Enthusiasm and promise at the ACS Dallas National Meeting

I am writing from the Dallas airport from where I am heading out back home after a fantastic national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). This meeting was definitely the best of its kind I have attended until now, mainly because I had a generous invitation to give an invited talk on the impact of information technology on chemistry and related disciplines. The topic is of course quite vast and general so I was spending all my free time this month preparing for it (that explains the hiatus here).

The day-long session and subsequent panel discussion along with an excellent lunch and dinner were part of the ACS Graduate Student Symposium and organized by graduate students from the University of Texas at Austin. These young men and women really did a phenomenal job, both in picking a remarkably diversity of topics for discussion and in the warm reception that we got at the session. Although I have not been out of graduate school for that long myself, I was really impressed by their enthusiasm and organizational skills. The entire program was put together with care and good sense. I think my own talk went well but what I really enjoyed were talks by the other speakers and panelists. A big thanks once again to the organizers for giving me this memorable opportunity; I hope they got as much out of my contribution as I got from the day's events.

Gautam Bhattacharya from Clemson University gave a talk about ethical and professional development of graduate students and professors; he made me realize how much more sensitive professors need to be about the personal and professional development of their students and how much students themselves need to ask the right questions concerning their progress. One of the most important messages that he drove home was that "learning by doing" is really a misleading proposition; what really enables you to learn is reflection, and this is something that's not stressed enough in college and grad school. Gautam's work is really important for the psychological advancement of graduate students and it should be widely appreciated.

Paula Stephan followed up with a fantastic talk on trends in science hiring, the changing nature of science careers and the state of the job market. Paula's tool is hard data, culled from 40 years of surveys by the NSF and other agencies; something about her presentation reminded me of the old saying about slaying a beautiful and fond belief by hard facts. There was enough in her talk to warrant a separate post but the gist was that postdocs and grad students need to be exposed much more to alternative careers and that we really need to focus on quality instead of quantity when training our students. A lot of postdocs seem to appreciate the state of the job market but often think of themselves as being good enough to surmount its difficulties. Postdocs need to thus get a much better idea of how long they want to continue their gigs and what they should expect in their near future. Stephan had actually led a panel that made these recommendations; not surprisingly almost all of them were ignored. I completely agree with her points, but I find it hard to shake off my depressing cynicism regarding the ossified structure of the government-academic funding system and the fundamental psychological changes that we would need to bring about to change the minds of people with entrenched opinions. But let's carry on.

Sonja Krane who is a managing editor of the Journal of American Chemical Society gave a nice talk about submitting and preparing articles. As much as I respect formal publications like JACS, the successful rise of blogging as a valid second tier for peer review in the last decade or so makes me increasingly think of the formal publication system in rather quaint terms. Bruce Gibb from Tulane University was the last speaker. He gave a funny, entertaining and inspiring talk about the value of basic R&D and the futility of "picking winners" when funding science, especially based on the fact that winners often appear out of the blue and from unexpected quarters and therefore cannot be predicted. Bruce also had a valid analysis of the increasing encroachment of administrative personnel on universities who sap resources away from research and the students.

In my own talk I gave a bird's eye view of how computers have affected chemistry by referring to mainly four areas - data, simulation and analysis, what I call "sociology, namely the culture of chemistry research communication and future challenges. I started out by pointing out the exponential growth in chemical data and its rapid (although not necessarily cheap) accessibility. This data has completely changed the way both theoretical and experimental chemists visualize chemical structures, analyze trends in chemical information and relate structure to properties using the tools of cheminformatics. Along with data, simulation also now has a seat at the table, propped up by phenomenal advances in hardware and software over the last two decades. Important advances like molecular dynamics, harnessing the wisdom of crowds and using knowledge from chemical and biological databases to predict the properties and uses of new materials, drugs and food products are definitely shaping the landscape of chemistry. As far as I am concerned the future shines with promise and knowledge.

The final part of my talk addressed the role of blogs and social media  in serving as a valid source of peer-review and in performing a variety of non-research functions (analyzing academic culture, the job market etc) that are often not part of formal trade journals. I have been lucky to witness the rise of chemistry blogging (and science blogging in general for that matter) from a limited milieu inhabited by a few enthusiasts to a serious, mainstream source of enlightenment and criticism. I focused on two case studies - the hexacyclinol controversy and the Breslow "spacedinos" brouhaha - as examples of how blogging and social media can serve not only as legitimate means of research analysis, but sometimes as the only ones.

The acknowledgment of blogs as an increasing valuable mode of communicating research and improving communication skills was affirmed in the stimulating panel discussion after the talks. Most of the audience seemed to concur that it might be a good idea for graduate students and professors to start writing about their research. This is especially valuable for graduate students since most of them are going to end up in non-academic jobs where softer skills like science communication might be even more important. I was very gratified to see enthusiasm for blogging both among young and old members of the audience. The younger graduate students and undergraduates had some anxiety about their careers, but my perception of that anxiety was more than compensated by the clear enthusiasm for science in all its forms that rippled across the room. Leaving the symposium I could not help but get the feeling that in spite of the problems and challenges all is well with the future of science, at least as reflected through the eyes of its young practitioners.

Are chemistry bloggers journalists? Eat the fruit, don't count the trees

There is an updated version of this post on my Scientific American blog so you may want to read that instead. Comments are of course welcome at both sites.

In his parting editorial for C&E News, Rudy Baum had the following words for science bloggers:

"Technology has profoundly changed journalism during my tenure with C&EN. Much of the change has been positive—who can imagine doing research on a topic without access to the Internet?—but the business model for journalism remains very much in a state of flux. The silly mantra, “Information wants to be free,” overlooks the fact that quality information requires effort, and effort costs money.  

Blogs are all well and good, they add richness to the exchange of information, but they are not journalism, and they never will be."

In addition as Derek and Chembark have pointed out, the ACS's director of public affairs Glenn Ruskin said in another context that:

“We find little constructive dialogue can be had on blogs and other listservs where logic, balance, and common courtesy are not practiced and observed,”

I agree with Mr. Baum's thoughts about information not being free. However I think information can be cheap, in fact very cheap, and it's this line of thinking that is the source of the campaign against publishers like Elsevier who practice unfair "bundling" and sport huge profit margins. More importantly though, I think there's at least some evidence to refute Mr. Baum's statement that "quality information requires effort, and effort costs money". I think Wikipedia is a resounding example of the fact that quality can come without money through the efforts of millions of volunteers who contribute knowledge and information for a variety of reasons. Many articles on Wikipedia have been vetted by experts in their respective areas (including Nature) and have been found to contain high-quality information.

On the other hand I find myself confused by Mr. Baum's thoughts on blogging. What exactly does he mean when he says "science blogs will never be journalism"? I see journalism defined mainly in three terms; news, opinion and analysis. As far as I am concerned, science blogs have contributed to each of these phases of journalism over the last decade or so. High-quality content not driven by money has been an outstanding feature of the chemical blogosphere.

Let's start with opinion. Opinion has always been a principal function of blogging; in fact that's why many of us started our blogs, to hold forth in all our self-important erudition on a variety of topics. As far as news is concerned, those of us who are reporting on the latest chemical breakthroughs, safety issues, chemical controversies and the human side of chemistry are communicating exactly the kind of news that magazines like C&E News report. I am not saying that magazines are not doing a good job of reporting the relevant news, just that bloggers can also be equal to the task.

And then there's analysis. I believe this is an area in which bloggers have been outstanding. Whether it's Derek Lowe analyzing the state of the pharmaceutical industry, Chemjobber analyzing the state of the job market, Paul analyzing the state of chemical publishing or SeeArrOh analyzing the state of chemophobia, I believe that bloggers have repeatedly subscribed to the highest standards of fact checking, careful thinking and clear exposition. Sure, we all make mistakes, but I think many of us can agree that when it comes to episodes like the sodium hydride "oxidation" or the structure of hexacyclinol, bloggers have been at the forefront of sounding the alarm and of meticulously charting the flaws, often before more "official" news sources scoop the story up. In some cases this analysis has even been more thorough and well-informed than the official sources. Even a preliminary look at some of the major blog posts written by chemistry bloggers would convince Mr. Ruskin that "logic, balance and common courtesy" are not just alive but are thriving in the chemical blogosphere.

The benefit of a magazine like C&E News is of course that all this information is in one place instead of being scattered around various sites, but this is hardly a general argument against the ability of blogs to do good science journalism. Perhaps what Mr. Baum means that all blogs don't contribute to journalism, but that's a far cry from saying that they can't and that they never will. Surely Mr. Baum is familiar with the high-quality service that veteran chemistry bloggers have provided over the last decade. Surely he is aware of the fact that members of his own very capable staff have often featured and linked to posts, both their own and others. At the very least his opinion should have been tempered by a recognition of the good that has come out of chemistry blogging during the last few years.

I will leave you with an excellent post regarding this very perceived distinction between science blogging and science journalism written by Ed Yong, one of the most accomplished science bloggers around. It seems that Ed really hits the nail on the head in locating the source of criticism of science blogs:

To an extent, I get why it’s played. I think people are rightly worried about their industry. As I said at the start: massive sinking ship. People see a profession in trouble, they want to save and protect it. They see these random interlopers trying to claim a stake and they think that it somehow devalues this noble thing that they’re trying to defend. I certainly agree that good journalism in all its forms is a necessary thing that is worth defending. But no one has ever saved something by playing with definitions. You protect journalism by trumpeting its values, criticising people who do it poorly and supporting those who do it well, regardless of the medium they happen to use. You won’t buoy up journalism through taxonomy.

Indeed, you don't buoy up journalism through conventional, narrow-minded classification. You buoy it up by recognizing high-quality content in your field, irrespective of the source. There's an old proverb which roughly says "Enjoy the fruit, don't count the trees". If the fruit is sweet and satisfying, do you really care where the trees come from and how many there are?