The ‘front half’ of this week’s Nature is packed full of chemistry – there’s a News & Views by Tom Muir on a recent JACS paper from David Liu’s group, Emma Marris wrote a short News piece on the controversy surrounding two recent syntheses of hexacyclinol, and Phil Ball wrote a News Feature on the big questions facing chemistry (or in his own words: “are there still major chemical questions to crack?”)
In 2005, Science published a special issue that featured 125 ‘big questions’ that scientists hope to solve in the next 25 years – some of the chemical questions included ‘How far can we push chemical self-assembly?,’ ‘What is the structure of water?,’ and ‘Are there limits to rational chemical synthesis?’. Phil adds a few more questions to the list, including ‘How do we design molecules with specific functions and dynamics?’ and ‘What is the chemical basis of thought and memory?’.
Let’s say you had a lab of 20 highly competent graduate students and post-docs and was just awarded a large grant (how about one million dollars per year for five years – wouldn’t that be nice…) What problem(s) would you work on? Would you tackle a basic/fundamental problem or use chemistry to explore an interesting biological system, make new materials/devices, develop new therapeutic agents, or something other application?
Joshua
Joshua Finkelstein (Associate Editor, Nature)
I think the final question you raise is by far the most pertinent. As a consequence of the stiff competition for grant money, science seems to have become much less subjective.
In a “publish-or-perish” world, it is wrong that the future career of an individual can be influenced not solely by the quality of the research they carry out, but but also influenced by personal grudges or relationships.
The stifling objectivity instilled by personal vendettas, friendships, or aspirations was the reason I left life as a chemist for the far less Macchiavellian world of investment banking.
The process you are introducing is very interesting; in effect, you have increased the sample size for peer review to a far larger amount, therby reducing the effect of personal or political bias. But the nature of the mechanism (web based) means that the demographic has changed to a potentially younger and more web-literate group. This would appear to isolate the contributions from the older and more established researchers. Of course, what I have stated is a massive generalisation, but perhaps you will notice a trend.
The reward of being a referee should no more than plus point for ones curriculum vitae, showing a certain prowess and respect. But there is a problem that, being a rather prestigious journal, Nature publications garner a lot of envy, even jealousy from authors peers. Then suspicion begins to creep in; “How did X manage to get that into Nature…” Of course, most of this, as I said, is jealousy, but can form a skewed image, where those who have peer reviewed might find it a little easier to get published.
Best of luck – I hope the community is open-minded and just.