First of all, I hope you’ll all excuse the somewhat overreaching title of this post – the coincidental timing of this and the previous post, however, seemed to merit some comparison.

Second of all (and the point of this post): The National Academy of Science has elected 72 new members and 18 foreign associates (which is the maximum that can be elected in any given year, apparently), of which a pleasantly surprising number are chemists (such as Frances Arnold, Steven Boxer, Steven Buchwald, Ken Dill, Michael Grunstein, Eric Jacobsen, and Tim Swager). Go chemists! It is perhaps worth noting, however, that only a small number of these folks have mustaches (which bodes well for Ken Dill; to be explained later).

The NAS site also tells us that ‘election is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded a scientist or engineer’. What do you guys think? Are you more impressed by someone who is in the HHMI? Or someone who’s won a Cope Award, the Priestley Medal, or the Nakanishi Prize? How do you think the Kavli Prize will stack up (to be awarded for the first time in May)? Do you think NAS membership (or, in fact, most of these awards) would be more or less impressive if the rationale for who was picked was more transparent? Or do you find that the people doing great work come to be well-known and well-respected regardless of these external trappings?

In any case, it’s clear that chemists are doing some moving and shaking (and shaving) these days. Congratulations to the new NAS members.

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

In case you weren’t aware, today is ‘World Laboratory Day’. This website tells us that “World Laboratory Day celebrates the place where great discoveries, inventions, and medical cures are born. It’s also where mad scientists dwell.” I was actually going to go in a completely different direction upon hearing the name of the holiday – something more to do with celebrating your international collaborators, thanking that company 3,000 miles away for making the small molecule you want to do assays with, or sharing the candy that someone brought back from a recent conference overseas… I also have to take issue with the poor grammar of the sentence (gosh, I really have become a nerd!), which suggests to me that mad scientists dwell in World Laboratory Day, which seems a bit unusual (unless World Laboratory Day is frozen in time like Brigadoon, perhaps? Ok, enough randomness.).

Although a lot of screen time is given to mad scientists in movies, TV shows, and even the news (nothing says ‘Watch the 11:00 news’ like a scientist raving about time machines or cloning him/herself), I don’t see a lot of true scientific content devoted to these beloved figures. For example, a friend of mine suggested there could be a journal just for research from mad scientists (plots to take over the world, new kinds of poisons, etc., which would have the side benefit of making it extremely easy to fight terrorism (by arresting all the corresponding authors)), but there could also be conference sessions or entire conferences devoted to ‘Ways to create living matter using a corpse’s brain’ or ‘How to accidentally change the size of your family members so that they get lost in your back yard and hilarity ensues’. What about special grants programs for people working on cloning dinosaurs into frog eggs, or switching faces back and forth? Really, I think this is a whole section of the science community we’ve been ignoring for too long. Unfortunately, most of these ideas don’t really tie in to chemistry very well… perhaps we chemists are just too normal for all that silliness?

Anyway, I’m off to see if I can find some nice European chocolate. Hooray for globalization!

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

Hey everyone, our May issue is now online. Check it out!

In the review in this issue about reactive oxygen species, Christine Winterbourn makes an interesting comment. She says:

“The early days [in free radical research] were notable for healthy and at times vigorous debate on how free radical chemistry could be rationalized with biological observations. Such debate is still needed today.”

This comment made me think about something I read a couple of months ago in a plane magazine*, which was an interview with Gary Taubes. In describing his new book, he says:

“If I had my druthers, I’d have the public health authorities institute something more akin to the legal system to decide what we know is so and what we don’t. They’d get a jury made up of 12 exceedingly good scientists, none of whom have worked in the fields of nutrition, obesity and chronic disease. Teams of competing experts would present the evidence for or against a particular belief – say, the healthfulness of low-fat diets, or whether salt causes hypertension. The jury would be able to cross-examine witnesses – i.e., those researchers who believed their studies provided some useful evidence. And then maybe the jury would deliberate for as long as it took to give an answer. If they didn’t believe some particular piece of advice was justified, but they couldn’t say it wasn’t, they’d suggest what experiments had to be done to know for sure.”

It’s an interesting idea – that of whether enough debate is occurring in general and how specifically ‘debates’ might occur to be most productive. I feel like I don’t see a lot of debate occurring… I wonder if scientists are less willing to voice their opinions (outside of more regulated talks) than a generation ago, or if there are fewer topics that we feel completely adrift about? Or are there instead more topics that, as we continue to learn, we feel more adrift about, and so it’s less easy to set forth a specific hypothesis (which then makes it difficult to argue for that hypothesis)? What do you guys think? Going back to Gary Taubes’ idea, it seems like there are many biological or medical questions that are unresolved, perhaps at least partially since there are so many different ways of conducting clinical trials or dosing mice, etc. However, if you could assemble a chemistry jury, what topics would you set before the court?

Catherine (associate editor, Nature Chemical Biology)

*Sadly, I don’t remember the airline, so can’t reference this properly. Feel free to tell me!