CENtral Science

Women chemists of color on credentials

When women chemists of color talk about how they got to where they are now professionally, the conversation can be simultaneously funny and poignant. At the ACS Women Chemists of Color Summit symposium on Tuesday morning, Aug. 24, seven such women joined in a semicircle before a packed audience to share their experiences about overcoming hurdles unique to women of color. Moderated by Zakiya Wilson, assistant director for graduate recruitment and admissions at the department of chemistry at Louisiana State University and Gloria Thomas, an assistant chemistry professor at Xavier University of Louisiana, the session was frequently punctuated by laughter. As a person of color myself, I was inspired by these women’s determination to break barriers and claim their rightful places in their chosen professional roles on the basis of merit. Their example eases the path for other women of color.

Discussants at Women Chemists of Color Summit: from left, Julia Chan, Louisiana State University; Thomas; Robyn Hannigan, University of Massachussetts, Boston; Wilson: Linette Watkins, Texas State University, San Marcos; Malika Jeffries-El, Iowa State University; Prather; Shu; Sharon Kennedy, Colgate-Palmolive

Two stories about establishing credibility and credentials stood out for me.

Shu Shu (yes, her first and last names look identical when written in English, and they are pronounced the same, but they are represented by different Chinese characters, she explained), a chemical engineer with a Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology and now working at Shell in Houston, recounted her first overseas assignment, to the Netherlands, to supervise the start up of a refinery unit that she had designed. The child of a Chinese mother and a Japanese father, Shu is soft spoken and almost delicate in appearance.

Most companies have diversity programs, Shu said, and in Shell the concept of diversity goes beyond the usual factors of sex, race, and age to diversity in personalities, ways of thinking, and ways of working. “I felt terrific because I worked with colleagues from all over the world,” she said, “until I got my first assignment to go to Netherlands to work in a refinery.”

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Climate Change and a Book Signing Event

On Monday evening in Boston, nearly 200 people gathered in a ballroom of the Seaport Hotel for the ACS Forum on Science & Consequences of Climate Change. The forum was sponsored by the ACS Committee on Environmental Improvement (CEI) and was an ACS Presidential Event. It was moderated by Charles Kolb, president and CEO of Aerodyne Research and chair of CEI. 

To this reporter, the disconnects that are manifest in discussions of climate change were in full blossom on Monday. Earlier in the day, I had read a long op-ed piece in the New York Times, “Disaster at the Top of the World,” by Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor of global systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, Waterloo, Canada. Homer-Dixon opens his essay with observations from a Canadian Coast Guard ice breaker plying the Arctic Sea, and he writes:

The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and this summer its sea ice is melting at a near-record pace. The sun is heating the newly open water, so it will take longer to refreeze this winter, and the resulting thinner ice will melt more easily next summer.

 At the same time, warm Pacific Ocean water is pulsing through the Bering Strait into the Arctic basin, helping melt a large area of sea ice between Alaska and eastern Siberia. Scientists are just beginning to learn how this exposed water has changed the movement of heat energy and major air currents across the Arctic basin, in turn producing winds that push remaining sea ice down the coasts of Greenland into the Atlantic.

Globally, 2010 is on track to be the warmest year on record. In regions around the world, indications abound that earth’s climate is quickly changing, like the devastating mudslides in China and weeks of searing heat in Russia. But in the world’s capitals, movement on climate policy has nearly stopped.

Homer-Dixon argues in his essay that climate change may not be gradual and easily adapted to and that a “devastating climate shock” may well be delivered in a very short time period. He maintains that nations should be preparing a “Plan Z” to deal with such a climate crisis.

In Boston, two speakers at the forum, Michael McElroy, the Abbott Lawrence Rotch Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and the Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Sciences at Harvard University, and James McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard, presented, first, a primer on climate change and, second, an examination of anticipated climate change impacts.

An ACS colleague who sat through these first two talks with me commented, “How can you possibly listen to these two talks and not be convinced that this is a serious problem?”

The third talk, by John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center and distinguished professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and Alabama’s State Climatologist, made an effort to answer that question. Christy is not a climate change denier, but he is skeptical of the predictions of many atmospheric models that project significant increases in Earth’s temperature if atmospheric CO₂ levels continue to rise, and he presented a number of studies that called into question whether the models’ predictions matched measured temperatures. Christy’s presentation would have been more credible had he focused on fewer examples and done a better job explaining where his data had come from.

Christy also echoed many of the climate change skeptics with less impressive credentials than his in his overall message, which was, basically, that climate change models don’t match actual temperature measurements (a lot of climate scientists don’t agree); that even if rising atmospheric CO₂ levels are causing global warming, nothing we can do will make any difference; and even if we could do something about it, it would inflict an injustice on the world’s poor. Christy’s message, in other words, was a call for inaction.

Robert Socolow, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where he is also the co-principal investigator of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative, gave the concluding talk. Socolow primarily focused on the National Academies work on a major report on “America’s Climate Choices.” Four panels have already published their reports, and the final summary report will be released shortly. Socolow summarized the findings of the four panels and made a number of personal comments on those findings.

Of the many trenchant points Socolow made in his talk, two stood out for me. When it comes to climate science and policy:

• Never in history has the work of so few led to so much being asked of so many.
• What has seemed too hard becomes what simply must be done.

One other note on a completely different subject: One of yesterday’s events at the C&EN booth in the exposition was a book signing. George M. Whitesides, a chemistry professor at Harvard University, and Felice C. Frankel, an award-winning science photographer who holds concurrent positions at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, signed copies of their new book, “No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale.”

Whitesides and Frankel at C&EN book signing event

GRADUATE STUDENTS’ HOME RUN

I attended most of the Aug 23 ACS Presidential Symposium titled Chemistry & Policy: Solving Problems at the Interface, a symposium organized by 10 MIT graduate students, eight of whom are pictured below: Rebecca Parkhurst (from left), Brian Walker, Johanna W. Wolfson, Jose M. Lobez, Jan M. Schnoor, Brandi Cossairt, Jared Silvia, and Brett VanVeller. Not pictured are Jeewoo Lim and Kristin Glab.

All smiles after successful symposium

By many measures, the symposium was a smashing success. By the time the last speaker, Harvard University chemistry professor George Whitesides, started to talk the 200-person-capacity room was standing room only.

The graduate students organized and executed the symposium under the auspices of ACS’s Graduate Student Symposium Planning Committee (GSSPC) Project, which encourages and supports the involvement of graduate students in planning symposia at the American Chemical Society national meetings.

The roster of speakers was impressive. Joining Whitesides were MIT chemistry professor and former CIA director John M. Deutch; William S. Rees Jr. of Los Alamos National Laboratory; Jay D. Keasling of UC Berkeley; Kathryn Beers of NIST; David Goldston of NRDC, Joan Berkowitz of Farkas Berkowitz & Company; John Gavenonis of DuPont; and Janan Hayes, Chair ACS History of Chemistry and a member of the ACS’s board of directors.

ACS recorded the presentations and will be available on acs.org in about two weeks. After the symposium, I talked to four of the student organizers and came away impressed with the methodical, collaborative, consultative approach they took to plan and implement this successful meeting. I’ve asked them to think about what they’ve learned from and how they’ve grown because of this experience. Stay tuned for a story about this student success in C&EN.

Bertozzi: As Infectious As Ever

At the Aug. 22 ACS Presidential Symposium on the impact of science and technology on global health care, in Boston, I reconnected with Carolyn R. Bertozzi of UC Berkeley.

Bertozzi at ACS Presidential Symposium on the Impact of Science & Technology on Health Care, Aug. 22, 2010, Boston

I  profiled her in 2001, after she won a MacArthur Fellowship, one of three women chemists who were among the fellows named in 2000. After more than a decade of following her career from a distance, I again had the pleasure of listening to her easily accessible explanation of the theme of her research. Her enthusiasm is as infectious as ever.

Bertozzi has pioneered bioorthogonal chemistry, which she defines as chemistry that does not interfere or interact with biological systems. This chemistry—which involves introducing a functionality in sugars that get incorporated into glycolipids and glycoproteins that will specifically undergo a rapid chemical reaction with a molecule that serves as a probe–is having a huge impact on the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries but is still a largely “unknown universe,” she said. Among the well-established applications of Bertozzi’s chemistry is imaging of the glycome, the universe of glycans or carbohydrate oligomers on cell membranes that is a dynamic indicator of the cell’s physiological state. “When cells transform from one state to another, there is a corresponding change in the glycome,” she said. “To the extent that glycans can be used as indicators of health disease, you can understand the interest in imaging glycans; you could you detect tumors in vivo without invading the body.”

Another major application, Bertozzi said, is protein engineering through site-specific modification. Protein modification, she said, is now a major platform for drug development at biotech companies such as CovX (which Pfizer has acquired), Ambrx, Redwood Bioscience (which Bertozzi founded), and Allozyne.

Bioorthogonal chemistry is an open field waiting to be mined, Bertozzi said. The textbook has not been written, many more reactions are awaiting discovery and development.

During our informal chat before the program began, Bertozzi mentioned that she continues to indulge her passion of working with high school students to encourage and support their interest in science. I wondered how she still could find the time, and she said that these days the students come to her, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which hosts monthly lectures  called Nano High. Her February 9, 2009, lecture is available in video. Watch and see why Bertozzi is such a great teacher.

This And That

I was away the week before last on annual leave with my wife, Jan, visiting Oregon. We spent two days in Portland, two in Hood River, and three in Bend hiking, touring, eating—boy, did we eat; they take their food seriously in Oregon—and drinking some of the state’s wondrous microbrews. So this is a week to catch up, get ready for the ACS national meeting in Boston (more on this after the jump), and write an editorial on this and that.

Did you know that ACS Executive Director and CEO Madeleine Jacobs has started a blog on the ACS Network? Her first post went up on Aug. 4, and she used it to praise ACS’s outstanding staff on the occasion of the retirement of Marlyne Carr after 29 years of service to the society, the past six-and-a-half years as a special assistant to Jacobs.

As most of you know, Madeleine was C&EN’s editor-in-chief from 1995 to 2004, and in that position she was renowned for her graceful, witty, and thoughtful editorials. She says in her second blog post that writing those editorials was harder than writing a blog post. As her managing editor and the first person usually to critique the drafts of her editorials, I can attest to how hard she worked to polish them. I know her well enough to know that she will work just as hard to polish her blog entries; they’ll just be shorter than an editorial.

Check out Madeleine’s blog. And make it a point to leave a comment. We need to encourage her to keep up her blogging in the face of the many other demands on her time.

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