Category Archives: Uncategorized

WTF? Die to Abolish CRT?

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So #45 is at his incitement game again. He asked spectators in a rally in South Carolina recently to be willing to die to abolish critical race theory, CRT. He said, “The fate of any nation ultimately depends upon the willingness of its citizens to lay down, and they must do this, lay down their very lives to defend their country …”, and then he said, “If we allow the Marxists, and communists, and socialists to hate America, there will be no one left to defend our flag or to protect our great country or its freedom …”.

Wow! Marxists and communists? In the USA? Really? An old bogeyman has resurfaced from the cold war days and has come to plague the hearts and minds of unsuspecting innocents going about their business. The horror! The horror!

When he says “to die”, what exactly does that mean? This can easily imply some kind of participation in violence. Does he mean to participate in a struggle to physically attack school board members who do not acquiesce to or even understand their demands? At what point should an opponent and a proponent of CRT fight to the death? With his usual cageyness, #45 leaves these details for individuals to sort out and suffer the legal consequences in his name.

The great and powerful Oz clearly hopes that fear and anger from the phony threat of CRT will translate into votes and political contributions. Fearmongering has been a conservative strategy for decades. And it works! Remember how Reagan turned the word ‘liberal’ into an epithet? Americans of a certain mindset will reliably continue to eat it up with a spoon. How disappointing it is to see so many countrymen be so gullible and persuaded by such transparent manipulation.

Will Russian Sanctions Work?

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It remains to be seen if the economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the west will have even a smidgen of effect on Putin. Western sanctions on the USSR had substantial effect on the Soviet people back in the cold war days, but the leadership of the USSR lasted for a very long time in this condition. It is naive of us to think that it will be any different with the Putin regime. Look at Iran and North Korea. They have lived under extreme sanctions for a very long time while under the tight control of their leadership and even have developed or will develop nuclear weapons.

One difference today in Russia is the relatively large middle class. They are accustomed to a lifestyle where goods and services are abundant. The smack down of the Russian economy will adversely affect them. But will it make a difference in Putin’s autocratic behavior? In the past, Putin’s response to dissent has been to crack down using the police and security services to enforce draconian law. Putin does not report to the Russian people. Like the old story of boiling the frog, he has cannily built a tight power structure around himself over time.

Will pinching the finances of the oligarchs make the difference? There is already talk of them turning to block chain schemes to park their money. Sanctions mean that money will begin to flow elsewhere. It seems doubtful that Putin would have allowed this kind of Achilles Heel of a powerful class to exist. Some think that the oligarchs report to Putin and not the other way around.

One beneficiary of this situation is thought to be China. It surely hasn’t gone unnoticed in China that the disconnection of western business will provide a great many business opportunities in Russia as well as an expansion of their sphere of influence. All we can do is to watch it unfold.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will bring negatives to his regime. Whether it will bring him down seems unlikely. Historical precedence does not give much hope to the idea that Putin will have a ‘come to Jesus’ moment and cause him to relent.

Russia’s status as a nuclear power worries everyone, of course. Adherence to the strategic doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) between nuclear states has limited warfare to the use of conventional arms for generations. It has been the doctrine of the US to incorporate a fire break between the use of conventional and nuclear arms. Whether this is true for Russia is unclear. They may see nuclear arms as part of a normal escalation in force. This would be most unfortunate if true. How the west would respond to the release of nuclear weapons in Ukraine or against other states of the former Soviet Union is also unclear, but there are surely contingency plans for this eventuality somewhere in the pentagon. I hope.

The unifying affect on the west in responding to Putin’s aggression is encouraging but it may not be enough to stop Putin from further invasions. Let us hope that this madman can be contained.

American Devolution

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It used to be that I couldn’t understand how the Nazis came into power with Hitler appointed as chancellor of Germany in 1933 and how in the ensuing years the German people could support the foul rhetoric and authoritarian nature of the Nazi Party. What kind of mindset did people have then? Now it’s not such a mystery. History isn’t repeating itself exactly, but there is a definite rhyme to it.

Donny and Vlad

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Yet another mournful lamentation on Putin and Trump.

Yesterday, 2/22/22, Trump had words of praise for Putin’s move into Ukraine with “peace keeping” forces. He used the word “savvy” in his praise of the tactic. This is in addition to his spoken admiration of Putin in past years. But he also said that if he were in office this wouldn’t have happened. Trump’s acolyte, Tucker Carlson, seems to be issuing forth the same kind of spew. So, what is Trump really saying?

During Trump’s term he proved to be cool on NATO and America’s place in it. So much so that he spooked EU countries. By most accounts, he had little if any recognizable foreign policy and left a great many important posts unfilled in the State Department. Foreign affairs just didn’t capture his interest. Yet, he says he could have prevented Putin’s invasion if he hadn’t been cheated out of the presidency. I guess the invasion is maybe the fault of Biden supporters.

I have come think of Trump as a wannabe despot who admires Putin the despot (and others) as one professional may admire the work of another. Putin as leader is accustomed to having considerable control of Russia. Trump was in control of numerous private companies and thus not accountable to public shareholders. Both characters are used to the exercise of unquestioned power. Maybe it’s not surprising that there is mutual admiration.

Will Trump followers be disappointed by his open admiration of Putin? It seems doubtful. His supporters have an evangelical zeal for the man. A great many of his followers are conservative evangelical Christians who believe that Trump’s appearance on the scene meshes with their end-times theology. His appearance is related to the beginning of the apocalypse of prophesy. These supporters believe that the man is here due to supernatural forces that must play out and cannot be dissuaded.

If this is your belief, then it must be comforting for you. For the rest of us, it is an incoherent and destructive kind of nonsense. How can it be that the same religion that preaches love and gave us the Beatitudes would also give us a leader the likes of the ethically disabled Trump. Somehow the creator of the universe, the one who set the galaxies spinning and knows the movements of every flea in the tail feathers of every sparrow, gave us a malignant narcissist like Trump. It is not a question shrouded in religious mystery. It is what it appears to be- absurd. Ambitious and destructive characters like Putin and Trump have appeared regularly throughout history. And through the lens of history we can make some good guesses as to what they can do. Both are threats to democratic civilization in their own way and must be contained.

As to the original question, what did Trump mean by his comments, I don’t know. He makes things up as he goes and lies profusely. I don’t think that even he knows what he means.

Witches in Church

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Wow. This video has just appeared on the internets. Not only is Tennessee pastor Greg Locke off his rocker, but listen to the crowd clap and cheer. The pastor seems ready to confront the accused witches in the congregation with a stream of bile, angry accusations and promises of divine retribution. These people are our family and neighbors who have fallen for a charismatic leader spewing nonsense.

Civilization is a millimeter thick. It seems to have worn completely through to the bone in Tennessee.

Locke is just one example, granted. What is especially alarming, though, is the enthusiasm with which the congregation receives this information absent any evidence. They seem thirsty for a mystical experience and to witness divine intervention. The preacher-man is very persuasive and could possibly inspire someone to commit an act of violence. This kind of intellectual frailty is another example of why church and state should remain separate at all levels.

When future historians view this pandemic

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Some historians in the future will focus on this time period and try to make sense of the social and political turmoil we’re now experiencing in this endemic of COVID-19. Many US citizens are in conflict with knowledgeable authorities who are trying to limit the spread of this viral disease. As of this writing the endemic has not yet fully played out.

There are several particularly good questions that must be investigated- How should we view a culture that can’t bring itself to cooperate internally in the prevention of a communicable disease that has so far caused more than 900,000 deaths? Would one expect that roughly 1/3 of the adult population in a highly advanced culture such as ours would refuse to cooperate with the most minor measures to prevent the spread of contagion? That is, wearing a light weight mask when around others. Standing apart just a little bit and washing your hands a little more. These are simple requests yet they appear to be outrageous forfeitures of liberties to many people in the USA.

What kind of civilization is this where an appreciable fraction of the citizens refuse to act in the direction of self-preservation of the population? When shouting about personal rights to not wear a mask or get vaccinated outweighs the rights of the majority to remain infection free?

As bad luck would have it, the endemic coincides with a far right wing-leaning conservative political movement in the USA. This crowd had issues with the government anyway. They are especially furious that experts within various health agencies have issued instructions and mandates on containment of the disease.

We might have thought it obvious that when presented with a highly infectious virus that is spread through the air, it would be in our self-interest to voluntarily control where infectious breath goes, dial back our movement a bit and increase interpersonal distances temporarily in order to avoid mass infection and mass casualties. One might also think that given the long and highly successful use of vaccines, volunteering to get a shot would seem reasonable and also be in our self-interest.

The US constitution is silent on personal freedoms in a time of contagion as it is on many other things. I interpret that as wiggle room to figure out solutions for the problems of our time that serve to further the cause of survival against a mindless but efficient virus.

One of the purposes of government has always been to protect ourselves from each other. What we’ve experienced when government has tried to intervene is loud hysteria and political pressure from an infectious vocal minority who are actually dying from COVID at a higher rate than the vaccinated public. Aggravating matters greatly, some of the opponents of masking and vaccination have very large commercial platforms from which to broadcast self-serving misinformation. It has been obvious for a long time that this is done to increase viewership and profit from the misinformed. Capitalist organizations are using their broadcasts to increase the bottom line on the backs of the volatile misinformed.

At the moment, it doesn’t look like persuasion with solid information will work with the anti crowd. Do the rest of us have to wait around until these folks, many of whom are fervent authoritarian Trump supporters, just live out their lives and die hoping that they don’t crash democracy along the way?

Is this really the direction that the American experiment goes? What kind of country are we? I thought that I had a good grasp of that. I was wrong.

For Students. Thoughts on Chemical Process Scale-Up.

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Chemical process scale-up is a product development activity where a chemical or physical transformation is transferred from the laboratory to another location where larger equipment is used to run the operation at a larger scale. That is, the chemistry advances to bigger pots and pans, commonly of metal construction and with non-scientists running the process. A common sequence of development for a fine chemical batch operation in a suitably equipped organization might go as follows: Lab, kilo lab, pilot plant, production scale. This is an idealized sequence that depends on the product and value.

Scale-up is where an optimized and validated chemical experimental procedure is taken out of the hands of R&D chemists and placed in the care of people who may adapt it to the specialized needs of large scale processing. There the scale-up folks may scale it up unchanged or more likely apply numerous tweaks to increase the space yield (kg product per liter of reaction mass), minimize the process time, minimize side products, and assure that the process will produce product on spec the first time with a maximum profit margin.

The path to full-scale processing depends on management policy as well. A highly risk-averse organization may make many runs at modest scale to assure quality and yield. Other organizations may allow the jump from lab bench to 50, 200, or more gallons, depending on safety and economic risk.

Process scale-up outside of the pharmaceutical industry is not a very standardized activity that is seamlessly transferable from one organization to another. Unit operations like heating, distillation, filtration, etc., are substantially the same everywhere. What differs is administration of this activity and the details of construction. Organizations have unique training programs, SOP’s, work instructions, and configurations of the physical plant. Even dead common equipment like a jacketed reactor will be plumbed into the plant and supplied with unique process controls, safety systems and heating/cooling capacity. A key element of scale-up is adjusting the process conditions to fit the constraints of the production equipment. Another element is to run just a few batches at full scale rather than many smaller scale reactions. Generally it costs only slightly more in manpower to run one large batch than a smaller batch, but will give a smaller cost per kilogram.

Every organization has a unique collection of equipment, utilities, product and process history, permits, market presence, and most critically, people. An organization is limited in a significant way by the abilities and experiences of the staff who can use the process equipment in a safe and profitable manner. Rest assured that every chemist, every R&D group, and every plant manager will have a bag of tricks they will turn to first to tackle a problem. Particular reagents, reaction parameters, solvents, or handling and analytical techniques will find favor for any group of workers. Some are fine examples of professional practice and are usually protected under trade secrecy. Other techniques may reveal themselves to be anecdotal and unfounded in reality. “It’s the way we’ve always done it” is a confounding attitude that may take firm hold of an organization. Be wary of anecdotal information. Define metrics and collect data.

Chemical plants perform particular chemical transformations or handle certain materials as the result of a business decision. A multi-purpose plant will have an equipment list that includes pots and pans of a variety of functions and sizes and be of general utility. The narrower the product list, the narrower the need for diverse equipment. A plant dedicated to just one or a few products will have a bare minimum of the most cost effective equipment for the process.

Scale-up is a challenging and very interesting activity that chemistry students rarely hear about in college. And there is little reason they should. While there is usually room in graduation requirements with the ACS standardized chemistry curriculum, industrial expertise among chemistry faculty is rare. A student’s academic years in chemistry are about the fundamentals of the 5 domains of the chemical sciences: Physical, inorganic, organic, analytical, and biochemistry. A chemistry degree is a credential stating that the holder is broadly educated in the field and is hopefully qualified to hold an entry level position in an organization. A business minor would be a good thing.

The business of running reactions at a larger scale puts the chemist in contact with the engineering profession and with the chemical supply chain universe. Scale-up activity involves the execution of reaction chemistry in larger scale equipment, greater energy inputs/outputs, and the application of engineering expertise. Working with chemical engineers is a fascinating experience. Pay close attention to them.

Who do you call if you want 5 kg or 5 metric tons of a starting material? Companies will have supply chain managers who will search for the chemicals with the specifications you define. Scale-up chemists may be involved in sourcing to some extent. Foremost, raw material specifications must be nailed down. Helpful would be some idea of the sensitivity of a process to impurities in the raw material. You can’t just wave your hand and specify 99.9 % purity. Wouldn’t that be nice. There is such a thing as excess purity and you’ll pay a premium for it. For the best price you have to determine what is the lowest purity that is tolerable. If it is only solvent residue, that may be simpler. But if there are side products or other contaminants you must decide whether or not they will be carried along in your process. Once you pick a supplier, you may be stuck with them for a very long time.

Finally, remember that the most important reaction in all of chemistry is the one where you turn chemicals into money. That is always the imperative.

Chemical safety as social science

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Chemical manufacturing safety is challenging to oversee consistently over time. A given manufacturing facility has many kinds of hazards, some common and some specific to plant activity. Specialized operations will produce hazards that manifest in ways ranging from obvious to obscure to counterintuitive. For those tasked with keeping operations free from injuries and mishaps, the hard part may be to keep everyone vigilant constantly.

I often compare safe practices to the handling of a rattle snake. Every time you pick up that snake, you have to be just as careful as the last time. Over time you may learn to predict or anticipate threatening snake behaviors, but you do not get to bank safety credits for past cautious behavior. Furthermore, it is necessary for you to change some of your basic behaviors around the rattler. For instance, you may want to alter your posture when standing near the snake so, if you lose your balance, you fall away from the snake, not onto it. Or, you may decide to bring the snake out only when there is not a crowd around you for fear of spooking the animal. A wrangler can cite many techniques to adopt when handling this venomous creature.

My views of safety policy and practices have evolved over time. In the academic and industrial lab facilities I have worked, safety policy varied from “don’t get hurt” to academic departmental policies with the unofficial “for god sakes don’t let a student get hurt” to highly professional facilities using “we reserve the right to dismiss you” if your accident involved a violation of policy. In these chemistry jobs I have functioned as a dairy processing lab chemist, student assistant, grad student, postdoc, assistant professor, chemical sales manager, senior scientist and process safety chemist. There has been some variety.

What allowed my successful navigation through these experiences with body parts intact? Skill from good training and a large shot of luck. And having been cautious by nature when it comes to hazardous energy and chemical hygiene doesn’t hurt.

In my estimation there is a large social/psychological component to safety anywhere. Safe operations in a chemical plant requires an alignment of behaviors that lead away from mishaps due to all manner of influences, predictable or otherwise. To oversee safety at a facility, one must use facts and the power of persuasion to convince people to behave in ways that might seem needless or unnatural. There is a large social component to safety. That said, the threat of dismissal doesn’t hurt.

In a US chemical plant, operational staff commonly undergo safety training on hiring and refresher training thereafter on a periodic basis. If an adverse event happens relevant staff may undergo a refresher training session as policy dictates. The range of safety topics will depend on the kind of activity happening at the facility.  Safety training has the goal of bringing and keeping staff up to par on recognition and prevention of some kind of undesired event that plays out as a near miss or an incident.

A core subject in chemical manufacturing facility is the matter of hazardous energy. Hazardous energy is manifested in numerous ways: High pressure, high temperature, electrostatic, rapid or runaway heat of reaction, compressed springs and energy of motion. Hazardous energy can emerge from the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Dangers emerging from “ordinary” hazards, i.e., the hazards everyone is accustomed to, can perhaps be most vexing. How does one convince people not to become complacent with familiar hazards, particularly those of low frequency high consequence?

Frequent training and thorough root cause analysis of actual incidents is probably the best approach to suppressing complacency. One need look no further than the military for an example. Military personnel undergo frequent training with an emphasis on situational awareness. A particular strength is the existence of protocols for many exigencies and the mandatory adherence to that protocol. The obvious problem of the military approach to training is that it is not aimed at producing material goods for a competitive market. Businesses cannot afford to lavish much downtime to training. Civilian safety training in business is conducted but at nothing like the frequency or scale that the military uses to maintain readiness.

A useful tool available to industrial safety is layer of protection analysis (LOP). There are companies that offer custom LOP services/instruction and outside assistance is often a good thing. Other resources exist as well. There are two kinds of layers- administrative and engineering. Administrative layers of protection include the process instruction document, various SOPs and work instructions, training as well as eyes-on active management. Engineering layers of protection refers to the equipment which protects against the effects of an excursion.  Each layer will have empty spaces where they are not protective. The idea is to lay down layers where the empty spaces do not overlap. Most would agree that engineering LOP are preferred over administrative LOP.

The terms “dangerous” and “hazardous” are often used interchangeably. I would argue that the word danger be reserved for the situation when all of the layers of protection around a hazard have been removed. This is an important distinction because our lives are filled with hazards that don’t fill us with dread fear. We tolerate this only because we contain hazards with layers of protection which prevent the consequences of the hazard. In order to keep working in an industrial setting, we all must come to terms with the contained hazards on site. Workers predisposed to chemophobia must become comfortable with the LOP in place, yet remain vigilant for uncontained hazards. The alternative for them is to work elsewhere.

Incidents should be followed closely by a Root Cause Analysis, RCA. There should be an SOP that specifies this action. With any luck, an expert conversation in the subject matter at hand will spark the insight of someone leading to the identification of failure modes related to the incident. The RCA will identify which dominoes fell in the event and will highlight the weak points and hopefully find the initiating event. Finding the incident initiating event is always a goal.

It is important to evaluate the existing LOP after the RCA and every effort should be made use the event to strengthen systems. The notion of LOP should be present early in the process of writing instructions for the manufacture of materials. Each batch or process instruction document should be critically evaluated and signed off by a variety of experienced people. This would include R&D chemists, chemists and engineers involved in process scaleup, Environmental, Health and Safety, production supervisors and plant managers. All can be reminded to evaluate the production document with LOPA in mind.

Inevitably, incidents and near misses stemming from unanticipated failure modes will occur. To provide added protection against the unexpected, imaginations need to be stimulated by conducting a PHA- Process Hazard Analysis. This must be done before a process is begun. It is a formal brainstorming session conducted by a committee of subject matter experts evaluating every step in a chemical process at the production scale for possible failure scenarios. These will be chemical, mechanical or safety systems related. In the PHA you ask the question: What happens if this component or action fails in the process? It is a detailed what-if map of the failure or event with potential consequences. Each potential consequence must be evaluated for risk and harm. Software is available to help people guide themselves through the process.

Finally, it should be noted that once the incident investigation is complete, learnings from the event should be applied going forward and archived where the results can be readily found.

Orphan Wells

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Recent news tells of the federal government’s intent to spend $1.15 billion to cap orphan gas and oil wells in 26 states. For its part, the American Petroleum Institute issued a statement “We welcome the administration’s efforts to address orphaned wells,” said the API spokesperson. I should hope so.

My question is, what kind of person/organization would walk away from a gas/oil well that isn’t capped? It seems like there should already be structure in place to prevent or remedy this. Leaving behind open wells that could be venting hazardous natural gas should be defined as willful negligence and subject to criminal penalties for the company officers. This behavior is an affront to those of us in the chemical industry who strive to comply with good operating practices and environmental compliance 24/7/365.

Learnings from a career in chemistry.

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I will be retiring from industrial chemistry in early 2023. Retirement has snuck up on me, to be honest. I suppose like most 64 year-olds I have trouble recognizing myself in the mirror. The joys and battle scars from my youthful early career are still fresh in my memory even as I turn the corner into the doddering years. I still recall most of the sights and smells and people in the years leading up to the present. I was lucky to meet many good people and unlucky enough to encounter a few problematic jerks. One of my earliest lessons was that not every scientist is one of your brethren. Science contains a bell curve of people- skewed to the good side for the most part, but there are always toxic characters around seemingly bent on making life difficult.

My entry into chemistry was a bit of an accident. I entered college as a physics major and Air Force ROTC minor at the age of 22. Naively I thought that my freshly issued pilots license and an intended physics degree would grease the skids into a flying career in USAF. Boy was I wrong. If anything there was palpable contempt for the pilots certificate. The curious attitude was if you didn’t learn to fly in the USAF then you weren’t shit. Turns out that I was also nearsighted so I was automatically disqualified from a pilot slot. My view in turn became that if you can’t fly jets why be in the USAF?

I took freshman chemistry in the summer for the physics major, then in the fall of my freshman year I started organic chemistry just out of curiosity. I was always puzzled about how drugs work and organic chemistry seemed to be the key. It turned out that organic chemistry was uniquely suitable for my type of ape brain. Soon I switched to a chemistry major and out of ROTC and never looked back at the smoldering crater of my flying career. That said, airplanes are still a passion of mine.

From this end of my career I can look back and see some mistakes I made in the past. First, while I chose a good PhD advisor, I may have aimed too low for the postdoc. It limited my opportunities for a better academic career. Always aim high.

I had a succession of four (count ’em) 1-year sabbatical replacement jobs before I got a tenure track slot at a small midwestern college (with an NMR). One year into my tenure track academic position I drove my career straight into a tree by having an escalating argument with the tenured chemistry department chair. After a long and successful career before my arrival, he tragically became a drunk and a failure in the classroom, he came to treat department faculty with disrespect and was an autocrat. All of this was well known in the department. My mistake in handling the personality conflict was to push a little too hard for near term change in department norms rather than playing the long game by waiting for his retirement. Unfortunately there was no support from the Dean despite the chair’s history of bad behavior. Seeing no help from admin, at Christmas break of the second year I took the first industry job offer I got and left the college. There was no hope for a new contract. I consider this episode to be my fault entirely for not being savvy enough to play the politics right. It was a mistake I would not make again. Oh yes, he died a year after I left.

Lesson No. 1. Learn to engage in politics calmly and ethically. Be patient and smart about it. Abstaining entirely from politics is the politics of victimhood. Like the old saying goes, if you put two people in a room you have politics. If it’s going to happen anyway, you may as well be good at it.

Believing that my teaching resume was fatally disfigured by this absurd episode, I resolved to move into industry. I joined a startup company that was bringing out new technology for commodity-scale polylactic acid (PLA). I was hired to find new catalysts for the cyclodimerization of lactic acid to lactide (the monomer) and comonomers that would lower the glass transition temperature of PLA. PLA homopolymer has a high glass transition temperature that leads to brittleness under ambient conditions. It was a great job and I took a fancy to polymer chemistry. Unfortunately, 11 months after I joined the company folded and I was on the street. Bringing a new polymer into the market at the commodity scale requires a powerful position in the polymer market which we didn’t have. Worse, we had persistent problems with low molecular weight as the money was running out.

Lesson No. 2. Beware the siren song of startup companies. They often fail.

Losing an academic job and an industrial one in a short interval had me eating a big slice of humble pie. These were dark times. In order to feed the family I took a job as an apprentice electrician working commercial construction sites. I had a good boss and the work was interesting. This phase lasted 6 months.

Not wanting to move across the country again I looked for a local job as a PhD chemist. They were scarce. Passing by pharmaceuticals, I took a risk and got a job in chemical sales at a small local chemical plant. Initially I assumed that my career as a scientist was over. As it turned out, that wasn’t true. Most of the chemistry there was multistep organic synthesis so I fit right in. This job would put my chemistry education to use in ways I hadn’t anticipated. We had diverse customers scattered across the world and marketing and customer sales and service required more than just a conversant level of chemistry knowledge in this small market. Very often being able to speak with equal confidence to both scientists and purchasing managers was a necessary skill in making the sale. And the job required some travel to far flung locations which was very stimulating.

Lesson 3. Don’t assume that your career should look like your dissertation project. Be open to possibilities.

Along the lines of Lesson 3, it is worth mentioning that in the course of a chemistry career the chemist might run into the choice of remaining in the lab or transitioning into the business end. The chemical industry requires some business leaders to have a knowledge of chemistry. This should be obvious. The problem is that relatively few chemists enter the job market with solid business credentials. By contrast, chemical engineers evolve their careers by solving chemical manufacturing problems and designing projects within very tight economic constraints. Whereas chemical scientists have a world view that mainly has two axes- space and time- engineers see the world in terms of 3 axes- space, time, and economics. Engineers are trained to bring capital projects in on time and within budget. This facility with projects and economics provides for the facile promotion of engineers to top management positions. My observation is that lab chemists without training in business generally seem to have less career buoyancy than engineers within chemical organizations. Of course there are exceptions. An MBA for a chemist can have real value in upward mobility and lifetime earnings. I’ve seen it happen numerous times.

Lesson 4. The world of chemical business is very interesting and challenging. Give it some consideration.

One way to migrate from the lab to an executive level for a chemist is to become a chief technology officer. This can be a very consequential position in an organization bearing a heavy load of responsibilities. Executive level chemistry jobs can take you into the thin air of business development and the chance to work with a large assortment of executives and managers from other organizations. It is worth aspiring to.

Lesson 5. Polymer chemistry is very interesting. For all you small molecule people out there, try it. You might like it.

But with all of this said, my view now is that I should have tried harder for a flying job in the airlines.