Category Archives: Chemistry Blogs

NOLA ACS

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Th’ Gaussling is heading for fabulous New Orleans, LA, to that gathering of eagles we call the National ACS Meeting. It’s an extravaganza. Chemistry overlords and underlings awkwardly walking about in their wrinkled dress-up clothes.  Undergrads on their first professional trip, lugging plastic bags loaded with trade show trinkets.  It’s an orgy of PowerPoint presentations disclosing all of the latest “firsts” and “remarkable” results. 

The National ACS meeting is a harmonic convergence of the illustrious grandees of the First Tier of universities together with those perched in lesser stations.  Th’ Gaussling, a 2nd rate molecule merchant, will be staying within hurling distance of Bourbon Street.  NOLA is a place where it is still cool to play the tuba.  Ya gotta love a place like that.

Management Recruiter Buggery

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High on the list of exciting professional experiences is the job interview process.  I just spent the weekend updating my resume. It is good to do this now and then if for no other reason than it forces you to recall just what the hell you’re good for.  As I performed this task, I was flooded with a stream of memories, both good and bad. 

I’ve had great interviews, ho-hum interviews, and a few awful experiences. My greatest interviews were from my stint in academia. Of the 7 interviews, I received 5 offers.  Not bad for a rythmically disabled Iowegian. But a few years later my smug confidence was to be shaken by an whole body dose of reality.

Academia is not reality, it is a sort of intellectual Hollywood. A la la land of frog princes and preening fussbudgets, special effects and make-believe. It is a pageant of grant-writing rock stars and untenured showboats on parade waving their tail feathers at all who would watch. I who had earlier embraced that world would later be out in the catabatic winds of big time management recruiting.

I won’t write a tedious valentine about my slender portfolio of actual talent.  Instead, I’ll tell of an experience with those bottom feeders of the job world- recruiters. 

In the frantic world of job placement, there are several kinds of recruiters. There are the recruiters that place at the highest levels of play, and there is everyone else. In my view they are all shady operators.  They will drop a line with bait on the end right in front of your face. Poachers they are. They’ll feign an excuse to call you at your office and query for associates –wink wink, nod nod- who may be looking for other work.

You’ll send a resume and there will be some back and forth. The recruiter will get to know you a bit.  Then one day you’ll receive an email invitation to interview at their office suite in Watercloset, PA.  You’ll fly to Philly, the city of brotherly shove, and navigate your rental car to their office.  The waiting room will have that dental office smell that’ll make your flesh crawl and your molars throb.

A smarmy receptionist will hand you off to a smarmy executive recruiting specialist. For me, this is where it all went down the toilet.  I sat in an expensive office near the Delaware River while the recruiter reviewed my resume, my buttocks reflexively clenched in the way countless other buttocks have been so clenched in that leather chair while enduring the first 2 hours of detailed questioning- “drilling in” they call it.  All the while, she was quietly building a case for yea or nay.

Here is where I went wrong. It was utterly and comically naive.  I thought that the recruiters job was to get me an interview for a management slot with an international chemical company. Fancy that! As I was to learn, my assumption was wildly and insanely in error. The recruiters, you see, only get paid when they deliver a candidate who gets hired.  So, they prescreen over the telephone and only bring in final candidates for the slot.  I was a final candidate for Sales and Marketing Director, but that is still far from the finish line.

As I sat through the meeting, it dawned on me that I was not being coached to give an award winning interview with the unseen client, but rather, I was being slowly skinned alive. 

Based on earlier conversations with this recruiter, I thought that they would deliver me to an interview with the company looking to fill the position. Instead, I was brought into the recruiters office for a much closer inspection on behalf of the customer. I was to have my professional colon inspected, so to speak, by these savage HR mercenaries.

After the early morning session with the contact recruiter, a real heavyweight was brought in- a partner of the firm. He was apparently an alumnus of HR at Merck and was accustomed to body slams in Big Pharma. He was a sort of “Refrigerator Perry” in the recruiting world.  There were no pleasantries, only an immediate start to some pretty rough play.  There was a long succession of close and bluntly skeptical questions about my experience and abilities. The two recruiters did a bit of good cop, bad cop along the way.  They were a team and played a disciplined game of question and answer, drilling ever deeper to what they were looking for.  The refrigerator lectured me at length like I was some kind of rube from up the holler, giving me the facts of life in Big Business. 

I guess I really was a rube from up the holler.

It didn’t take very long for me to see that not only would I not advance forward in this game, but I would have my head lopped off and handed to me on a greasy wooden plate.  And that is what happened.  After 90 minutes of questions and thinly veiled accusations of weakness, inexperience, and retarded professional development, the Refrigerator stood up and left the room. As the other recruiter fumbled with her notes, I sat there in silence like a stunned carp floating on the lake surface after dynamite fishing. After a moment she suddenly became matronly and bleated out consolation.  I was stunned and shocked from the rapid fire rude questions and the careless dissection of my very being. I had never been treated in this manner before, not even in grad school.

After my “case” recruiter made a brief show of effort to salve the wounds, I put my severed head under my arm and was shown the door. It was a long, depressing trip back home. I have had plenty of time to mull it over and can only conclude that I was treated badly.  As for the chemical company, I have had the chance to shun them as a supplier in subsequent years.  My indulgence in pettiness is one more scar from the experience.

The Scariest Stuff- Pu and Phosgene

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Has anyone else noticed how people behave when they describe plutonium?  Invariably, it is described as the most 1) toxic, 2) hazardous, 3) dangerous material on earth. It seems that no matter the context, these adjectives or strings of other adjectives are used in the preamble. (See! I just did it.)  It is though plutonium really is thought of as a manifestation of the dark forces thrusting upward from the underworld. Certainly the name and applications infer some malevolent attributes.

I think this curious attitude to a chemical element exists because most people have no other reference point. In reality, plutonium is a dense radioactive metal, grey in color and sensitive to water and oxygen. It is/was produced by the reduction of plutonium  cation with metallic calcium. Like a number of other metals you can’t handle it in the open or without protective garb and inert atmosphere.

I have never heard a credible comparison of it’s chemical vs radiological hazards.  Is it chemically toxic, or does the radiological hazard drive the issue.  My guess is that the radioctivity dominates.

Its radioactivity (Pu-239) and chemical reactivity render it useless for much of anything outside of fission-related uses. It’s not even a good paperweight. You wouldn’t want to have a criticality accident on your desk when you spilled coffee on it. Think of the paperwork. Blue flash and heat pulse …

The same curious treatment is afforded phosgene.  Any mention of this substance outside of a chemistry journal invariably recalls the early uses in trench warfare.  The one time I used it as a post-doc, the purchase order for one mole of phosgene in toluene came back to me in the perspiring hand of the Dean of the College. He called me to his office and wanted to know precisely what kind of harm was I inviting to the University. Literally, he wondered what the neighbors would think.

This university was in a wealthy and exclusive neighborhood of a large city in Tejas. What would the neighboring plutocrats think of having research done with a WW-I war gas in their neighborhood? What if *gulp* there was a release?  That’s a fair question.

I was requested and required to write a letter describing the proper emergency response to a spill and what procedures I would put in place to prevent a mishap. This was not a memo of understanding, but rather it was CYA for the Dean in the case of an accident. He could wave the letter around in the inevitable investigation after an incident. He would pass it to my one remaining hand so I could read it publically from my hospital bed for maximum effect.

Oh yes, at near-threshold levels, phosgene has a fragrance very similar to lilac.

Far Side of the World

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In chemistry, nothing is easy. Everything has failure modes. It’s possible to screw up when putting water in drums. My ham-fisted attempts at a new reaction pathway for a thorny, expensive process have thus far lead to naught. Nature has hidden some subtle requirements that are yet unknown to me. Application of known processes to new substrates may suffer failures that seem obvious afterwards, but are opaque going in.

I used to joke that if one in ten reactions lead to a good result I was doing well.  It’s not always that bad, but you can have stretches where the most reasonable transformations fail in one way or other. Unfortunate side products, poor yields, wrong selectivity, yada, yada, yada. Try doing the last experiment first, they say.

Th’ Gaussling is off to the far side of the world next week for a conference. A week in Bangkok will offer some needed punctuated disequilibrium.  The down side- 20 hours of confinement in an aluminum tube with wheezing strangers. I would prefer to be sedated and put in a box for transport than sit in an airline seat for that long.

Publishing in Open Access Journals

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In the course of searching chemical topics I keep running into the on-line publication Molecules, A Journal of Synthetic Organic Chemistry and Natural Product Chemistry.  This journal is part of MDPI, Molecular Diversity Preservation International, with an office in Basel, Switzerland.  MDPI is also dedicated to the “deposit and exchange of molecular and biomolecular samples”.

The idea behind this journal is to provide open access. The journal asserts that, with this approach, articles get substantially higher citation numbers. Open access is an alternative to paid subscriptions. In this model, the author pays the publication fee up front for peer reviewed editorial oversight and rapid publication.

This was covered by C&EN in the July 3 of 06 issue. It was stated in the article that Elsevier was planning to offer the same service for authors who wanted free access for a cool US$6,000 per article.  The Public Library of Science has a similar program, but with a more reasonable price structure.

What I find especially exciting about this publication mode is the MolBank service. Have you ever ended up with new compounds or data that was perhaps deserving of disclosure but not part of a body of work that would develop into paper?  Here is a blurb from the website-

Molbank (ISSN 1422-8599, CODEN: MOLBAI) publishes one-compound-per-paper short notes and communications on synthetic compounds and natural products. Solicited timely review articles will also be published. Molbank was published during 1997-2001 as MolBank section of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049, CODEN: MOLEFW). Since 2002 it is published as a separate and independent journal. Molbank is a free online Open Access Journal. To be added to the subscriber’s mailing list, write your e-mail address into the “Publication Alert” box on the right side, and press the “Subscribe” button. Molbank is indexed and abstracted very rapidly by Chemical Abstracts.

Interestingly, this could be a possible venue for defensive disclosures in intellectual property. Hmmm … 

The question is, will paying-to-publish be cheaper than paying-to-subscribe? And, how will library administration have to change to accommodate this? 

But perhaps the bigger issue may be related to a certain snobismus that exists in regard to publishing. At some point, the rock stars of research (Whitesides, Trost, etc.) need to wave their hands over this mode of publishing and utter something like “verily, it is good” so the rest of the herd will thunder in that direction.

The writer of this blog has vented on this issue several times.  Putting public financed research results into free public access is the fair thing to do and should contribute to innovation and get new technologies into use at lower cost.  Turning over copyright of research papers to private third party groups only adds to the expense and complication to the use of this national treasure.

No doubt this will be vigorously opposed by the publishing establishment. The US$6000 fee charged by Elsevier is absurd and in reality is the beginning of the end of their publically financed milking of the R&D cash cow.

Creeping Featurism: Too much Software

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My big problem in life, other than being age 50 on a runaway train with the Grim Reaper, is a plurality of software.  It crept up on me while I was standing there, slack-jawed and admiring of all of the pretty colors and pull-down menu’s that were a mouse click away. What a wonderous stack of riches, says I.

In any given week, I can find myself at the console of a Bruker 300 MHz NMR, an HP GCMS, an older HP GC with stand alone integrator, a TA Instruments TGA, a Cecil UV/Vis, A Perkin Elmer FTIR, two GOD**MNED cell phones, an office voicemail system, the business MRP accounting system (&$^#!#!@!), office laptop with many applications in Word, Excel, Access, Contact, GoldMine, ChemDraw, SciFinder, a telescope driven by The Sky, numerous platforms on the internet, two home computers, two cars, and, oh yes, a family. And don’t forget my cruel mistress- Chemistry.

It all adds up to a bit too much. I use perhaps the top 5-10 % at most of nearly every software on the list.  The standardization imposed by Microsoft Windows does help with basic navigation, but the data workup and all of the particulars put me into an eternal state of “technological Alzheimers”. I keep asking “Now, how did that work again”?

Then there is the password issue.  All of the computers I work on have some level of security, and so passwords are required to get in. Blessedly, being a networked system, my network password usually works. But passwords expire and it is a constant battle to remember all of them. But if you log onto the Aldrich catalog, or any number of other on-line systems, entry requires a password.

Each of these computerized marvels is layered like an onion with hierarchies and taxonomies unique to the miserable cluster of sods who wrote the code. These sadistic canker blossoms … whoa! I’m getting carried away here. Easy does it, skippy.

Then there are the rules- business SOP’s, IATA, DOT regs, Customs issues, TSCA, policies, lab safety, Hazmat storage, respirator training, new Homeland Security regs, flash points, HMIS numbers, Haz Waste issues. 

This week I did bench chemistry, wrote an MSDS, issued and received inventory in the accounting system, defined SKU‘s, ran a few TGA‘s and FTIR’s, defined some product specifications, did competitive intelligence and worked out some costing and pricing, sent out some quotes, sat in mind-numbing meetings, took two long days to write a report, noodled through some patents, sent some products out the door that I made with my own hands, and received a few new orders.

It was a productive week in fabulous industry. They don’t call it industry for nuthin’.

Lost Comments

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Sorry to a couple of commenters whose cogent additions to the blog were lost. Their comments were somehow trapped in the spam gill net and then plinked into the 12th dimension. When the God Akismet is angry, even Th’ Gausslings superior left clicking skills begin to fail.

Thorium and Methanol

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As we track down the back side of the petroleum curve, we will see a transition from the alkane/alcohol fueled Otto engine to a greater reliance on electric conveyance. Here is some wishful thinking-  Ethanol as a direct petroleum replacement will collapse under the weight of scrutiny as better cost data becomes available. Eventually, ethanol will be prized foremost as an oxygenate additive replacement for MTBE. 

Methanol and Fischer-Tropsch hydrocarbons from coal and biomass will provide high energy density fuels for the carbon-neutral future as petroleum scarcity drives other technologies into play. The Fischer-Tropsch liquified fuels technology from 20th century pariah states (Nazi Germany and South Africa) will assume a greater role in the post-petroleum age.

Fermentation of starch-derived glucose to ethanol and CO2 is too wasteful in the end to be attactive.  Fermentation of cellulosic material to acetate is more mass efficient. Esterification and reduction of ethyl acetate affords ethanol. One company, ZeaChem, (former coworkers, actually) is already working to bring this technology on stream. It remains to be seen how it will go over. I wish them well.

Electric power for the future will come from many sources. Distant, centralized power plants will channel energy across the grid to home-charged automobiles. Electrons travel fast and quietly over the lonely wire. They do not require fleets of ponderous 18-wheelers to move them around in limited quantities.

I see a future heavily reliant on electrons supplied from nuclear plants. Uranium-235 infrastructure will continue to supply fuel to nuclear plants for a long time. But the low abundance of U-235 (o.7 %) and the ever present proliferation potential of Pu-239 from this fuel cycle raises questions as to the wisdom of building U-235 nuke plants in the third or fourth tier states.

A more obscure nuclear fuel that is more abundant than uranium will see a phase-in as demand on the present nuclear fuel infrastructure exceeds supply.  That fuel is Th-232. Thorium-232 is  generally more abundant that uranium and has the additional benefit that it’s major isotope, Th-232 , is the nuclide of interest. Th-232 is not a fissile nuclide, but is a “fertile” isotope instead. Th-232 absorbs a neutron in a reactor seeded with U-235 or Pu-239 to provide an initial neutron flux to become Th-233, which beta decays to Pa-233 which further beta decays to U-233.  It is U-233 which is the fissile nuclide.  U-233 then participates in the fission chain reaction that generates the heat.

You can’t make a nuclear weapon out of Th-232, though in principle you could make one from U-233. The downside of a U-233 bomb is the high specific activity of this isotope.  U-233 is intensely radioactive and poses extra problems in handling.

The economics of thorium energy is advantageous in many ways to that provided by uranium/plutonium infrastructure. Thorium is abundant in monazite formations- reportedly up to 16 % thorium oxide.  The present problem with the thorium cycle is handling the intensely radioactive U-233 that remains in the spent fuel elements. Separate processing infrastructure will have to be put in place to supply reactors that burn thorium before this fuel can go forward.

An HTGR  Brayton cycle reactor with a helium turbine could provide up to 50 % thermodynamic efficiency.  Combine this reactor design with the potential cost savings of the more abundant Th-232, and you have a technology that is well set to provide power to keep the lights, cable TV, and the internet going into the post-petroleum age.

Check out the blog dedicated to Energy from Thorium. I’m writing about thorium because I think it is an important fuel and it needs to find its way to mainstream thinking.  

Feral Chemists. Gaussling’s 4th Epistle to the Bohemians.

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Like the house cat that returns to the wild state when it leaves the house, chemists can go feral when they get out into the world.  The process begins the morning after graduation from college.  No exams to study for, no lab writeups to hand in. Being enrolled in coursework has a kind of edifying effect; a kind of regimentation that keeps one true to the discipline.

Human behaviour resembles a gas in some ways- we expand to occupy the space available to us. If bench space is available, we’ll find something to put on it. If condensers are in abundance, we’ll find a way to hook them up to something. If other distractions are available, our consciousness will expand into that space.

Some chemists quit learning after graduation.  They lose their gusto for the subject.  They acquired their bag of tricks in grad school and are quite content to stick with those tools for the duration of their careers. They become an intellectual couch potato- a 9 to 5 technocrat. Some companies are unaware of the value of professional interaction and refresher coursework.  Other companies just do not care.

A wise chemist once told me that the worst thing you could do in your career was to be a chemist in a company where chemistry was not the main activity. He was an IBM chemist and he spoke from bitter experience.

One of the most valuable assets of a scientist is curiosity and keeping it well honed is crucial.  Industry can bleed you of all of your professional enthusiasm if you let it.  Or, it can tempt you to go to the dark side- the business end.  Industry can exhaust you with endless administrative requirements and supervisory duties.  Insane deadlines and fickle management can bind you to seemingly impossible projects like a modern Sisyphus.  You’ll wear leg irons bearing the letters SAP, and speak in tongues- TSCA, MSDS, ROI, and CYA.

Through the years, unopened journals stack up on the floor. You can’t remember what an ACS meeting was like.  The paper in your college textbooks begins to yellow, and you become aware of your prostate. 

But the feral chemist has to resist. You have to rage against the stupifying isolation and indifference. It is important to periodically experience that rush of adrenaline that you get when some new concept opens before your eyes.  Open a journal and don’t set it down until you learn something new!

On Getting Screwed. Gausslings 3rd Epistle to the Bohemians.

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At some point in you career, you’re going to get screwed. Either by an organization, a person, a cabal, or some dark force. It’s going to happen so you should give some thought as to how you’ll behave.  But what do I mean by “getting screwed”?

Getting screwed means that you’re career has taken some kind of a hit as the result of an aggressive or destructive act. Your reputation has been besmurched or soiled in a way to cause harm, or some damage has come to your credibility as the result of the posturing of another player.  Screwings as a result of your own stupid behaviour are self-imposed and are not addressed here.

To use the naval metaphor, a hit can happen above or below the waterline.  A hit above the waterline may be survivable, but one below the waterline means that you’re gonna sink. No matter what, you’re going to take some hits. The goal is to minimize the hits below the waterline.

When I was teaching, my rule of thumb was that about 10 % of the class will hate your guts no matter what, about 10 % will love you no matter what, and the 80 % in the middle were undecided. Turns out this may be generally true in polite society.  Call it the 10:80:10 Rule.  (Minimally, it is a comfortable illusion that I cling to… )

Nobody is universally loved; not Lassie, the Virgin Mary, or even Col. Sanders. In fact, the goal really shouldn’t be to find universal love and adoration. The goal should be to earn as much respect as you can.  It is possible for people to dislike you, but simultaneously respect you. That is probably as much as you can expect. Pay special attention to people who dislike you. You may learn something important about youself.

Whoever said “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” was a true seer and this should always be considered, distasteful as it may be.

Office politics are ubiquitous and you should learn to master it.  Put two people in a room and you have politics. There will always be competing interests and ego. Always. Pretending to be apolitical is just another form of politics- the politics of victimhood.  Your political stance should always include- BE HONEST, GENEROUS, and FAIR. This is a type of politics- don’t be shy in using it.

Always be honest. It is too hard to remember all of the intertwining lies and subterfuge.  Always seek the best for the company and your colleagues. Be fair and generous with credit for contributions to a project.  The politics of earnestness is hard to beat. Remember, you cannot fall off the floor.

If your career is being sabotaged, address it in a straighforward and open manner. To respond in kind is to abandon all hope of fair treatment later. It is always better to be guilty of being honest.

If you find yourself working with insufferable SOB’s who participate in fatal office politics, still, try to be fair and upbeat. It is better to have lost a position and be given the chance to move on than to sink to petty and crude behaviour.