Dear Gentle Readers,

For a long time I have been an author and outlet for many in the chemistry community and the run was, to say the least, more than I could have ever expected.  It was through this blog that I found a cathartic release of frustration, anger and, most importantly, the insatiable curiosity I have always had for science.

Some time ago, a reader named Bethany Halford asked me a question about why I blog and I framed my answer in as quotable of a context as I could – because I wanted to see how far I could push this thing.  I think I have pushed it far enough and I have reached the end of my intellectual interest and now wish to divest myself from blogging so that I may completely free myself for the pursuit of other things.  No doubt you have noticed that the frequency of posting has diminished as my other projects have begun to take off and my fullest efforts are required there.

Now that blogging appears to be an activity which is regulated by the FTC, I think it’s safe to say that it has finally arrived.  I now know (or at least I think I know) what it takes for someone to develop a successful web presence and what sort of innovations are needed to build on that presence.  My programming skills are also none the worse for the endeavor.

In any regard, this is the end.  The lights will be shut off next month, the gmail account will no longer be answered and the chemblog store with its catchy EJ cup and functional group poster will be deleted.

Good bye, world.

Yours,

Kyle Finchsigmate

Today I constructed a brand new shelf in my hood.  I love hood shelves.  You can put chemicals on them, solvents, glassware… all kinds of things that would ordinarily go somewhere else more… public.   After I was done constructing my masterpiece I began to admire my handiwork and populate it with things (mostly chemicals) but, while I was standing there talking with my hood neighbor, the consensus was reached that the new shelf begged a novel hood design:  it needed hood Feng Shui.

While I have no idea what Feng Shui actually is, I’m 99% certain it has something to do with colorful fish or those lucky bamboo things they sell at Target and since 99% is basically 100% I figured my hood needs a fish inside of it.

Of course, I’m a realist.  I can’t put a whole aquarium in my hood – that would be chest slappingly short bus retarded.  Since I don’t want to run an air pump through my hood I need a labyrinth fish.  The king of such fish is the betta fish or the Siamese fighting fish.  And  because I’m 99% sure Feng Shi also means making sure your shit matches, it needs to be in a round bottom flask.  (That useless 29/42 ground glass is suddenly less useless!)

So, I’m thinking about something like this:

I would put the fish in a flask on my shelf, where I would feed it and it could watch my reactions for me at night (and tell me who the fuck keeps turning my hood’s airflow alarm back on).

Alternatively, I could set up an ant farm and run the ant tubes all over my hood.  That would prolly kick ass, too.

I hate technology.

Let me be more specific, actually.

I hate technology that brings people together.  I don’t mind fancy new toys or new medical devices or sexual robots, these are the things that are making the world a better place – I hate technology that not only PUTS me in contact with other people but KEEPS me in contact with other people.  For instance, the most hated thing I have on my person, aside from taint stank, is my cell phone.   If my parents’ bottomless wealth and charity didn’t allow me to own needless gadgetry, I certainly wouldn’t have one at all (but it’s free, and it’s essentially expected that a grown man will have one, so I oblige.)

The next thing I Hate is Facebook, of which I have an account, because it’s essentially obligated of a socially networked person.  Invitations for events, birth announcements, birthdays and anniversaries are all announced over Facebook and if you walk into a conversation about “oh, what are you going to wear to the Tron convention?” and I’m like “huh?” and they’re like “Didn’t you get my Facebook Friend Habilitation Request Poke?” and I’m like “Shut your cum dumpster” but then out loud I say “oh, I don’t check that very often” and then I get this blank look.

The problem is enhanced even more because it seems like entire labs are migrating to facebook style networks where, out of a thirty some people lab, groups of 10 facebook users will cluster into facebook super cliques, which have clique powers that extend beyond the confines of the office.

So, while walking along the beach with my dog, Poopiebutt, I thought back to the olden days of my youth – back to the 1990’s, about how I managed to live my life without these social inconveniences.  Then it hit me.  I JUST HUNG OUT WITH PEOPLE!

Granted, back in the 1990’s, being a teenager was hard.  If I wanted to know what my friends were doing, I had to actually WALK inside my house FIND my phone, DIAL it with telephone numbers I had MEMORIZED and ASK THEM how they were doing.  The chances of them being home were uncertain and if I couldn’t reach them by phone, I’d have to talk to whomever answered and see if they were around.

It was the social equivalent of using an outhouse.

Anyway, you can see where I may be taking this.  Our parents comic lamentation about having to use the television before the advent of the remote is a little more disingenuous when compared to the change of the social norms.  One won’t (or shouldn’t) truly miss the intimacy of a television thanks to the remote, whereas I can easily see a dangerous reduction in real human contact with social networking.  It’s taking us toward a Philip K Dick style meta-reality.

The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded for discovering that you needn’t have living cells to produce fermentation in 1907 by the notable E. Buchner (who did not, as it turns out, invent the funnel of a similar name).  What were these chemicals?  Hard to say.  I hear Buchner’s NMR wasn’t working at the time so he could only guess, but they were certainly the extracts of whole cells.  (The chemistry Nobel in 1929 would go to the guys who figured out exactly what those chemicals were.. sort of).

Chemists at the time, I’m sure, tossed their bowler hats on the floor and went straight to fisticuffs over the slight.

In 1915, it was awarded for research on chlorophyll – not the synthesis, mind you, just for figuring out that it was there (you’d have to wait until the Nobel in 1930 for the chemistry, again).

In 1946, it was awarded just for crystallizing (and purifying) bioshit.  In 1946 this was a major step… which reminds us how infantile biochemistry was in 1946, considering the first Nobel, 25 years earlier, was awarded for the analysis of chemical dynamics to van’t Hoff… “real” chemistry, it seems, had been… err… established quite a bit more than the ability to purify compounds by 1946.  Chemists would get their Nobel for chromatography a few years later….[shame on us])

In 1947 the prize was given to Robert Robinson for discovering there were chemicals in plants and characterizing a few of them.

1957 – Neucleotides and co-enzymes

1958 – The structure of insulin

1961 – Assimilation of carbon dioxide in plants

1962 – Globular proteins

1964 – X-ray techniques for the determination of biological compounds

1972 – Ribonuclease…

This is getting to a point – the Nobel in chemistry isn’t reserved for proper chemists who work with small synthetic molecules, it’s reserved for people who advance the understanding of chemistry and that makes no distinction between the chemistry done in the flask or chemistry done between a bilayer.  The prize is handed out annually to anyone who produces outstanding work that explains, on a molecular basis, the fundamental actions that occur to transform one substance into another substance, heat or energy.  Consider (if it paints a more obvious picture) that it may have been awarded to the smallest chemist yet and thanks to Yonath, Steitz and Ramakrishnan, we know how that chemist does the chemistry it does.

The structural characterization of the ribosome, an organelle composed of many molecules, may well have fit the glove of the medical prize, but it certainly wasn’t shoehorned (at least when you take history into account) into the chemistry prize.  It was a significant and substantial advancement in the understanding of the chemicals (in this case, large hard-to-crystallize polymers) that compose an organelle.

So, yeah, stomp your feet.  Whatever.  The Nobel, like the Oscar, is an award that is best at glorifying itself, not to highlight the obscure but fascinating fact that you can make retardedly huge branched polymers both convergently or divergently or stick an alkyne to an aromatic halide.  It’s more pomp and circumstance than substance and is probably overrated and biased.  Whatever its defects, it still manages  to end up in the hands of people who do good science.

And Biologists study how fish fuck and birds migrate – proteins are squiggly cartoons to them -  it’s biofuckingchemistry.

I don’t mean to be all salty and shit, since no one was going to pick me but WTF is this? Remember when the Nobel prize in Chemistry was awarded to chemists for… you know… chemistry?

Well, congrtufuckinglations nobel prize winners.  I’m sure my ribosomes are fucking peeing themselves.  So, for real this time, congratulations you three – whoever you are – it was well deserved, I’m sure – I don’t know, of course, because I’m not a goddamn biologist, but other people say you made us aware of the ribosome, so I’ll go with that.

For a less dickheaded (and perhaps more appreciative) analysis of the reviews, you can read it at The Curious Wavefunction.

For a period in graduate school, I would work from 8 until 7, generally without lunch, in something I thought was approximating a 12 hour day.  I don’t know what it is about working that much, but it’s exhausting and soul draining and not fun.  The people around me, who didn’t work that much, were generally in more pleasant moods, which was probably what kept me from going E.J- Corey-student on my ass.

At some point in my PhD I revolted, mostly against myself, but it was also against the precept that someone who works 12 hours is 33% more productive than someone who works 8.  No scientific studies have suggested that longer hours help and many of them show a deterioration in both quantity and quality of work being preformed.   My boss at the time worked regular family-hours of 9-6, so that’s what I started working and not only was the quality of my work better, but I was spending less time doing it.

In other words, as I laid off on the hours, my focus became more clear.  I started to take walks on my beautiful campus during the day to think about my chemistry and my future.  I had, at that point, cut the string with my adviser and was doing my own thing, more or less.  I was also competently managing my own group of undergraduates who were, finally, performing like chemists.  I had one summer in which 5 papers worth of data were mined from this technique – the fruits of one still going through the CommuNazi European Journal of Chemistry review process.  I also worked closely with a younger graduate student in a very fruitful effort.

I don’t really know what I would do if I had a research group of my own.  I’d venture to guess that I wouldn’t restrict student hours but I’d be very sensitive about my students’ happiness in lab.  Unhappy but exceptional people will still produce the results you need (maybe not the results you expect) but who has a group filled with exceptional people?  Now having been a part of multiple research groups from a range of (granted, high quality) departments, I can say that most people have groups comprised of at least one retard that requires a  baby leash to keep them from destroying the lab.  The admission process is a funny indicator of who will be successful (but that’s a whole different post).

I know some advisers would cringe at that idea, some demanding a minimum of 10 hours per day plus weekends (and I came in either a Saturday or a Sunday the whole time I was there) but… why?  There’s no data to support that working those hours will be productive.  There’s plenty to show that they go bug nuts fucking crazy and burn out and quit.

Got an email from a lovely person passing on the Thomson Reuters pick(s). They seem to agree that Grätzel has one coming and I’ve been feeling that way myself.  They also have picked Benjamin List for his work using asymmetric catalysts and Barton/Giese/Schuster for electron transfer in DNA.

• Contributions of single molecule spectroscopy: Zare/Bard/Moerner 10-1
• Work in solar cells: Grätzel 11-1
• Computational chemistry: Karp/Goddard 12-1
• Enamine catalysis: List/Lerner 20-1
• Discovery and development of transition metal cross coupling: Suzuki/Heck/Sonogashira Buchwald 30-1
• Development of advanced materials: Matyjaszewski /Gray/Inokuchi 50-1
• Work on molecular Chaperones: Hartl/Horwich: 60-1
• Electron transfer in DNA: Barton/Giese/Schuster 100-1
• Electron transfer process in proteins: Gray 145-1
• Contributions to bioinorganic chemistry: Solomon/Gray/Holm 200-1
• Epigenetics: Cedar/Razin: 350-1
• Molecular Machines: Stoddart/Feringa/Leigh: 400-1
• Enzyme mimics, Breslow: 1000-1

UPDATED: 09.13.09

UPDATED: 09.15.09 — Replaced Whitesides with Matyjaszewski and lowered odds, added Hartl and Horwich for work on Chaperones (on account of this article [though I still don't think bio will win it this year]) and removed Westheimer, on account of him being dead. Enzyme mimics are now a long shot of long shots.

UPDATED: 09.24.09 – Seriously reconsidered Grätzel and read Thompson’s report.  Changed the topic of what Zare is going to win his Nobel for, such that it makes sense.  Moved Gratzel to number 1 pick.

UPDATED: 09.25.09 – Interesting link sent to me via the Gmail: 10.1007/s11192-009-0035-9. It discusses, in depth, why it is becoming harder to predict who will win the Nobel.  Added Lerner w/ List and changed it to the more apt “Enamine catalysis.”

UPDATED: 10.06.09 – Removed Sonogashira (’cause he’s dead) and replaced him with Buchwald (why not?)

Aldrich has a blog and on that blog they peddle their deepest wishes, like being able to competently compete on the level of, say, Strem. Well, the compound on the right is the new “yellow” Aldrich tetrakis – which is clearly not fucking yellow.  The compound on the right left, still in its bottle, is the same motherfucking compound from Strem.

It’s good because 1. Strem uses advanced technology to seal their bottle, called sealing wax.  2. They tape the package to a cold pack and 3. They cover their shit in real organic Argon.

Of course, you can make your own.

I never wanted to be a chemist.  I wanted to be a physicist – particularly an astrophysicist.  If I hadn’t been so goddamn pigheaded as an undergraduate and majored in chemistry to spite my bitch high school teacher, I’d well be a fucking physicist right now.  What is there to be disappointed about in astrophysics?  Could it possibly be as bad as chemistry?  Could you come in on Monday with a great idea, have it dashed by mid-afternoon, resurrected a bit modified by the time you leave, have half the preliminaries done by Wednesday only to discover your hypothesis was wrong – head home dejected, return Thursday, realize after coffee that you’ve discovered something wonderful (even if it wasn’t what you initially had hoped for) started planning your intro for your Nature paper on Friday morning, only to realize it has been published three years ago?

You know, when most people describe their boss as bipolar, maybe they should consider the fucking field they’re in.  Every week I get excited about science and every week I get let down by it.  Sometimes, the beatings from the research lows are so bad I feel satisfied with myself after a successful BOC protection.  My inexplicable good mood, the result of a happy NMR spectra of something other than broad peaks, water and chloroform, is going to get stuck in the belly with a shank in the next few moments.  That shank may be as trivial as being unable to take the fucking BOC group back off.  The embrangled emotions of a chemist are a tempest, which manifest as the bipolar self-absorbed prima donna we normally act out.  And I’m quite certain that the halogenated gasses and small mildly psychoactive alkaloids we serendipitously ingest take their toll over the years.

So, on days when I’m frustrated with my life as a chemist I grab a book by Kip Throne, the man that inspired me to be a physicist and pretend that I’m failing somewhere else – somewhere that doesn’t involve pumps belching pyridine at me when I turn them on.

UPDATE: Uch, slipped my mind. We’ve hit 10,200 legit comments. What a milestone, eh?

Well, I don’t think I have ever seen that on my TLC.  Goddamn spots ran as loops. Also, I have no starting material left.  And I have blue glowie fluorescence!  WOOT!  Easiest macrocycle I’ve ever made.

(My normal lab camera, a Nikon D80, is resting at home.  If you’re going to get a camera for lab and blog use, you should invest in a decent digital SLR.  As you can see, that picture is bullshit.

Up next… Sigma Aldrich, I fucking hate you.