Category → The Working Scientist
Did theater shooter use lab address to procure regulated hazardous substances?
This post probably belongs on The Safety Zone blog but I was struck by a comment just made during a news conference in Aurora, Colorado, this afternoon. Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates noted that over the last four months “the suspect had a high volume of packages to both his work and home address.” Oates indicated that these shipments may account for the large amount of ammunition and booby-trap incendiary devices currently being disarmed in the suspect’s apartment.
Work, of course, was the neurosciences PhD program at the University of Colorado School of Medicine on the Anschutz Medical Campus. According to The Scientist, the suspect had done at least two laboratory rotations with faculty in the Department of Pharmacology. (Note: The websites for both the interdisciplinary neuroscience program and the pharmacology department are closed to public access to protect personal contact information for faculty.
While we don’t yet know the precise identity of the explosives in the suspect’s Paris Street apartment building in Aurora, I hypothesize that he took shipments at work of the more eyebrow-raising chemicals. As CU laboratory staff are likely questioned about the suspect’s year in the PhD program, I wonder if anyone might have accidentally opened one of his packages and asked who ordered the [flammable and/or explosive compound].
On a personal note, my heart goes out to the victims of the shootings, their families and other loved ones. I also have immense respect for all of the first-responders and medical staff who have been tending to the victims. I spent ten years of my career at the CU Health Sciences Center in its old location in Denver and have several friends and colleagues in basic science and clinical departments at the Aurora campus. My heart aches for all.
Update 5:12 pm EDT: I just saw a tweet from Matthew Keys, Reuters Deputy Social Media Manager, quoting Chief Oates as saying there was, “[n]o evidence that shooting suspect had access to “dangerous materials” at Colorado medical school.”
Update 12:21 pm EDT, 22 Jul – Gillian Flaccus and Nicholas Riccardi at AP have confirmed my suspicions:
The University of Colorado said Sunday it was investigating whether mass shooting suspect James Holmes used his position as a graduate student to order materials for the potentially deadly booby traps that police said they found in his apartment.
Holmes, 24, got deliveries over four months to his home and school, authorities have said.
The university is looking into what was received at the school to assist police, said spokeswoman Jacque Montgomery.
Update 9:00 pm EDT, 23 Jul – Officials from the University of Colorado Denver | Anschutz Medical Campus held a press conference earlier today to discuss issues of campus security and some questions about the former student. This is the official summary from the University press office. I’m surprised that no one from the national media asked why the campus is called “Denver” when it is fully in Aurora and in another county.
WaPo: Not enough jobs for science PhDs
Tomorrow’s frontpage of The Washington Post will run an article by Brian Vastag (Twitter, WaPo bio) on the employment challenges facing science PhDs. The difficulties are no secret to our readers – whether you are a freshly-minted PhD or a 50-something subjected to downsizing – but I believe that this is the highest profile treatment of the subject in the US print media.
The article even cites the closure of the Roche campus in Nutley that we discussed two weeks ago and, below, employment numbers from the annual ACS survey.
“Scads and scads and scads of people” have been cut free, [former Sanofi-Aventis scientist Kim] Haas said. “Very good chemists with PhDs from Stanford can’t find jobs.”
Largely because of drug industry cuts, the unemployment rate among chemists now stands at its highest mark in 40 years, at 4.6 percent, according to the American Chemical Society, which has 164,000 members. For young chemists, the picture is much worse. Just 38 percent of new PhD chemists were employed in 2011, according to a recent ACS survey.
Although the overall unemployment rate of chemists and other scientists is much lower than the national average, those figures mask an open secret: Many scientists work outside their chosen field.
What amazes me are the number of comments already. I already followed Vastag on Twitter and when he tweeted about the article at 4:44 this afternoon, it had 22 comments. Right now, at 9:50 on Saturday night, the article has accumulated 504 comments. Some of these are nonsensical or non-sequiturs but the bulk are robust and on-topic. I can imagine that the sober assessment of PhD training vs. job market demands will be discussed far and wide on Sunday and in the coming week.
One thing missing from the article was a discussion of the so-called alternative career paths where one uses PhD training but not in an academic or industrial setting. Even a typical non-lab career of science writing is becoming extremely competitive, both for salaried positions and freelancers.
I hesitate to say this without complete data but we may indeed be reaching a point where more PhDs are being produced than can be absorbed by both academia/industry and non-laboratory positions.
Source:
Vastag, Brian. U.S. pushes for more scientists but the jobs aren’t there. The Washington Post. 8 July 2012.
Nutley nostalgia on Roche campus closing
The most-viewed article at C&EN online over the last seven days was news from Lisa M. Jarvis on the announced closing of the venerable Nutley, NJ, campus of Hoffmann-La Roche – better known today as simply Roche. A mere 13 miles from Manhattan’s Times Square, the US headquarters of Swiss company moved to Nutley in 1929.
A total of 1,000 jobs will be lost when the campus closes late in 2013 – Susan Todd at The Star-Ledger has a pair of articles with the details (1, 2). Todd also used the term, “venerable.” The Nutley campus is legendary for the discovery and development of major drugs – isoniazid for tuberculosis, for example – and the manufacture of vitamins. At one time, it was the example of how a pharmaceutical company could run an independent research institute with its Roche Institute of Molecular Biology.
But this week, we lament the sadly unsurprising loss of employment for many of our friends in chemistry and pharmacology, as well as a host of good folks in administration and support services. Despite its contraction from a high of 10,000 employees in its heyday, Roche continued to provide 9-10% of the tax base for the city.
Roche, Building 76, Nutley, NJ following 2010 renovation. Credit: green@worktoday
My nostalgia for Roche extends back to my childhood, growing up on a hill five miles across the Passaic River in the predominantly Polish town of Wallington. From a clearing in the woods on the hill, the major landmark across into Essex County was the Roche tower, built the year before I was born and known by the unglamorous name of Building 76. The route my family took while driving back from the official state pastime of mall shopping invariably took us past the Roche campus on the Route 3 side. This drive past Roche from the west was preceded immediately by a glorious view of the New York City skyline, almost straight on with the Empire State Building. Whenever I see these two landmarks, I know that I’m almost home.
My Uncle Tommy was a facilities maintenance worker at Roche for about 30 years. Readers here are certainly concerned about the loss of scientist jobs – but Roche provided upward mobility for high school and GED graduates like my uncle. He used to buy us our vitamins from the employee purchase plan. My daughter – and much of the internet – absolutely hate the smell of multivitamins. When I stick my nose deep into a bottle, I smell nurturing, love and care. Roche brought the first synthetic vitamin C to market using the combined microbial and organic synthesis method of Nobel laureate Tadeus Reichstein.
Brian Malow: Science Comedian Makes a Move
Brian Malow, new Curator of the SECU Daily Planet. What’s the Daily Planet? Click on the image.
RALEIGH, NC – Although it’s personal day job news, I’m certain this announcement will be of interest to C&EN readers in the Research Triangle area and others in the science communications community.
Brian Malow, Earth’s Premier Science Comedian, has been named Curator of the SECU Daily Planet at the new Nature Research Center (NRC) of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.
Currently residing in San Francisco, Malow produces science videos for TIME magazine’s website and is a contributor to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk radio show.
The SECU Daily Planet is the iconic centerpiece of the new 80,000 square foot wing of North Carolina’s flagship natural science museum.
The NRC addition will open to the public with a 24-hour program of Grand Opening events beginning at 5 pm on Friday, April 20.
The Grand Opening will be preceded by a formal Gala and After Party on the evening of Friday, April 13. Tickets for the Gala and After Party are on sale here but admission to the April 20th public grand opening – and every day afterward – is free.
Building upon a 130-year history of showing visitors what we know about the natural world, the Museum’s NRC will engage visitors in-person and online to experience the scientific process in action: how we know what we know.
And what exactly is the Daily Planet?
Bad news for Bionovo and herbal drug development
A pharmacognosy colleague contacted me on Friday morning with word that the botanical drug development company Bionovo was closing its chemistry group.
Well, the news is actually worse as judging from this 8 pm Friday press release:
Bionovo, Inc. (OTC Link Platform: BNVI.PK) today announced that it will need to obtain substantial additional funding to achieve its objectives of internally developing drugs. The Company reduced its workforce by over 90%. The remaining management of the Company will receive reduced cash compensation until either adequate financing can be obtained or the Company is sold. The Company can not make any assurances about either of these events. As previously announced, management and the board of directors are continuing to explore strategic options for the Company. Management is currently reviewing the status of the ongoing clinical trial for Menerba.
The Company does not currently have adequate internal liquidity to meet its cash needs. If sufficient additional funds are not received in the near term, the Company may not be able to execute its business plan and may need to further curtail or cease operations.
Bionovo has been the rare superb example of a company that’s been trying to develop FDA-approvable drugs based on Chinese traditional medicine. Led by Isaac Cohen, a UCSF guest scientist and Doctoral of Oriental Medicine, and chief medical officer, Mary Tagliaferri, Bionovo took a hard, science-based approach to identifying herbal extracts for cancer and women’s health issues. Cohen and colleagues at UCSF and elsewhere examined Chinese herbal medicines for their biochemical and cellular effects based upon their traditional use.
#icanhazpdf: Civil disobedience?
Some lively Twitter banter has arisen this evening regarding the practice of sharing PDFs of scientific articles when one does not have personal or institutional access.
Specifically, some among my stead have taken to tweeting requests for articles using the #icanhazpdf hashtag.
For non-open-access articles, does this practice violate a publisher’s copyright?
Discuss.
(And I welcome input from my ACS overlords.)
Update 24 December: I have changed the title of this post to reflect a comment below by Michael Eisen that sharing PDFs of journal articles is an act civil disobedience toward the scientific publishing enterprise. I had previously compared the practice to the Underground Railroad or Napster music file sharing. I deeply regret the use of the analogy of PDF file sharing to the Underground Railroad, a network of abolitionists who facilitated the safe escape of enslaved African-Americans in the southern US to freedom in the North and northward to Canada. I, in particular, should be especially sensitive to making such an ill-considered analogy of one of the most degrading episodes in US history to an intellectual discussion of sharing scientific papers. It was wrong, period. I apologize deeply to those offended by my thoughtless mistake.
Call For Social Media Success Stories in Academia
"Do you know the way to San Jose?" (with apologies to Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, and Hal Davis, 1968)
We’re packing up the world headquarters of Terra Sigillata this afternoon and high-tailing it out to San Jose, California, for the annual meeting of SACNAS – the Society Dedicated to Advancing Hispanics, Chicanos, and Native Americans in Science. It’s a tremendous organization comprised of several of my former students and faculty colleagues from over the years and I’m ecstatic about reconnecting with them.
With the initiative of my colleagues – Alberto Roca of MinorityPostdoc.org and Danielle Lee of The Urban Scientist at Scientific American blogs (plus a whole host of online activities) – we pitched and were accepted to present a session on Blogging, Tweeting, & Writing: How an Online Presence Can Impact Science and Your Career.
I’ll be discussing how a responsible, online presence on blogs, Twitter, and Facebook can enhance networking opportunities for graduate students, postdocs, and faculty. Specifically, I’ll introduce how I’ve increased the exposure of my students who are RISE Scholars at North Carolina Central University. In this NIGMS-funded grant, I’ve been helping my students capture their research experiences in their own words (with previous review by their P.I.’s of course, to prevent accidental disclosure of unpublished data). The students have been surprised by the level of engagement and support they’ve received in the comments from scientists all around the world.
But I know of many other students who use blogs and Twitter to engage with the scientific community in ways that brings them positive recognition outside of their academic and laboratory work.
To better prepare for this session, I’d like to gather some advice from you, Dear Reader:
Who are some of students, trainees, and junior faculty, who best exemplify the use of social media for career advancement?
Are you a student who has had Good Things happen to you because of your social media activities? How did that transpire?
If you have any responses, please drop a link in the comments with a brief explanation – or longer if you’d like! And also feel free to recommend the sites and stories of others. I’ll be sure to promote your responses in tomorrow’s talk and direct attendees to this post for future reference.
The three of us thank you so much in advance for your suggestions!
On journalists copy-checking with scientist sources
Should science journalists solicit scientist sources to fact-check article content prior to publication?
Or do scientists have no more right to do so than, say, politicians previewing the latest criticism of their policies.
"Just try fact-checking with me, pal." The legendary Helen Thomas. Credit: helenthomas.org
I have to admit that I had not quite anticipated the magnitude of interest in these questions when I first wrote about the topic in late September at my Take As Directed blog on the PLoS Blogs network.
The backstory: I had been watching an episode of Vincent Racaniello’s excellent netcast, This Week in Virology (TWiV), from the the International Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) in mid-September. The first 35 minutes saw Vincent and Rich Condit turn the tables to interview Chicago Tribune science and medical reporter, Trine Tsouderos. Trine is perhaps best-known of late for her coverage of the faulty link between XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome as well as the suspension of Dr. Mark Geier, a physician using a chemical castration drug to treat people with autism.
Trine mentioned in the interview that she often runs passages of complex science from her articles past the scientists she had interviewed for the piece. She doesn’t do so for approval or in any way to affect the tone of her writing but rather to be sure that she has interpreted the scientific findings accurate (my words, not hers).
Compilation of synthetic marijuana posts (Spice, K2)
Welcome to readers arriving from Reddit – scroll down through the post for links to our more detailed discussions on cannabimimetics. (updated 8 October)
Recent media coverage of our writings on the chemistry, pharmacology, public health risks, and regulation of synthetic marijuana herbal incense products has led us to put together a compilation of posts we’ve written here on the topic over the last year-and-a-half.
Go. Dream. Read.
I thought I’d get a real blogpost up before getting on a plane to Chicago today. Alas, not.
In the meantime, have you been reading the Just Another Electron Pusher blog across the masthead here at CENtral Science?
You must. Seriously.
Since Leigh Krietsch Boerner left us for greener pastures, Christine Herman and Glen Ernst have been destroying it like a boss.
Go do this dream exercise as Christine suggests. And do play the video to learn about white blood cells – and see her dance!
Then, go congratulate Glen on his rescue from an involuntary hiatus.
Then, tonight, sit down with a glass of wine and read Christine’s profile of Kawal Tandon, a wine industry chemist.
And a hearty “well-done” to our benevolent overlord and C&EN Online Editor, Rachel Pepling, at the home office for putting together these two, fabulous writers to capture life in chemistry from graduate student to formerly-unemployed mid-career chemist.
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