Category Archives: Chemistry

BS, MS, or PhD in Applied Chemical Science

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Perhaps one solution to the problem of excess chemistry PhD production by our institutions is to take a step away from the path of pure scholarship into the applied sciences. That is, a chemistry program wherein chemical science is integrated with economics and business.  The goal is to support the industrial part of our civilization with scientifically educated people who desire to apply their knowledge to the industrial arts, i.e., manufacturing, sales, management, and distribution. 

I’m suggesting that chemical education could be split into two streams- scholarship and applied science- because that is where the grads go anyway.  Presently, the scholarly route supplies the entire supply of chemistry graduates.  I think there are several reasons for this. Faculty produce graduates along the manner in which they were schooled. Another reason  for this singular path is the effect of the ACS standardized curriculum.  Most chemistry departments struggle to maintain their ACS certification as a validation stamp for their program .  It also serves as a foil for deans who want to gut the chemistry budget because it is typically very costly.  The ACS program has basic requirements and that is that.

An applied science program would require a modification to the usual faculty profile. Instead of having a faculty of stellar Harvard , MIT, and Stanford graduates, the faculty would have a few from Dow, DuPont, Air Products, etc.

An applied chemical science program could include coursework on the manufacturing processes of petroleum feedstocks from crude oil to BTX, polyolefins, and maybe into some fine chemicals or extractive metallurgy.  It would cover the regulatory environment and give students familiarity with EPA and OSHA regulations as well as those regs governing transportation of hazardous goods. 

At some point there should be coursework in basic accounting, marketing, law, and finance. A business minor would be very useful.  A student should know how to calculate the manufacturing cost of a product based labor & overhead as well as the cost of raw materials.  There are many possibilities here to use real life examples. Y ou never know what will happen to a student once they understand how to get a product to market. The just might want to go do it themselves.

It is not inconceivable that a program along these outlines and with the right faculty could produce graduates who are inclined to do a startup. Once you know something about what is required to get a product out the door, it is natural to begin to dream about doing it yourself. 

American chemistry lacks a culture of strong entrepreneurship among chemists. This is not quite as true for chemical engineers, though. Chemists are afraid to start a company because they have not been exposed to much of the business environment because they are partitioned in the lab. They do not know what the issues are or how to attract resources to get the thing started.

I was on the phone with a professor the other day who has $$ in his eyes. He has a customer who wants x kg of his compound and he thinks that he is going to staff a small production campaign with students in a rental space. He admitted he had no idea of what is required once you have employees doing hazardous activities. He had no idea of what workmans compensation insurance was. 

 His business model was simply a larger version of his research lab. The university would pay his students a stipend and he would have them laboring off campus making some stuff that is too nasty for use on campus.  It is much like gold fever.  Otherwise rational people become greedy and foolish when they think there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The over arching goal of an applied science degree program is to produce graduates who have a better understanding of our industrial culture and are prepared to strengthen it by a lifetime of effort in making better things for better living.  The future holds the inevitable confrontation with scarcity. We need a layer of educated industrialists who can help fashion a good life in the US with smarter manufacturing that can accomodate reduced energy and materials consumption.

Top chemistry professors get the idea

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A recent issue of C&EN (the Specialty Chemicals swimsuit issue, Vol 89, number 5) quotes several top research profs on the topic of the present glut of PhD’s.  Seems that these professors profess to actually grasp the job picture for recent and current grads.  Was there a flash of light or was there a visitor in the night who whispered the situation to them?  These folks have been benefitting from cheap, abundant, and enthusiastic labor to propel their research forward for decades and suddenly they claim to be paying attention to the job picture for their alums. Oh please!

In his column, Rudy Baum concludes that it isn’t so much that that we have too many PhD’s, but that we aren’t teaching them what they need to “succeed and benefit society.” 

OK. I can get on board with that. But it begs the question, who is going to teach them what they need to know, whatever that is? A bunch of academics who have spent their careers grooming students to be academics?  Are you kidding me? The status quo is not capable of adjusting curricula to make this change.  It isn’t in their bag of tricks. It is well beyond their experience.

Imagine trying to convince a group of faculty members of anything, much less that their past efforts are now obsolete?  Just imagine that happening. I can’t.

C&EN is the publicity organ of ACS. Imagine the handwringing and chafing that had to happen before these Polyanna’s came to publish such findings? The horror, the horror.

The university/research apparatus in the USA is the principal system within which basic R&D gets done in this country. Resources by way of tax revenues are plowed into the university system to maintain the research effort. Corporations hire the graduates of this system and benefit from their education by way of invention and innovation.

IBM, Dow, GE, GM, etc, didn’t grow wealthy and successful in a vacuum. Their hires, many of which came from the US university/research infrastructure, brought their eduction to bear on the problems of market penetration faced by these companies.

These companies took advantage of the entire spectrum of American infrastructure available to them. They did not have to build roads, monitor public health, run power distribution lines, build hydroelectric dams, or fight wars on foreign soil themselves. That infrastructure was provided to them. Yet, these and other corporations are unhappy with operations in the USA and, rather than inventing a domestic solution, are happy to export their operations and magic.

Over time, university departments and institutions grow based on state and federal funding. Now, the system finds itself possibly with excess capacity. But who is going to admit it? Who is going to go along with American industry and admit that R&D is too expensive to do in the USA?

Part of the problem with the present dearth of scientific jobs is with the structure and imperatives of the publically owned corporation. Publically owned corporations are owned by absentee landlords. The owners, i.e., we who have 401(k)’s, are only interested in quarterly growth. Absentee landlords don’t want to throw cash at a new roof and an upgraded sewer line. They (we) insist on rapid growth in shareholder value. That imperative isn’t necessarily compatible with the organic growth of a business or a market. So, if outsourcing of R&D offshore will save money, then the CEO better do it. I think we need a new business model that isn’t so anxious to export our magic.

My libertarian friends will say that this is the natural result of market forces, as though whatever the market wants is good by definition. 

The market is like a stomach. It has no brain. It only wants one thing- more.

Is that automatically the only acceptable consequence? I don’t think so. We have civilization to buffer us from the extremes of reality. Those who advocate adherence to pure market logic are missing the point of civilization.

Cuppa Noodles

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Working late in the lab tonight. Listening to Music from the Hearts of Space on NPR. Couldn’t leave for supper so I had to break into my emergency cup-o-noodles for nourishment, such as it is.  Night is a good time to write reports and tumble deep into the dendritic recesses of the internet. Some companies won’t let you in the building after hours. I’m good as long as I don’t unchain the dragon and let her fly around.

Have to purify some inorganic stuff I made. It’s very problematic. The material has a large coefficient of expansion in the solid phase from room temp up to the mp. The solid mass tends to break the container if you’re not careful.  It’s a real pisser to make some moisture sensitive stuff only to have the jar or flask break on warming.  The earth’s atmosphere will have its way with my lovely anhydrous product and deliquesce it into a corrosive hellbroth.  Glovebags are useful, but not always the answer.  Deliquescent powders have a way of contaminating the interior surfaces of a glovebag, making it sticky like a empty bag of honey-baked ham.

I use glovebags from Aldrich and am less than happy with them. The ziplock fastener always fails after just a few uses no matter how gently I use it.  I’m pretty sure the check we send to SAF for the bags always clears the bank and the funds remain negotiable until they need it. 

And speaking of SAF, I have received many bottles of reagents lately that are absent the usual physical properties printed on the label. You know,  like MW, density, etc. And what print there might be is absolutely microscopic. C”mon guys.

Sharpless dihydroxylation technology now off patent

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I noticed that a number of the Sharpless US patents for dihydroxylation processes would appear to be expired. For example, US 5126494, US 4965364, US 5227543, US 5260461, US 4871855, etc. 

I wonder how useful this chemistry is today? It was a minor sensation back when I was in grad school.  Of course, grad students and profs didn’t worry about patent coverage then.

Carbonate Fusions

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I’ve been reading about extractive metallurgy in my spare time for the last 18 months. Finally I get to try it. The other day I rediscovered the solvent power of molten sodium carbonate. At 1000 C it dissolves porcelain crucibles. Luckily an hour at 1000 C wasn’t enough for a catastrophic failure, just some melt through on the bottom.

Somehow, seeing your reaction vessel glowing yellow-orange (on purpose) is deeply satisfying and awe inspiring.

At these temperatures, the notion of acidic and basic conditions needs to be recalibrated for low temperature chemists like me. Irrespective of the crucible, I did digest my sample and convert it into a yellowish meteorite shaped like a flattened cupcake.

Carbonate fusions are used to release metals from silicate matrices. Molten carbonate hydrolyzes the silicate matrix and renders the resulting mass amenable to attack and dissolution by mineral acids.  Platinum is the preferred crucible material of construction.  I have such a Pt crucible. It’s beautiful.

On the pitfalls of science outreach to the public

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There was a time when I cared about spreading the gospel of the periodic table. I was a believer in the inherent good of knowledge and in chemistry in particular.  I knew in my heart that the examined life was a good life and that knowledge of chemical phenomena could enrich ones life greatly. And for me it has for the most part.

I flamed out a few years ago in the public outreach of science. I was involved in an organization that had some astronomy equipment that was available for public use.  I was enthusiastic about science and gave a lively talk that was often well received by members of the public. I had been an astronomy hobbiest since I was a boy.

But over time, I began to see that a sizeable fraction of people weren’t really too interested at all. Parents there with their kids usually just sat there waiting for it to be over.  The kids, usually boys, wanted to hear about black holes. In fact, we could have gone “All Black Holes All the Time” and could have kept the attendance up. All people wanted to hear about was black holes and aliens, it seemed. On occasion there would be some interest in eclipse phenomena. But how fascinating can a shadow be, anyway? It’s just a shadow people. Let’s move on.

Being bored with black hole talk (or my superficial understanding of them) I began to talk about matter and how it seems to have come about. I read about nucleosynthesis and stellar novae phenomena. I read about the insanely energetic Wolf-Rayet stars and tried to introduce the matter side of things.  People would politely sit and listen for a while, but eventually the squirming kids would blurt out a request to hear about black holes.  So,  I would relent and give the canned spiel.  Nobody was interested in hearing about matter. I was on a fools errand.

Space science people and astronomers would come by now and then and speak about star stuff to the community during an open-house. I became increasingly impatient with this and began to ask questions about the star stuff. What the hell is it? What do you mean when you use the word “ice”. 

I finally realized two things. That I’m not an amateur astronomer and I have no interest whatever in being one. And I was bone-weary of the public.  I was not indifferent to the public. Rather, I was annoyed by the public and had no business standing in front of them trying to sell science because, in the end, I just didn’t care if they got it.

Why was I annoyed? Because they didn’t want to work for their insights. They just wanted to pick through it like a box at the flea market. Screw ’em, I thought. The ones who go home and continue their search will eventually get the prize. That I could respect. The rest are out of luck.

I realized that as a PhD scientist I was a member of a small group of actual freaks who were set well apart from the rest of the bell curve in at least one regard. The willingness to dive into deep and prolonged study on really basic concepts and phenomena. I imagine a similar situation for a sculptor facing a block of marble. The answer is in there, but you have to work to bring it out.

All this being said, what about chemistry?  I have done some classic demonstrations for the public. People like watching flash-bang demo’s or other fairly superficial displays. But what everybody wants to see is razzmatazz. The underlying principles are where the deep and meaningful beauty is. But this is to be enjoyed by the few who are willing to hike deep into the bush for a glimpse of it.   I can’t say for the life of me if my talks and demos made a whit of difference to anyone beyond simple entertainment.

Fact is, society doesn’t need a lot of actual scientists at any given time.  It doesn’t even need too many to be even moderately educated in science.  But we do need to provide opportunity for some to learn and grow in scientific concepts. I’m inclined to think that those who show a natural interest in science are the ones we should take care to educate and cultivate. Most people can lead a perfectly happy life without knowing the work of Newton or Einstein, Seaborg or Woodward. For most of human history, this has been the case. Yet we got to the moon and developed the microprocessor.

The real motivation behind broad science education is in the matter of public funding. We need public funding to support the scientific culture. The public needs to feel that it is important to justify the expenditure. So, to keep up appearances, we beat the drum.

anti-IYC 2011

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So, what does it mean to have an International Year of Chemistry?  What should it properly celebrate or advance?

I think we chemists have a bit of a professional inferiority complex. The physicists have control over astronomy and space science with its endless pageant of high profile activities and imagery. Glamor-boy physicists have numerous programs on cable channels. Any synthetic utterance of Steven Hawking turns into a documentary.  Medical science people are glorified to embarrassing levels for the most slender blips of therapeutic progress.  Begoggled chemists do flash-bang demonstrations for whomever will watch.

Who will love us for the gift of cheap and abundant synthetic goods? Who will love and adore us for our facility with bond making and breaking?  How many times has the product of your long endeavor been little more than a clear, colorless oil or a white crystalline solid?  Besides you, who could boggle at this? Who will stop and take in a lingering look and shake their head in admiration and wonderment?

I think chemists should clam up about what it is that makes our field so endlesslly fascinating.  We should resist the urge to share the wonder with the world. We should be stingy with the insights and the beauty.  Call it “The Craft” and make it a mystery.  Create scarcity and let the world pay a premium for us to divulge our hard won wisdom.  If we want to create a buzz, then why not try to be quiet about it?  The world adores a mystery.