En termes de services, les BU ont édité une plaquette "Enseignants-chercheurs, la BU vous accompagne" qui récapitule l'ensemble des services à destination des enseignants-chercheurs.
Vous pouvez la télécharger ci-dessous :
Parmi ces services, les bibliothécaires des différentes BU sont à votre disposition pour vous former en laboratoire, à la demande, sur les thèmes suivants :
Plus d'infos en consultant notre programme de formation à télécharger ci-dessous, et pensez à consulter notre programme de formation en ateliers.
Des formations sont aussi proposées sur l'open access (contact : archiveouverte@univ-amu.fr) ou sur les données de la recherche (caroline-sophie.donati@univ-amu.fr)
Chemistry Conferences est un site de conférences en chimie de Reto Mueller, éditeur également du site Organic Chemistry Portal.
Blog d'une des premiers bloggueur chimiste, Derek Lowe, sur l'industrie pharmaceutique
Projet porté par l'Université de Bristol associant des photos d'objets familiers avec la représentation des molécules qu'elles contiennent.
Blog de rédacteurs de "Nature " spécialisés sur la chimie.
Editor’s note: following on from their previous groundbreaking publication on this blog – in which they provided a comprehensive overview of chemical-free consumer products – Drs Goldberg and Chemjobber submitted another manuscript to Nature Chemistry. Despite being summarily rejected by the editor, many (many) months later – and in the wake of some poetic exchanges on Twitter – the manuscript (and cover letter) are now both posted here on the blog with the permission of the authors. In the spirit of the Christmas papers published by the BMJ, consider this (tongue-in-cheek?) comment on synthetic chemistry by Alex and CJ a holiday-season gift to our readers!
––––––––––––––––––––
An expeditious and parsimonious approach to strychnine
Alexander F. G. Goldberg and C.J. Chemjobber
Throughout and following its structural elucidation1-5 strychnine has captured the imagination of synthetic chemists. Beginning with Woodward’s landmark total synthesis, reported in 1954 (ref. 6), this storied molecule has enabled chemists to showcase the state-of-the-art7,8. Advances in the field of organic synthesis over the following decades have culminated in a synthesis as short as six linear steps from commercial materials9. Indeed, each subsequent publication on this strychnine has been a reflection of the leading concepts of the time.
In this vein, we sought in our approach to limit the use of harmful reagents — and harmless reagents — and maximize step economy, atom economy10, redox economy11, word economy12, time economy13, graduate student economy14 and economy15.
Our efforts were initiated and concluded by obtaining commercially available strychnine as a light yellow powder from Sigma-Aldrich. Gratifyingly, all spectral data matched those reported in the literature, and the purity was found, fortuitously, to be as indicated by the vendor.
In summary, we are delighted to have obtained multi-gram quantities of strychnine in the shortest synthetic sequence to date from commercial materials. Future work will likely not be directed toward similar approaches to brucine, cinchonine, and erythropoietin.
Author contributions
A.F.G.G. and C.J.C. contributed equally to the experimental work.
Acknowledgements
We thank Sigma-Aldrich in advance for their sense of humour; A.F.G.G thanks Christine Hansplant for her patience in waiting for this acknowledgement for her contribution to our previous publication.
Affiliations
Stan’s Exchange Secondhand Store, Edmonton, AB.
Competing Financial Interests
A.F.G.G. is handily in the pockets of Big Strychnine.
References
1. Leuchs, H. Über Strychnon und Pseudo-strychnon als Nebenprodukte der Darstellung des Pseudo-strychnins und über weitere Versuche in dessen Reihe. (Teilweise mit Fritz Räck.) (über Strychnos-Alkaloide, 110. Mitteil.) Chem. Ber. 73, 731–739 (1940). [LINK]
2. Briggs, L. H., Openshaw, H. T. & Robinson, R. Strychnine and brucine. Part XLII. Constitution of the neo-series of bases and their oxidation products. J. Chem. Soc. 903 (1946). [LINK]
3. Robinson, R. The constitution of strychnine. Experientia 2, 28–29 (1946). [LINK]
4. Woodward, R. B., Brehm, W. J. & Nelson, A. L. The structure of strychnine J. Am. Chem. Soc. 69, 2250 (1947). [LINK]
5. Woodward, R. B. & Brehm, W. J. The Structure of Strychnine. Formulation of the Neo Bases J. Am. Chem. Soc. 70, 2107–2115 (1948). [LINK]
6. Woodward, R. B., Cava, M. P., Ollis, W. D., Hunger, A., Daeniker, H. U. & Schenker, K. The Total Synthesis of Strychnine. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 76, 4749–4751 (1954). [LINK]
7. Bonjoch, J. & Solé, D. Synthesis of Strychnine. Chem. Rev. 100, 3455–3482 (2000). [LINK]
8. Cannon, J. S. & Overman, L. E. Is There No End to the Total Syntheses of Strychnine? Lessons Learned in Strategy and Tactics in Total Synthesis. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 51, 4288–4311 (2012). [LINK]
9. Martin, D. B. C. & Vanderwal, C. D. A synthesis of strychnine by a longest linear sequence of six steps. Chem. Sci. 2, 649–651 (2011). [LINK]
10. Trost, B. M. Atom Economy—A Challenge for Organic Synthesis: Homogeneous Catalysis Leads the Way. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 34, 259–281 (1995). [LINK]
11. Burns, N.Z., Baran, P. S. & Hoffmann, R. W. Redox Economy in Organic Synthesis. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 48, 2854–2867 (2009). [LINK]
12. Goldberg, A. F. G. & Chemjobber, C. J. A comprehensive overview of chemical-free consumer products. The Sceptical Chymist. [LINK]
13. Hayashi, Y. & Ogasawara, S. Time Economical Synthesis of (–)-Oseltamivir. Org. Lett. 18, 3426–3429 (2016). [LINK]
14. (a) Wang, P., Dong, S., Brailsford, J. A., Iyer, K., Townsend, S. D., Zhang, Q., Hendrickson, R. C., Shieh, J., Moore, M. A. S., Danishefsky, S. J. At Last: Erythropoietin as a Single Glycoform. Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 51, 11576–11584 (2012) and references therein. [LINK] (b) Nicolaou, K. C., Heretsch, P., Nakamura, T., Rudo, A., Murata, M. Konoki, K. Synthesis and Biological Evaluation of QRSTUVWXYZA’ Domains of Maitotoxin. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 136, 16444–16451 (2014) and references therein. [LINK] (c) Aad, G. et al. (ATLAS Collaboration, CMS Collaboration) Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 191803 (2015). [LINK]
15. Newhouse, T., Baran, P. S. & Hoffmann, R. W. The economies of synthesis. Chem. Soc. Rev. 38, 3010–3021 (2009). [LINK]
––––––––––––––––––––
Cover letter
Dear Stu,
Please find attached our latest manuscript for your consideration for publication in Tetrahedron Letters or whatever it’s called, entitled “An Expeditious and Parsimonious Approach to Strychnine.” This scalable approach features a broadly-applicable method for accessing complex bioactive natural products, and adheres closely to the principles of green chemistry. For instance, our approach to strychnine was solvent-free and atom-economical, and all raw materials were obtained from renewable sources, which were fully incorporated into the final product. We trust that you will find that traditional green chemistry metrics such as atom economy, effective mass yield and E-factor are second to none.
Furthermore, the future of funding for basic research remains uncertain and subject to the whims of oft closed minded and myopic politicians. Pressing, therefore, is the need for cost-effective methods for obtaining important natural products, especially for the purposes of the biological studies which we all say we’re going to get around to.
Indeed, our zero-step synthesis of strychnine from commercially-available materials is a superb model for efficiency in synthetic chemistry. We are confident that the application of this method to other commercially available natural products will accelerate discovery in our own field, as well as in the fields of chemical biology and analytical chemistry; as the 200th anniversary of strychnine’s isolation approaches, we consider this timely and unparalleled manuscript suitable for the broad scientific audience of your publication.
Thank you in advance for your consideration,
Alexander Goldberg & CJ Chemjobber
As students and postdocs worldwide gear up for the start of graduate school, a new postdoc, or the beginnings of a long (and often stressful) search for a permanent position, Markus Ribbe reflects on his career path in order to remind us that things often don’t go the way you expect — but that doesn’t mean that things can’t end up better than you could have imagined.
Nearly 20 years ago, I was sitting on a plane from Munich to John Wayne Airport in southern California. I was on my way to a postdoc position in the research group of Barbara Burgess at the University of California, Irvine. Other than being interested in Barbara’s line of research, I did not know what to expect from this new life far, far away from my small hometown in Bavaria — in fact, I had no idea where I was heading to. As a former weightlifter, I was certainly excited to move a lot closer to Venice Beach, the residency of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the undisputed mecca of my sport. However, my enthusiasm was mixed with trepidation that Irvine was just a ranch in an area with nothing but cattle, a fear supported by a friend’s internet research. Instead of a herd of cattle greeting me at the airport, it was an oversized statue of John Wayne — a former resident of Orange County. At this point, it seemed strange to me that an airport in southern California should be named after a movie star other than Arnold, and that this movie star even deserved a statue of that size. This reaction was probably natural for a clueless postdoc who just arrived with nothing else but a small, half-empty suitcase and very little knowledge about life in SoCal. Little did I know that the statue of John “the Duke” Wayne would have a major impact on my life and career many years later.
Top: Markus’s suitcase, Bottom: the John Wayne Statue at the airport in Orange County
In the first couple of years after my arrival, I quickly got used to the local lifestyle and, despite the limitation of my all-inclusive, three-word vocabulary (“cool” for something that was good, “stink” for something that was not so good, and “unbelievable” for something that I could not quite put my finger on), I was able to express myself well enough to get around without a problem. My research in Barbara’s lab went smoothly as well. I have fond memories of those long protein-purification days that gave me grams of air-sensitive nitrogenase proteins, the dark brown colors proving that those proteins were alive and well, the nerve-wrecking experience when we accidentally soaked the last piece of crystal that had taken two years to form in the wrong buffer — and the spirit-lifting moment when we found out that the crystal had survived the savage treatment and diffracted well on the beamline. These dedicated days at work led to some good publications and, although life as a postdoc was somewhat monotonous, I started to realize that Irvine was a really cool place with lots of sunshine, great cultural diversity and a much livelier lifestyle than the quiet little town I grew up in. The fact that I met my future wife there, Yilin, who’d started her postdoc position in Barbara’s lab a bit later than I did, certainly helped me get truly comfortable in SoCal.
Things took an unexpected turn, however, when Barbara tragically took her own life. This really affected us, and apart from the personal implications of her sudden disappearance, life became harder, and the future seemed uncertain. Then, one day, out of the blue, Jerry Manning, our department chair at that time, came and asked me if I would be interested in applying for my own NIH grant with support from the school in order to continue doing research on nitrogenase. Affected by the unmatched positive personality of Jerry — the coolest chair one could ever ask for — I responded: “Sure! How difficult can it be to get an R01?” My reaction at this point certainly proved that one of John Wayne’s famous lines, “life is tough, but it’s tougher if you’re stupid”, should be rephrased as “life is tough, but it’s much EASIER if you’re ignorant and stupid”. Had I known how tough it would be to get an R01 grant for a PI-less postdoc without a faculty position, I would have promptly looked for other opportunities.
Well, fueled by blind enthusiasm, I wrote my first R01 together with Yilin, submitted it to our study section in the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), and anxiously waited for the verdict. The reality started to sink in when we saw the score of our grant. Although the proposal received a rather decent score, it was sitting right on the funding line, and we would need to submit a revised proposal to improve the score. So we did. Twice. Several months passed by, the remaining funds of the late Barbara Burgess that had helped us through were exhausted, and our hopes for getting the grant funded became faint. We were seriously looking into other options and job opportunities, even overseas. Then, a dramatic turn of events changed our fate. On a typical sunny morning in SoCal, I received a phone call from our NIH program officer, Dr. Peter Preusch, who informed me that our proposal was funded by NIGMS. I must have annoyed Peter ever so slightly by repeatedly asking him if he was joking. Fifteen years later, this NIH-funded project on nitrogenase assembly is still the backbone of our research program, something that would not have been possible without the support of the good people on the NIH study section.
Life was good again now that we had our own funding to go on for a while, and the next step was to land a faculty position. Continuing in the theme of “ignorance is bliss”, I started to apply for tenure-track faculty positions in a number of universities, including some not-to-be-named top-tier schools. Naturally, I received response letters with comments like “we have to regretfully inform you that you are not in the circle of our elite candidates”. Unfazed by these setbacks, I continued to apply and was interviewed by several schools, riding on my motto that “the worst that can happen is they say no, but nothing will happen if you don’t try”. Then, a golden opportunity popped up when UC Irvine advertised for two assistant professor positions in biochemistry. I was ecstatic because both Yilin and I had grown more and more attached to SoCal, and getting these positions would allow us to stay in the area we loved. Things didn’t run smoothly, however, when I applied for the position at Irvine the first time around. I was only ranked third among all the candidates and, although the school intended to fill two positions, I was not offered the job even after the second candidate turned down the offer. The next year, the position was advertised again and, you guessed it, I applied again despite hearing discouraging comments like “do you really want to go through the embarrassment of getting turned down by the school again?” Learning from mistakes I made in the previous interviews, I focused my effort on convincing the Irvine people that they would not regret offering me the job. And they did, finally! Thinking back, persistence, opportunity and good people were the keys to my success in landing this job. My appointment in Irvine would not have solidified without the support of faculty members like Jerry Manning, Tom Lane and Tony James in our department.
From the time I was appointed as a faculty member in UC Irvine, I have had an incredible streak of good luck to work with Yilin, as well as outstanding graduate students Chi Chung, Aaron and Jared in the lab, and our great collaborators in the field. Their hard work has led to exciting discoveries, such as the reduction of carbon monoxide to hydrocarbons by nitrogenase and the radical-SAM dependent insertion of carbide into the center of the nitrogenase cofactor. Some of these stories were published in top-tier journals including Science and PNAS and caught the attention of several German universities. A series of events followed, with the aim to recruit me back to Germany. Suddenly, I found myself traveling frequently in the opposite direction of that when I came to the United States, and I quickly became a 1K member with the United Airlines.
The climax of these recruiting events was an offer for me to return to my home country as an Alexander von Humboldt Professor, one of the biggest scientific honors one could receive in Germany. The offer included a substantial start-up package and a number of house positions for scientists and staff at the host university. What was even more tempting for us was that it was combined with a tenured faculty position for Yilin. Attracted by this once-in-a-career opportunity, we were pretty much all set to move to Germany and were already looking for a house.
But then, unexpectedly, we had a sudden change of heart during one of the seal-the-deal trips between the two countries. Despite the charm of Germany, with each trip we found that more and more we looked forward to returning home in SoCal, and our frustration grew over the thought of moving somewhere far, far away from the place we had become attached to. Eventually, one day, arriving at the Orange County Airport from another trip to Germany, I stopped in front of John Wayne’s statue — basking in the sun with palm trees in the backdrop — and thought to myself “This is really cool! What are you doing, and why do you want to leave all this behind?” Something that looked strange to me 20 years ago felt really good all of a sudden, and, well, the rest is history. We traded an incredible offer from Germany for the lifestyle and career path in SoCal. We stayed and Yilin started a tenure-track faculty position in UC Irvine a few years ago. Work has been exciting in our labs, with a number of outstanding postdocs and graduate students continuing our traditional line of research on nitrogenase assembly and function and moving toward new directions of generating artificial iron-sulfur enzymes. Life is great here, and somehow I can’t help feeling that John Wayne has something to do with it.
Markus Ribbe is the Chancellor’s Professor in the Departments of Molecular Biology & Biochemistry and Chemistry at University of California, Irvine
Posted on behalf of Brett Thornton and Shawn Burdette. This blog post is an epilogue to the In Your Element (IYE) article on fermium.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
When exactly was fermium first created by humans? The date for fermium’s initial production is given in some sources as October 1952, while others claim November — both dates are given for the Ivy Mike nuclear weapons test, the first time humans created elements 99 and 100. The discrepancy apparently is because Enewetak Atoll, the site of the test, lies on the other side of the International Date Line from the United States. The Ivy Mike nuclear weapons test there occurred on 1 November 1952 local time, but 31 October 1952 in the U.S. mainland.
The Ivy Mike weapons test was the first thermonuclear device — or ‘hydrogen’ bomb — and this explosion injected large amounts of radioactive debris high into the atmosphere. In the stratosphere, this debris spread over the entire globe as fallout, which was no different than any other above-ground nuclear weapons test. (Concerns about fallout was a major impetus for the the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which banned all above-ground or above-water nuclear tests). Arkansas was one of the many places the fallout landed and, in 1952, someone there was watching the sky.
After the Ivy Mike test, initial studies had revealed that the fallout contained 244Pu, a previously unknown plutonium isotope with a relatively large number of neutrons compared to 238U, its likely source. Glenn Seaborg at the University of California Radiation Laboratory (UCRL) received a somewhat cryptic telegram informing him that the existence of 244Pu was classified, even if it was produced by unclassified means. The UCRL group had not produced 244Pu yet, but they knew it was possible now. Seaborg and his UCRL group were well-known as leaders in transuranium element research, having already helped with the discoveries of plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, and californium. If anyone stumbled across or created 244Pu besides the people analyzing nuclear weapon test fallout, the ‘top men’ at UCRL would be the first suspects on the list.
The knowledge that 244Pu existed, even if classified, was enough to get the UCRL group thinking. This probably meant that six neutrons had been almost instantaneously fused into the nucleus of 238U, much faster than was possible in a high-neutron flux reactor. This prompted UCRL researcher Albert Ghiorso to request samples of the Ivy Mike debris. Ghiorso wondered exactly how many neutrons might have been added. Was 244Pu the heaviest isotope in the debris or were much heavier isotopes also present? (ref. 1). Seaborg was skeptical that so many neutrons could be added to a uranium nucleus, but supported the work. This eventually led to the UCRL group finding elements 99 (ref. 2) and 100 in that fallout debris, as we describe in the fermium IYE essay.
Back in Arkansas, Paul (née Kazuo) Kuroda was interested in nuclear fallout. Kuroda was a Japanese radiochemist who had studied natural radioactive soruces in Japan. He emigrated to the United States in 1949, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota in analytical chemistry until 1952 when he received a faculty appointment at the University of Arkansas. At Arkansas, he returned to his previous interest in radioactivity by studying the local hot springs3. Soon after starting his independent career, Kuroda came across a quote from Edward Teller, one of the principal developers of the hydrogen bomb, stating that the ”radioactive and non-radioactive elements” (the fallout) left behind by a nuclear explosion could be studied to ”learn much about the bomb”.
The Teller quotes are found in Harold Urey’s 1952 book The Planets: Their Origin and Development. Teller was paralleling the isotopic signature in bomb fallout with the isotopic signature left by the creation of the solar system and Earth. Kuroda was puzzled that Urey’s book contained no follow-up on these ideas. Kuroda later wrote ”I therefore decided to initiate my own research project on radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests.” (ref. 4). In 1952, Kuroda only knew about the American atomic weapons tests in the Nevada desert, and assumed that any fallout in Arkansas came from these tests. Kuroda realized that the radioactive debris from large nuclear explosions would disperse over the entire planet after being injected into the stratosphere.
In the summer of 1953, Kuroda and his co-worker Paul Damon noticed high concentrations of fission products in the Arkansas rain. They published their results quickly5. Their publication ”On the artificial radioactivity of rainfall”, did not go unnoticed. In the autumn of 1953, they were ordered to stop studying fallout, because ”the study of radioactive fallout by non-authorized scientists was strictly forbidden by the U.S. government as a classified military secret” (ref. 4). Damon and Kuroda apparently were mostly silent about the order to stop, but in 1954, they published a report titled ”On the natural radioactivity of rainfall”, which included the pithy statement about artificial radioactivity in rainfall: ”Presumably, considerable work is underway, but has not yet been published.” (ref. 6).
The concentrations of Es and Fm in the fallout reaching Arkansas in 1953 must have been vanishingly small, so Damon and Kuroda would almost certainly not have been able to detect the new elements. They also lacked the huge hint the UCRL group received about the 244Pu produced in the Ivy Mike test, which was the key insight that inspired Ghiorso’s search for elements 99 and 100 (ref. 1). On the other hand, Kuroda and Damon might have noticed 244Pu on their own. We like to envision Kuroda and Damon as characters in a movie asking government agents ”exactly who is investigating the fallout?” Then, like at the end of 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indiana Jones is assured that ”top men” are studying the Ark of the Covenant, Kuroda was being told that ”top men” were looking into it. Unlike Raiders though, the ”top men” were actually looking at the fallout samples7, instead of packing them in a crate and then hiding the crate in a warehouse.
Why would studying radioactive fallout be classified? Likely because, as Ghiorso and Seaborg discovered, the existence of 244Pu was classified. 244Pu is the longest-lived isotope of plutonium, and is not useful for building a nuclear weapon, but as the quote from Teller plainly said, knowledge of the fallout could reveal ”much about the bomb”. In this case, the existance of a neutron-rich isotope like 244Pu found from the fallout analysis might reveal something about the large neutron flux of the weapon. So 244Pu’s existence suggested a high neutron flux — which was key to Ghiorso’s search for elements 99 and 100. In 1953, this was definitely information best kept secret. Of course, the American government could only stop American scientists from studying fallout in rain. Papers began appearing in other countries, especially once knowledge of the hydrogen bomb tests became widely known, and the long range at which fallout could be transported was realized8,9.
Befitting its numerologically significant position on the periodic table, fermium represents the heaviest element which has been forged in a nuclear reactor. The “fermium wall” prevents production of elements heavier than fermium by neutron absorption due to the short half-life (i.e., spontaneous fission) of 258Fm. To go beyond element 100, nuclear scientists had to turn to the same atom-at-a-time techniques — and the same heavy ion beams which were used to produce the first unclassified ”discovery” of fermium (see the IYE article).
In the 1950s though, you didn’t need an nuclear reactor or a convenient hydrogen bomb to find fermium — it fell from the sky.
Brett F. Thornton is in the Department of Geological Sciences (IGV) and Bolin Centre for Climate Research, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden. Shawn C. Burdette is in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts 01609-2280, USA. e-mail: brett.thornton@geo.su.se; scburdette@WPI.EDU
References
1. Ghiorso, A. Chem. Eng. News 81, 174–175 (2003). [LINK]
2. Redfern, J. Nat. Chem. 8, 1168-1168 (2016). [LINK]
3. Kuroda, P. K., Damon, P. E. & Hyde, H. Am. J. Sci. 252, 76-86 (1954). [LINK]
4. Kuroda, P. K. J. Radioanal. Nucl. Chem. 203, 591-599 (1996). [LINK]
5. Damon, P. & Kuroda, P. Nucleonics 11, 59 (1953).
6. Damon, P. & Kuroda, P. Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union 35, 208-216 (1954). [LINK]
7. Ghiorso, A. et al. Phys. Rev. 99, 1048-1049 (1955). [LINK]
8. Miyake, Y. Papers in Meteorology and Geophysics 5, 173-177 (1954). [LINK]
9. Miyake, Y. Papers in Meteorology and Geophysics 6, 26-37 (1955). [LINK]
[Posted on behalf of Materials Girl]
We’re just getting to know each other, but your resume caught my eye and I might be looking to collaborate… How many papers have you published? What’s the typical impact factor of the journals those papers appear in? Or — to be Google Scholar-forward — what’s your h-index? At what rate do you publish? Are you first or corresponding author? Why should we get to know each other better? Is your CV worth a swipe right?
The potential questions regarding one’s publications are endless, and everyone knows that fateful metric by which a researcher is judged. The “publish or perish” approach to evaluating scientists is inescapable — and particularly of note for younger researchers at the beginning of their careers. As a postdoc working for an untenured professor, publication is of tantamount importance for both me and my PI. Those on the prowl for a job outside of academia, however, might find the importance of publication record to be less obvious. A colleague involved in government-run science/funding (e.g., U.S. Department of Energy) insists that 10–20 papers out of graduate school is the minimum number needed to prove one’s scientific worth and land a decent job. Another had the notion that collaborative, non-first author papers held more value, since institutions typically look for team players.
Naturally, the specifics of a position will dictate the need for a strong publishing record. Regardless of this importance to a particular employer, however, there is an undeniable, strong community expectation to produce papers. Having a low paper count implies low productivity, but how accurate is it to correlate publication statistics with individual labor/intellect/talent? Out of all the graduate students I’ve encountered, the average number of publications is definitively in the single digits – and could be measured on one hand if only first authorship is considered.
So here’s the question: Is this judgement system realistic? My PhD advisor always insisted that Nature and Science papers would definitely come if I worked hard enough. Not intellect or inspiration — just pure, hard labor. However, sometimes a good publication arises from luck — be it a lucky result or experiment, the luck of being on a good project, the luck of having access to equipment or funding at the right time, etc. Labor and brilliance notwithstanding, even the best researcher may not flourish without a dash of good fortune.
No clear-cut right or wrong answers exist to these matters, and it would be interesting to hear TSC reader opinions. What do you think about scientists judging one another on publishing? How heavily scrutinized should an individual’s publication record be? Do you think that the current system is fair?
Xin Su studied chemistry in China and the United States and started his career in scholarly publishing with John Wiley & Sons in New Jersey. He just flew across the pond to London to join Nature Chemistry as a Senior Editor, and will ultimately be based out of the Springer Nature Shanghai office.
1. What made you want to be a chemist?
Certainly a biography book of Michael Faraday I read when I was a kid. In retrospect, it is far from being a fine piece on this great scientist, but it did successfully interest me, sparking curiosity and inspiration in me to go and explore chemistry. Throughout my school years, I also had very good chemistry teachers, which reinforced my pursuit.
2. If you weren’t a chemist and could do any other job, what would it be — and why?
I would choose to become a historian, naturally and ideally studying the history of chemistry. I always had an interest in history, as I still do. I minored in history when I was in college, and was attracted to grammatology and classical Chinese literature. I was seriously thinking of apply for a postdoctoral fellowship from the Chemical Heritage Foundation when I was about to finish my PhD. So if I ever get an opportunity to take two half-time jobs, the combination will be publishing and history.
3. What are you working on now, and where do you hope it will lead?
Now that I have just switched to Nature Chemistry, I look forward to serving truly innovative and broadly influential research results to the readers. In the meanwhile, I’m interested in promoting communications and exchanges among chemists and between scientists and the public (with deep-rooted fear for the demonized chemistry).
4. Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?
Nikola Tesla. He was such a prolific genius, but a lot of work he did in his later year remains largely unknown. I’d be very eager to learn more from him.
5. When was the last time you did an experiment in the lab — and what was it?
It was after I left research and started in publishing and it wasn’t chemistry at all. I replaced a cracked screen on an iPad in the lab. It would have been quite awkward to maneuver elsewhere, and you could hardly imagine how easy it is with a lab jack, a heat gun and clamps unless you try yourself (DO WEAR GOGGLES).
6. If exiled on a desert island, what one book and one music album would you take with you?
Shishuo Xinyu (Chinese: 世說新語), or literally, A New Account of the Tales of the World, and to complement it, Guangling San (Chinese: 廣陵散), a qin (ancient Chinese zither) melody long enough to be considered as an album. They make the best companion for solitude, I think. Citing the comment by Graham Sanders, a sinologist at University of Toronto, “few works can match the importance of the book…. for its portrayal of cultural attitudes and social practices among elites in China from the second to fourth centuries”, simply a fascinating age.
7. Which chemist would you like to see interviewed on Reactions — and why?
Professor Gordon Gribble at Dartmouth College. He is a highly achieved scholar, as well as an avid winemaker, but more importantly, he cares about the public image of chemistry and defends against the so-called “chemophobia”.
