Roald Hoffmann has an editorial (open access!) in Angewandte Chemie in which he (mostly) gently scolds those who have criticized many of the last decade's Nobel Prizes as being "insufficiently chemical". I agree with him that any kind of preconceived expectations about who should get the Nobel Prize tries to fit chemistry into a straitjacket and denies scientists who may not have been trained in traditional chemistry departments the right to call themselves chemists."Ubiquitin and the ribosome, fluorescent proteins and ion channels are as fundamentally chemical as metal surfaces, enantioselective catalysts, olefin metathesis, or, just to name some fields squarely in our profession that should be (or should have been) recognized, laser chemistry, metal–metal multiple bonding, bioinorganic chemistry, oral contraception, and green or sustainable chemistry."
And ultimately he emphasizes something that we should all constantly remind each other. It's a prize, awarded by human beings. It's an honor all right, but it does very little to highlight the objective value of the research which is usually evident far before the actual recognition. The fact that we were informally nominating Robert Grubbs or Roger Tsien years before they received the prizes makes it clear that no prize was really going to change our perception of how important their work was. Today we look at Tsien's research on green fluorescent protein with the same joyful interest that we did ten years ago.
Hoffmann sees the principal function of the Nobel Prize as providing an incentive for young students and researchers from scientifically underprivileged countries, and he cites the examples of Kenichi Fukui and Ahmed Zewail inspiring their fellow countrymen. The Nobel Prize certainly serves this function, but I have always been a little wary of pitching the benefits of scientific research by citing any kind of prize. The fact is that most people who do interesting research will never win the Nobel Prize and this does nothing to undervalue the importance of their work. So even from a strictly statistical standpoint, it would continue to be much more fruitful to point out the real benefits of science to young people- as a means of understanding the world and having fun while you are at it. Prizes may or may not follow.
Hat tip: Excimer
Who is Maria Carey?
ReplyDeleteOf course, I had to comment. I am, naturally, sympathetic to this sort of viewpoint, although here are a few comments.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to scientists who have not necessarily been trained within a traditional chemistry department, there are plenty of chemists who find themselves outside of such departments. I don't know how much this might be fully appreciated - I recall commenting somewhere back in 2006 that Roger Kornberg had an undergraduate chemistry degree, did his Ph.D. in p.chem with Harden McConnell, and then a crystallography postdoc with Aaron Klug. What about that screams "not a chemist whatsoever in any manner!" to anyone? *shakes head*
I always felt that the Nobel Prizes were a great opportunity to do some science education with positive PR, as having to explain what kind of fraud someone perpetrated is not nearly as much fun. The point about them serving as an inspiration could be folded into this, as it can be difficult to get much science news in some papers, especially a couple of days in a row.
In the end, while graduate student labor is cheap, bacterial labor can be even cheaper. Instead of viewing biology as a topic to be studied, why not also view it as a source of materials and reagents? I know there's a fair amount of interest in industrial applications of enzymes (at least, insofar as I can gather from my windowless ivory basement NMR lab), and I'm sure there's more waiting out there. I would imagine that might be fractionally more acceptable, although I'm likely biased on this point.
I agree. I think most of the negative reaction to Kornberg's prize was personal, based on a lack of knowledge about his background and accomplishments.
DeleteAnd about the whole "biology as a source of new materials" thing, that's precisely why I find the recent efforts to tailor and design enzymes to produce unconventional fuels, polymers and drugs so exciting (particularly the work being done by Jay Keasling at Berkeley). Throughput is a real challenge there, but I am willing to bet that some of that work will win a chemistry prize down the road, and then it will be really hard to argue that it's not chemistry since as you indicated, the only difference is that we are getting these compounds from bacteria instead of human beings.
While I think it would be ludicrous to expect an award in "pure" chemistry every year, there is something unsatisfying about the prize in chemistry going to an American who isn't even a member of the ACS. But, that is just the personal feeling of a (biased) guy who'd like to see pure chemistry get more positive attention from the public.
ReplyDeleteYes, it was unsatisfying, but only because the ACS failed in its mission to recognize outstanding chemical scientists. And in any case, personally I never need the ACS's stamp of approval to appreciate the research of a particular scientist.
DeleteAbout your second point, it would indeed be great to have more "pure" chemistry recognized by the public. But in the case that it does not do so when the latest prize has been awarded to a molecular biologist, I really see it as a failure of the chemical community (us) to not be able to convince the public that the research is essentially chemical. We clearly need much better PR. But then we knew this all along; let's keep truckin'.
Don't get me started on the ACS. All I see them doing is helping to drive salaries down. But that's not the point that I am going for. In some ways, I think chemistry as a discipline is caught between one of its great successes and its biggest failing. The failure is, of course, the discipline's inability to convince the mass of the population that chemical is not a code word for unnatural, unhealthy, or dangerous. As long as people view anything labeled a chemical as undesirable, no company is going to want their name associated with it, and that goes doubly so for the companies working in environmentally friendly technologies. So the good things that come from chemical understanding are divorced in the public's mind from the discipline that enables them.
ReplyDeleteOn the positive side, chemistry, or at least an atomistic/molecular worldview has managed to pervade other scientific disciplines to such a degree that many of the recent advances in them are based on chemical foundations. Furthermore, these underpinnings are becoming so firmly wedded to the various disciplines that the demarcation point becomes murky. Chemistry is still a vibrant subject, and Hoffmann is right that the advances recognized by the Nobel Committee are chemical advances. We, as chemists, just have a terrible PR problem.
True. I think one of the problems is that the kind of chemical research we all know and love is rather disconnected from its ultimate manifestation in products that the public uses. Drugs are a classic example; while everyone is deeply familiar with drugs, most people associate them with doctors and not with organic chemists and computational chemists and biologists. That's because there are so many steps between the basic bench research done by these other people and the final administration of the medicine to the patient by a doctor that the public only sees the final step. I am not sure what we can do to communicate the earlier steps; for now better public education seems to be the only way. I sometimes fantasize about an alternative reality where the public understands enough about protein-ligand interactions to directly communicate with the bench-level scientists...
DeleteI am not sure that I agree that biology is the most exciting field of the 21st century. It depends what turns you on. However major contributions will be made and due to the multidisciplinary nature of science today I think it hard to distinguish them by traditional fields. In fact I think that many new advances are made by people coming to a problem from a different field. So if some person is not a chemist and solves a long standing problem, I think s/he should get the recognition.
ReplyDeleteI do not mean to say at all that other fields are less exciting. Nanotechnology and especially materials science promise equally exciting advances. But as Freeman Dyson said, "Biology is now bigger than physics, as measured by the size of budgets, by the size of the workforce, or by the output of major discoveries" and it interfaces with many more fields like neuroscience, economics, engineering and computer science. Plus, chemistry has a long history of solving biological problems and it will continue to do so in the new century. Your last point sums it up; if a person coming from a different field solves a longstanding chemical problem, it's irrelevant whether he or she was trained in a chemistry department.
DeleteHow about his finger-pointing at chemistry's forefathers: " I would place the blame elsewhere—for reasons buried in history and personalities, about a hundred years ago we allowed the biological to get away from chemistry, so to speak. That was a mistake, with molecular biology and the chemical turn in biology around the corner..."
ReplyDeleteIt would be great to learn more about this phase of the field's history. Any pointers?
Abi, I too am scratching my head about that. In fact it's interesting that Wohler and others' demolition of vitalism brought biology squarely within the realm of chemistry by the mid nineteenth century. In addition, by the turn of the twentieth century, many chemists were interested in the investigation and production of substances with pronounced biological effects. Perhaps Hoffmann is talking about the relative lack of attention paid to biochemistry as compared to say, physical chemistry. But even that criticism would not be fair since in the early nineteen hundreds, biochemistry had barely begun to be recognized as a bonafide field of chemistry.
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