February 27, 2012 - IMM@BUCT

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CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS 1155—16th St., N.W., Washington, DC 20036 (202) 872-4600 or (800) 227-5558 EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: Rudy M. Baum DEPUTY EDITOR-IN-CHIEF: A. Maureen Rouhi MANAGING EDITOR: Robin M. Giroux SENIOR ADMINISTRATIVE OFFICER: Marvel A. Wills NEWS William G. Schulz, Editor BUSINESS Michael McCoy, Assistant Managing Editor NORTHEAST: (732) 906-8300 Lisa M. Jarvis (Senior Editor), Rick Mullin (Senior Editor), Marc S. Reisch (Senior Correspondent), Alexander H. Tullo (Senior Editor), Melody M. Bomgardner (Senior Editor), Rachel Eskenazi (Administrative Assistant). HONG KONG: 852 9093 8445 Jean-François Tremblay (Senior Correspondent). HOUSTON: (281) 486- 3900 Ann M. Thayer (Senior Correspondent). GOVERNMENT & POLICY Susan R. Morrissey, Assistant Managing Editor Britt E. Erickson (Senior Editor), Glenn Hess (Senior Editor), Cheryl Hogue (Senior Correspondent), Jeff Johnson (Senior Correspondent), Andrea L. Widener (Associate Editor) SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY/EDUCATION BOSTON: (617) 395-4163 Amanda Yarnell, Assistant Managing Editor. WASHINGTON: Stuart A. Borman (Deputy Assistant Managing Editor), Celia Henry Arnaud (Senior Editor), Carmen Drahl (Associate Editor), Stephen K. Ritter (Senior Correspondent), Lauren K. Wolf (Associate Editor). BERLIN: 49 30 2123 3740 Sarah Everts (Senior Editor). CHICAGO: (847) 679- 1156 Mitch Jacoby (Senior Editor). NORTHEAST: (732) 906-8302 Bethany Halford (Senior Editor). WEST COAST: (925) 485-1034 Jyllian Kemsley (Associate Editor), (510) 870-1617 Elizabeth K. Wilson (Senior Editor). BEIJING: 150 1138 8372 Jessie Jiang (Contributing Editor). JOURNAL NEWS & COMMUNITY: (202) 872-6039 Lila Guterman (Senior Editor), (626) 765-6767 Michael Torrice (Associate Editor) ACS NEWS & SPECIAL FEATURES Sophie L. Rovner, Assistant Managing Editor Linda Wang (Senior Editor). DALLAS: (972) 529-4351 Susan J. Ainsworth (Senior Editor) EDITING & PRODUCTION Kimberly R. Twambly, Assistant Managing Editor Craig Bettenhausen (Assistant Editor), Emily Bones (Assistant Editor), Sophia L. Cai (Assistant Editor), Nader Heidari (Assistant Editor), Arlene Goldberg-Gist, Senior Editor Jeff A. Huber (Assistant Editor), Gail M. Mortenson (Associate Editor) ART & DESIGN Robert Bryson, Design Director Robin L. Braverman (Senior Art Director) Yang H. Ku (Associate Designer) C&EN ONLINE Rachel Sheremeta Pepling, Editor Tchad K. Blair (Visual Designer), Luis A. Carrillo (Production Manager), Ty A. Finocchiaro (Web Associate), Pamela Rigden Snead (Web Products Manager) PRODUCTION & IMAGING Renee L. Zerby, Lead Digital Production Specialist Tim Bauer, Richard C. Smith, and Steven J. Lovasz (Digital Production Associates) SALES & MARKETING Elise Swinehart, Assistant Director Elaine Facciolli Jarrett (Marketing Manager) Wendy Wise (Marketing Manager) Angela Yeo (Associate Marketing Manager) ADVISORY BOARD Paul J. Bracher, Jean-Claude Bradley, David Clary, Seth M. Cohen, Rita R. Colwell, Christopher C. Cummins, Daryl W. Ditz, Michael P. Doyle, Donald Hilvert, Malika Jeffries-El, Rohit Khanna, Roger LaForce, Derek Lowe, Michael W. Major, Andrew D. Maynard, Harold Meckler, Stephen A. Munk, Nick Roelofs, John M. Schwab, Francis X. Sherman, Thomas R. Tritton, Paul Turgeon, Paul A. Wender, Frank D. Wicks, Elias Zerhouni, David Zimmermann, Dorothy Zolandz Published by the AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY Madeleine Jacobs, Executive Director & CEO Brian Crawford, President, Publications Division EDITORIAL BOARD: Ned D. Heindel (Chair); ACS Board of Directors Chair: William F. Carroll Jr.; ACS President: Bassam Z. Shakhashiri; Stephanie L. Brock, John N. Russell Jr., Leah Solla, Peter J. Stang Copyright 2012, American Chemical Society Canadian GST Reg. No. R127571347 Volume 90, Number 9 IT IS TIME FOR A CHANGE IT WAS REFRESHING to read the realistic editorial “Employment Outlook: Clouded,” about the job situation in our profession ( C&EN, Nov. 7, 2011, page 5 ). The editorial speaks about it openly. It dares to point out that “the job market for chemists has not been bright over the past few years. Even before the onset of the Great Recession.” For years, many of those in the Ivory Towers protected by the Tenure Moat were waving the red flag of not having enough chemists. There were many Chicken Littles with predictions about dire consequences of the falling sky. There is nothing new about the shortage of jobs, which started many years ago. Sputnik made us realize that science education was inadequate in the U.S. and started a rush to produce more chemists. However, there was a chain reaction. Many graduates went to academe to produce more chemists. It was evident that somewhere the process had to come to an end, but those who dared to question the lack of proper attire of the king were ignored. In the 1960s, the ACS Employment Clearing House showed four jobs available for everyone who was looking for a job. Generally those were not recent graduates, because companies went to the universities to interview and hire the students before they had graduated. Starting in the ’70s the situation changed: Job seekers outnumbered the jobs offered by a 3:1 ratio. The most alarming fact was that the job seekers were mostly young graduates. Midcareer chemists who were terminated considered it more and more hopeless to sign up. I chaired various committees where we dealt with the problem of supply and demand. I also wrote a number of ACS Comments discussing possible actions as early as 1985. For a list, visit www.pavlath. org. However, if we dwell on past mistakes, proverbially we will miss the future. This is not finger-pointing. The question is, what should be done? The editorial suggests that chemists should be versatile and willing to change to areas where there are more jobs. Naturally, this should be done, but it’s just a bandage because it avoids one of the main causes of the problem. During my ACS presidency, I talked to many industrial representatives to get their views. They stated what we knew but refused to make substantial changes. We have the best educational system in LETTERS the world; our graduates receive excellent preparation to go to another university and to produce graduates with the same capability. However, we do not prepare them for industrial employment where most of the jobs are for chemists. In order to make graduates suitable for industrial jobs, the curriculum has to be changed. Unfortunately, academe needs cheap labor for work that can result in publications to obtain tenure and grants. Teaching does not provide tenure; it has become a burden and secondary to the pursuit of fame, grants, and tenure. Until the system is changed, the students are the ones who will have difficulties in their job hunt. Attila E. Pavlath ACS president, 2001 Albany , Calif. THOUGHTS ON TRANSCENDENCE RUDY BAUM’S Dec. 12, 2011, editorial (page 3), which deals largely with an article by Michael Polanyi that appeared in the Aug. 21, 1967, issue of C&EN, was of interest to me. I had recently read a new book, “ Michael Polanyi and His Generation : Origins of the Social Construction of Science,” by Mary Jo Nye, published by the University of Chicago Press. It is an engrossing story of one of the outstanding scientists of his time, and a fine historical account of the lives of a generation of European scientists caught up in the wars and economic strife that wracked Europe during the period 1914 through 1945. Baum takes a turn at critiquing Polanyi’s C&EN article, in which Polanyi argues that “life transcends physics and chemistry.” That is, the workings of a biological entity such as a cell cannot be ex- HOW TO REACH US CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS LETTERS TO THE EDITOR ◾ Our e-mail address is edit.cen@acs.org. ◾ Our fax number is (202) 872-8727. ◾ Or you can send your letter to: C&EN Editor-in-Chief 1155—16th St., N.W. Washington, DC 20036 ◾ Letters should generally be 400 words or fewer and should include the writer’s full name, address, and home telephone; letters may be edited for purposes of clarity and space. Because of the heavy volume of mail received at C&EN, writers are limited to one letter in a six-month period. WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG 2 FEBRUARY 27, 2012
plained by simple recourse to physical and chemical laws alone. Baum finds himself in disagreement with at least some of what Polanyi writes but ducks an attempt to reconstruct the arguments that are involved. However, a few words on the historical aspects of the issues involved might be of some interest. Polanyi is credited with keeping alive the idea that there is much more to understanding biology than a strict reductionism can provide. In two of his major works, “Personal Knowledge” and “The Tacit Dimension,” he wrote of the concept of emergence, the idea that the structure and organization of an entity, be it a machine such as a wristwatch or a biological cell, exert what philosophers refer to as a downward causation on the basic physical and chemical processes that the entity engages in. The organization and threedimensional structure of the cell determine how certain reactions occur, how components of the cell are transported, and so on. One can say, then, that while everything that goes on in the cell is in accord with the laws of physics and chemistry, the properties that we think of as cellular can’t be accounted for simply by supplying a list of the molecules and their amounts; they emerge from the cell’s structure and organization. Polanyi wrote on these matters near the end of his career, and in a time when reductionism was the ideal toward which science reached. He did not get all the biology right, and he tilted at some windmills he might better have left alone. In truth, his C&EN piece is rather turgidly written and not always clear. But while he did not actually invent the notion of emergence, Polanyi was prophetic in expounding upon it when he did. In the 1990s, emergence theory arose to become a significant topic of discussion in biology and the philosophy of science. Theodore L. Brown Estero , Fla. IN 40 YEARS of practicing science, I couldn’t help but confirm my intimate belief that society is ultimately ruled by the philosophers and not by scientists and engineers. Even if we had the firm conviction that everything in the heavens and on Earth is reducible to physical interaction and to the stringent laws of causality, this wouldn’t be more than a philosophical ideology, because we have not made the world; we just discover it and try to fit our gained LETTERS knowledge into hypotheses and theories. For this reason, I stopped criticizing philosophers on scientific and technical grounds; this would be equivalent to cutting the branch of the tree whereupon I am sitting. Philosophers may, however, be criticized on philosophical grounds. For example, someone pretending that every material process is reducible to physical causality would have to assume that human action is also reducible to physical causality (after all, we are made of atoms). But assuming this, we can no longer uphold the concepts of freedom and moral responsibility, and we cannot justify either to reward or to punish someone for what he has done, because everything on Earth would then be a pure mechanical action-reaction mechanism, outside the categories of good and evil, governed solely by the laws of causality. Denying the transcendence of life will at the same time deny the inalienable rights of the human being and the possibility of a lawful, organized, and civilized society! Philosophers such as Michael Polanyi expressed this early in a terminology that we should at least try to understand. Biology, “the science of life,” will, for the philosophical reasons given above, never be a molecular science in the deterministiccausal sense. This affirmation by no means excludes molecular biology as an integrating and very helpful part of the science of life. Similarly, the fact that information transfer can be tied to deterministic-causal physical processes (if not, we couldn’t copy a file onto our hard disk), does not mean that information is always of deterministiccausal nature. It is noteworthy that the (empirically found!) second principle of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a closed system is not bound to any conservation law, and according to our observation, it is generally increasing with time. Entropy, in a mathematical sense, is the logarithm of the information content of the system. In other words, according to our empirical findings, the information content of a closed system may, and generally does, increase with time. As information can be the cause of a physical process, we must conclude that there are not only physical but also nonphysical causes of physical processes. The second principle of thermodynamics is the principle of transcendence of life! Edgar Müller Prilly , Switzerland TOKYO ELECTRIC POWER CO. THIS WEEK ONLINE Little Radiation From Fukushima Reached U.S. After an earthquake and tsunami struck Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant last March, the plant released radioactive gases and particulates that circled the globe. Now scientists estimate the material boosted soil radioactivity in the U.S. by on average 3 to 10%. cenm.ag/env65 Paper Device Monitors Liver Health An alarming side effect of many medications is liver damage, which if unchecked can cause death. Monitoring liver damage is a challenge in developing regions without access to clinical tools and skilled personnel. Now researchers have created a cheap device made of paper to quickly and easily measure a patient’s liver health without a hospital’s laboratory tools. cenm.ag/anl55 Drug Delivery Hooked On Sugar In an advance for drug delivery, researchers have demonstrated that they can slip large biological molecules inside cells by tagging them with small molecules called boronates. The boronates deliver molecular cargo by reacting with sugars on the cell surface. The researchers hope the new delivery method will aid the development of treatments for cancer and other diseases. cenm.ag/bio13 Introducing Fine Line CENtral Science introduces its newest blog, Fine Line. C&EN Senior Editor Rick Mullin covers the fine chemicals market, keeping you up-to-date on the latest moves by companies and changes in industry regulations. In his first post, he describes the mood at the Informex meeting in New Orleans after recent changes in senior management at several firms. cenblog.org/fine-line WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG 3 FEBRUARY 27, 2012
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February 27, 2012 - IMM@BUCT

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