the function of drugs on a molecular level or how material properties depend on their molecular composition, the better we will be able to improve our life and deal with the upcoming challenges threatening our planet. Second, chemistry is the only natural science that not only tries to understand what is going on around us but also is capable to create. We can make new molecules, that never existed before; new molecules with new and much desired properties. Chemists create new drugs in order to improve our life and health. Chemists create new materials with improved properties for thousands of applications in our modern world. Chemistry can help to solve so many problems we are facing today: energy crisis, food and water supply, health issues or environmental challenges just to name a few.

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

Leonardo da Vinci. He was probably the most fascinating scientist that ever lived on our planet. It is amazing how much this one person accomplished and in how many different disciplines and fields: arts and sciences, chemistry and physics, medicine and biology, architecture and engineering and many more. He invented so many things that we still use today, even though in a modified and improved version, but still essentially going back to his ideas. And he achieved all this under really challenging and also sometimes life-threatening political circumstances.

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

Well, that was quite some time ago at least in terms of real scientific research. It was about six years ago when I just started my own academic career and when I had only three coworkers who just started to work with me for their diploma. It was a five-step synthesis of one of the building blocks, a guanidiniocarbonyl pyrrole derivative, we need for our research. Unfortunately, I do not have any time for lab research myself any more. And I guess by now my coworkers are much more skilled in the lab than I am due to lack of practice. However, I organize a chemistry day for high school students once a year. And on that day I also present some experiments like the classical nylon synthesis or gun cotton. It is always a “big show” also for my coworkers to see me in lab coat again and doing experiments.

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

Is there a book, how to make coffee from coconuts? That would be my first choice. Otherwise, perhaps the New York City telephone directory. That has so many pages which are good for making fire. As for a CD, does a CD player run on coconut oil? To be more serious, I could read the Lord of the Rings again and again, and a CD with music from Andrew Lloyd Webber would be nice.

Carsten Schmuck is in the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Würzburg and works on supramolecular chemistry and its application in bioorganic chemistry (e.g., development of drugs and sensors) and material sciences (e.g., self-assembled nanostructures).

With experiments at particle accelerators halted or scaled back, physicists look beyond the US.

Haley Bridger

Harvard physicist Gary Feldman and his collaborators thought 2008 would be a year of opportunity. Their plans for NOvA, a neutrino experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, had received positive reviews, and Congress and President George Bush seemed poised to increase funding for the physical sciences.

But at the end of December, Feldman, cospokesperson for the project, received some very bad news. Congress unexpectedly cut $94 million from the high-energy physics budget, slashing funds for NOvA and other projects at Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. US research and design efforts for the International Linear Collider (ILC)—an international particle accelerator still in the planning stages that represents the next big step for the field—have also been suspended. Several countries are vying to host the ILC, and Boston-area physicists fear that the budget cutbacks will jeopardize any American bid to be the ILC’s home.

The shrunken budget has effectively cancelled or drastically cut back large-scale experiments—for example, construction of NOvA’s detector has been delayed indefinitely—and has put planning on hold, leaving many Boston physicists uncertain about the future of their field.

“Students worry about having to work on experiments in Asia and Europe after this,” says Mayly Sanchez, a visiting scholar at Harvard who works with graduate students on neutrino projects. “They don’t see an optimistic future for high-energy physics in the States.”

Out of America

Georgios Choudalakis is a graduate student at MIT working at Fermilab. He came to the United States from Greece because of America’s reputation for pioneering new scientific programs. “How does [the United States] manage to attract the best? A major factor is that it funds the best universities and laboratories,” he says. But after his PhD, Choudalakis plans to move to CERN, the high-energy physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.

So far, only budgets for large-scale projects and facilities have been cut, but some Boston researchers are concerned that there may be less money available for smaller grants too, and that could affect the next generation of physicists. “If we don’t get funding, we can’t take on students,” says Ed Kearns, a professor of physics at Boston University. “Federal research dollars don’t go into rocket fuel that gets burned up; the money funds graduate students who we train in fundamental research. Those students go on to jobs not only in particle physics but also in the private sector here in Boston.”

Speaking up

Some Boston researchers are fighting back. Tufts physics professor Hugh Gallagher says that he’s been calling and faxing Senators John Kerry and Edward Kennedy, and Congressmen Ed Markey and Mike Capuano.

“One of the most concrete things that’s come out of this is the realization that the scientific community has to articulate to politicians and representatives why our research is so important and so vital to the training and education [of PhDs] in this country,” he says. “Nothing in Washington is safe unless there are people advocating for it.”

Feldman and his colleagues at NOvA have not yet given up hope. This spring, Congress could pass a supplemental appropriations bill to restore some funding. “We are doing everything we can to influence the political process and remain hopeful,” Feldman says.

Editor’s note: A correction has been made. Georgios Choudalakis is a graduate student, not a postdoc.