Prof. Erland Stevens's edX med chem class

Just as he did previously, Prof. Erland Stevens of Davidson College is teaching a comprehensive med chem edX class that would be useful for anyone wanting to dive into the field. The course attracted 25,000 students last year. Here's the syllabus and list of topics - it certainly looks like something I would enthusiastically check out if I were starting out in the field, or even if I had been in it for a while.

Information on the course:

• The course: D001x Medicinal Chemistry
• Host platform: edX
• Date: Starts 10/5/15, but enrollment is open until 12/11/15
• Length: 8 weeks
• Cost: free
• Time: 6-8 h/wk for all content, 1 h/wk to peruse the video lectures
• Pre-req: chem (organic functional groups, line-angle structures), biology (parts of cell), math (logarithms & exponents)
• Topics (~1 wk per topic)
• Drug Approval (early drugs, regulatory process, cost, IP concerns)
• Enzymes & Receptors (inhibition, Ki, ligand types, Kd)
• Pharmacokinetics (Vd, clearance, compartment models)
• Metabolism (phase I & II reactions, CYP450 isoforms, prodrugs)
• Molecular Diversity (binding, drug space, combi chem, libraries)
• Lead Discovery (screening, filtering hits, drug metrics)
• Lead Optimization (functional group replacements, isosteres, peptidomimetics)
• Case Studies on Selected Drug Classes
• Bonus features
• Interviews with pharma professionals, including scientists from Novartis (a partner on the course)
• Virtual labs involving online tools for predicting drug-relevant activity
• Target audience: pre-med students, graduate students, recent pharma hires, research assistants

Does modern day college and graduate education in chemistry sacrifice rigor for flexibility?

This is what I love about blogging; it's the classic "one thing leads to another" device. The previous discussion on the paucity of thermodynamics in college coursework led to a more general and important exchange in the comments section that basically asked: Are we sacrificing rigor for flexibility by giving students too much freedom to pick and choose their courses?

The following sentiments (or variations thereof) were expressed:

- There should be a core curriculum for chemistry students that exposes them to mandatory courses in general, organic and physical chemistry at the very least. These requirements seems to be more widespread among physics departments. To my knowledge, Caltech is one of the few schools with a general core curriculum for all science majors. How many other schools have this?

- Part of the lack of exposure to important topics in grad school results from emphasizing research at the cost of coursework. And this is related to a more widespread sentiment of woe: it's become all too easy to get a PhD, partly because of the curse of academia that encourages one to become a glorified technician at the cost of instilling creative scientific thought. The belief is that many professors (and there's many exceptions) would rather produce well-trained manual laborers who contribute to the Grant and Paper Production Factory than independent scientific thinkers who can assimilate ideas from diverse scientific fields. You shouldn't really get a Ph.D. just for putting in 80-hour weeks.

We need to hold students to higher standards, but I think this is not going to happen until the publish-or-perish culture is fundamentally transformed and the movers and shakers of academic research take a hard look at what they are doing to their graduate students.

- Many textbooks are mired in the age-old, classical presentation of thermodynamics that emphasizes Carnot cycles and Maxwell relations much more than any semi-quantative feel for the operation of thermodynamic in practical chemical and biological systems. We are just not doing a good job communicating the real-world importance of topics like thermodynamics; add to this students who are not going to study something if it's not required and we are in a real bind.

- Physical organic chemistry - the one discipline that can naturally build bridges between physical and organic chemistry - is disappearing from the curriculum. Those who intellectually matured in its heyday were naturally exposed to thermodynamics and kinetics. Graduate students in organic chemistry shouldn't be able to get away with just synthesis and spectroscopy courses.

- Matt who, unlike most of us armchair philosophers, is a live professor at an actual research institution, makes the point that we should do an outstanding job of emphasizing thermodynamics in the freshman general chemistry class. We should do such a good job that students should always be able to connect those concepts to anything else that they study later. As Matt recommends, we could include the more qualitative important real-life applications of thermodynamics (and not just to antiquated heat engines) like those in drug discovery in this gen chem class.

All great points in my opinion. I have strong feelings about all this myself, but I have not done any detailed study of college curricula so my opinions are mostly anecdotal. Feel free to chime in with actual data or more opinions in the comments section.

A chestnut so old, it's started stinking

Both Derek and SeeArrOh have nicely weighed in on this Washington Post letter by a disgruntled parent who is demanding to know why his son should be "forced" to study chemistry in high school. He then lists a number of arguments usually offered in favor of teaching and learning chemistry and proceeds to what he thinks are cogent rejoinders. This one in particular sent a giant bee through my bonnet:

Chemistry will teach him analytical skills that he can apply to other fields.

Great. So will a hundred other possible subjects that will be less painful and potentially even more interesting to him. An experimental physicist recently told me that at this phase in chemistry instruction “it’s all about memorization anyway.” There will be no other phases in chemistry instruction for my son. He will forget everything he “learned” a week after the class is over. I can’t remember a thing, and I was a pretty good chemistry student.

Ah, the "math and physics need good problem solving skills while chemistry and biology need a good memory" chestnut again, and SeeArrOh touches on this. I am hazarding a guess that this experimental physicist was jealous of chemists; I am tempted to send a few beakers flying through his office window. I was exposed adequately to this fallacy myself; when I was in high school, apparently all the future engineers were supposed to study physics and math to hone their analytical skills while the future doctors were supposed to study chemistry and biology, since "medicine is all about memorization too". This was nonsense. Chemistry is as useful for future engineers as math is for future doctors.

Obviously our schools are still not doing a good job of driving home the analytical nature of chemical science. Try to memorize every reaction in an organic chemistry textbook and you will indeed not remember any of it within a few months. But try instead to learn a few unifying principles like syn-anti addition, pkA, stereochemistry, acid-base chemistry and resonance and you can make sense of a vast landscape of chemistry which you will likely remember. The best textbooks like the one by Clayden et al. indeed emphasize this unified approach. In addition, learning the subject this way will make chemistry much less painful than memorizing it. 

It's very likely that the letter writer's high school teacher made chemistry all about memorization; if that had been the case then it might have been easy to be good at chemistry in the short-term without really understanding most of it. Unfortunately much of chemistry and biology is still stuck - if not by content, by its mental makeup and by the attitude of its teachers- in the nineteenth century where there was no structural theory and no molecular biology and therefore these sciences did appear like a set of disconnected facts to be memorized. That's also why chemistry makes a convenient target. Math and physics are much more obviously about analytical and logical thinking whereas biology is much more easily seen as essential for things like medicine. Chemistry as usual is the middle child, the one everyone likes to treat with benign neglect. But the fact is that the twentieth century saw both chemistry and biology elevated to the status of conceptual sciences, perhaps not as pristinely analytical as math but enough to be able to take a completely logical approach to the way in which they are taught.

Derek and SeeArrOh cover the other objections thoroughly. Physics, chemistry, biology and math are all part of the world we inhabit. I cannot see how omitting any of these from the school curriculum (along with history, politics, economics and literature) could contribute to an informed citizenry. The writer probably makes a good case that a high school shouldn't "force" students to take chemistry, but that hardly detracts from chemistry's intrinsic value value.

Come on Mr. Bernstein, you should at least have your son take chemistry so he can recognize all those dangerous "chemicals" in food products...