Monthly Archives: April 2008

Reactions – Barney Grubbs

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1. What made you want to be a chemist?

I grew up around chemistry (and chemists) and developed the usual youthful obsessions with setting things on fire. I also had some inspirational science and chemistry teachers, Mr. Covington and Paul Groves, in junior high and high school. However, I went off to college planning to study anthropology and later linguistics. At the end of my sophomore year I realized I liked chemistry and went on from there (though I still snuck in a few more linguistics classes). The idea that molecules interact at progressively larger scales to give observable objects and effects combined with the perpetually growing number of ways to go about designing and synthesizing interesting molecules continues to fascinate me and a large community of chemists.

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

While I have come to increasingly enjoy cooking as my time in the lab has become less frequent, I don’t think I have the fortitude to survive in the food-preparation industry, even with the embrace of scientific apparatus that “molecular gastronomy” has brought. Participating in the production of alcoholic beverages, while an honorable application of chemical principles, would probably have similar difficulties in terms of financial survival and would be hard on an already overworked liver. If I weren’t a chemist, I would probably be happiest writing about science and/or food and liquor (especially given the chance to consume interesting varieties of the latter substances).

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

There are a number of levels on which to consider this one (and I worry that anything I say here will come off as so much hand-waving nonsense). On the most basic level, some of us can make new and useful molecules and materials and others of us can work to understand how new and old molecules interact with each other (and can tell the first group of folks what new types of molecules to make). On a more societal level, I think we somehow need to convince an even greater percentage of the population (1) that what we do as chemists is important and fundamental to our everyday lives and (2) that physics, chemistry and biology are all worth trying to understand on a basic level and that they’re nothing to be scared of. (I’m still working on point 2 myself).

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

If it were mostly a liquid dinner, I would have loved to have had the chance to get Brendan Behan wound up and to enjoy the resulting songs, stories, etc. Benjamin Franklin would probably be a hoot too, and the food would probably be better. If it were someone still alive, I would enjoy the chance to dine with Haruki Murakami and then hang out drinking in smoky Japanese jazz clubs talking about stories.

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

In September 2005, I tried out a semi-novel route to some new initiators for free radical polymerization that worked well enough to have a few graduate students follow up and we have so far squeezed a few papers out of it. Mostly I end up doing basic repairs on simple machinery.

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

If it were the right kind of desert island, Euell Gibbons’ Beachcomber’s Handbook would be indispensable (even if just for its description of how to make palm wine). Otherwise Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Murakami might strike some concordant notes with the situation. Unless I could somehow get a magical live stream of WFMU, the CD would be a toss-up between the depleted glory of the Pogues’ “Rum, Sodomy, & the Lash,” the epic black metal of Weakling’s “Dead as Dreams,” or the otherworldly spirituality of Pharoah Sanders’ “Tauhid,” and then I would really miss a whole bunch of other music (and civilization, too). [And what did I do to earn an island exile anyway?!]

Barney Grubbs is in the Department of Chemistry at Dartmouth College and works on making polymers that really ought to assemble into larger, allegedly more interesting, maybe even someday useful, but still very tiny structures.

Materials Girl: Questions…

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I’ll cut to the chase on this one. What are graduate schools and employers looking for the most? Where do they draw the line between the two general characteristics that lead to success – natural aptitude versus natural inclination to work hard? Some graduate programs guarantee admission for students with sufficiently high GPAs. However, a few letters on a transcript can only indicate a student’s true ability to a certain degree. It is an unfortunate truth that a mere handful of blips on the academic radar can tank a history of otherwise good marks.

It has been said that great concern over grades is useless, but it is impossible to never worry. Not all scholars are blessed with the genius chromosome that allows for effortless, perfect academic records. So where does that leave the rest of us poor mortals? Is it just luck in finding someone who wants us? As always, I wonder.

Chemiotics: Causality in the cell and how puppies give us hope

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This post is pretty philosophic, but it discusses some issues raised by the previous post that shouldn’t be ignored. Future posts will be far more chemical.

Do we have any hope of constructing a nice chain of causality for what happens when we throw epidermal growth factor (EGF) at a Hela cell (described in the last post) — e.g., the EGF receptor activates kinases 1 through N, each of which phosphorylates substrates (some of which are other kinases) which eventually phosphorylate the 924 sites on the 2,244 proteins (and in the correct temporal order to boot). I don’t think there are enough researchers to do it, or labs to hold them. Even worse, if the results were available, I don’t think our minds are strong enough to grasp them.

A big stumbling block would be the multiple degrees of feedback present even with something as simple as phosphorylation and dephosphorylation. Simple ideas of causality and control vanish with feedback (see two posts back — “The Decline of Master Gland…”). Causality is inherently a linear, sequential idea. Even chaos theory is basically causal, although predictability goes out the window.

That’s not to say our brains don’t do incredibly complex things such as just recognizing people. You never see anyone at exactly the same angle, under the same light, with the same background. People are usually moving, attired differently, etc., etc… Yet our brains in some way compute an invariant that computer science can only dream about permitting instant recognition. As people move about and you interact with them, zillions of new sensory inputs must be absorbed, transformed and matched to the same invariant. Since we do all this unconsciously, we don’t think anything of it.

Yet we don’t do very well predicting events where feedback is involved (like the stock market where most people lose). Perhaps the next step up in human intelligence is the ability to perceive the various forms of multiloop feedback, the way we recognize faces and people.

Could our brains change that fast? Possibly. Consider the man’s best friend vs. the chimp. [Science vol. 298 pp. 1634–1636 (2002)] Chimpanzees are terrible at picking up human cues as to where food is hidden, even when the cues are as obvious as pointing to the food container. Even chimps that eventually perform well, take dozens of trials or more to learn what the cues mean. I find this surprising.

However, puppies (raised with no contact with humans) do much better at this than chimps — anyone owning a dog knows they can read us like a book. Wolf cubs don’t do better than the chimps, even cubs raised by humans. This implies that during the process of domestication, dogs have been selected for a set of cognitive and social abilities that allow them to communicate with us. Domestication has only gone on for 10,000–15,000 years (the dawn of agriculture). I find it absolutely incredible that we could have changed the dog’s brain in what is basically a microsecond in evolutionary time. Yet we did. Hopefully our brains are as plastic.

Not to be too depressed by this. There clearly are single chains of causality in the cell and chokepoints which we can find and modify. Consider Gleevec. Success stories like this provide employment for legions of chemists.

Communication let me down

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If you’re at a party, and a non-chemist asks what your work involves, what do you say? Let’s assume that you get beyond the “I’m a research chemist” stage, and your friend actually wants to hear some details. How do you explain your project in terms that joe public will understand?

I ask this because, having just completed two years as a News & Views editor for Nature, I’ve found that seemingly simple chemical concepts can be misunderstood by scientists from other disciplines. Here’s an example: catalysts. All that most people understand about catalysts is that they speed up reactions. They don’t know – or they have forgotten – that a defining characteristic of catalysts is that they’re used in small quantities.

This lack of insight seems remarkable, especially in biologists, who clearly know a lot about enzymes. But I know from experience that my biologist colleagues don’t know what is meant by ‘a catalytic quantity’ of material. Much less do they understand why a catalytic reaction is preferable to a stoichiometric one (and let’s not get started on the word ‘stoichiometric’). You may think that they’re being remarkably obtuse – but try asking a friend from another discipline about catalysts, and you’ll be surprised at what they don’t know.

Does any of this matter? Well, if we want chemistry to have the same respect and recognition as biology, physics and the geosciences (with their headline-grabbing genomes, exoplanets and predictions of climate change), then yes it does. When was the last time a breakthrough in chemistry made it to the front page of a national newspaper?

Frankly, it’s always going to be an uphill battle. We’re never going to see the headline “Catalyst distinguishes between enantiotopic protons” on the front page of the New York Times. In fact, we shouldn’t necessarily expect people to remember everything about chemistry that they were taught at high school – with catalysts being a prime example of this. But we shouldn’t give up trying to explain our work. I know from experience that complex concepts, such as enantiotopicity, can be explained to non-chemists in terms they understand. It just takes a little more effort than you might expect.

Andy

Andy Mitchinson (Associate Editor, Nature)