Those responsible for the care and feeding of the profession may sometimes feel that the only thing some scientists find more annoying than endless requests for interviews is no requests for interviews. A recent editorial in Chemical & Engineering News by Editor Madeleine Jacobs took this consoling approach to a related concern...
Chemistry: A Mature Science, Or Merely Boring?
A few weeks ago, a reader sent an e-mail lamenting the lack of literacy in the sciences in general and in chemistry in particular. "Chemistry does not seem to even be a consideration in the general topic of scientific literacy. If you sign onto the New York Times On Line on America On Line (AOL), you are presented with a number of buttons, which includes 'Science Times' [one of the sections of the printed newspaper]. If you click the 'Science Times' button, you are presented with a list of five general topics. They are: archaeology, environment and wildlife, health and biology, psychology and anthropology, and space and physics."
"Where in this list is chemistry? If the readers of the most prestigious publication in the United States have no access to information on a topic which they encounter every minute of every day of their lives, how can they be literate on it? How could we find ourselves in such an absurd situation?" Our reader, E. Allan Blair, executive vice president of Princeton Polymer Laboratories, Union, N.J., suggests that "we chemists should play the same game as the other sciences and start emphasizing public relations, or we should accept the fact that we do not need the public to be literate in chemistry."
Another reader, chemistry professor Emeric Schultz of Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, wrote, bemoaning the lack of a decent chemistry section at the popular mega bookstore chain, Borders. While on sabbatical in Madison, Wisconsin, he visited Borders where he "quickly found the science/math/engineering section. Biology, earth science, physics were along a big wall. ...After some searching, I found the chemistry section. It was in a separate waist-high cubical 'island' bookcase, three faces of which were dedicated to engineering disciplines. The content of the remaining 'chemistry' section was disappointing, to say the least: about an equal mix of textbooks, and 'how to survive chemistry' manuals....Why are we perceived this way? And do we deserve it?"
Schultz suggests that chemists "suffer from being in the middle....My experience with physicists is that they act with self confidence, don't worry about the opinions of others, and therefore can be playful. Biologists know that they are not chemists, but they know that what they are doing is naturally interesting. On the other hand, we live in a world of angst....Can't we be a little more playful about our discipline instead of always being so darn serious?"
Not content with these possible explanations and solutions, and distraught that the New York Times could be so cavalier with my favorite field of science, I wrote to an old acquaintance, the newspaper's publisher, asking him if he could rectify the omission of chemistry on the electronic menu for Science Times. He passed my inquiry on to the section's editor, who responded promptly: "The relatively low number of pieces [appearing in the Times on chemistry] is because chemistry is a mature science compared to molecular biology, say, which is in an explosive phase of discovery. Mature sciences are tremendously useful to society, ... but their usefulness arises from their being settled areas of science and hence usually not so newsworthy. It's because we have so few news stories about chemistry that the people who design the AOL version of Science Times have assigned these stories to other categories rather than creating a new category just for chemistry stories."
Dear reader, what is molecular biology but biology that has been successfully tackled by chemistry? The field would not exist were it not for the tools, techniques, and insights provided by chemists to biological systems, and it would not be thriving without the ongoing seminal contributions of chemists. And how does the electronic New York Times categorize its recent front-page Science Times story on structure based drug design, work carried out by Cornell University chemistry department chair Bruce Ganem and his colleagues? Why, health and biology, of course!
Devotees of the Science Times--of which I am one--surely recognize that many of its stories are firmly rooted in chemistry, just as the range of stories in this and every issue of C&EN illustrates that chemistry is most certainly providing more and more input into other fields of science. But chemistry is still the central science, and chemists should not be required to be playful in order to be taken seriously. Chemistry may indeed be a mature science, but it is never boring.
Madeleine Jacobs,
Editor
Reprinted with permission from page 5, Chemical & Engineering News, Vol 73, Number 48, February 19, 1996. Copyright 1996 American Chemical Society.
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