Monday, April 11, 2011

Too many chemists -- the letters

The reader response to Beth Halford's article on whether or not we've been overproducing Ph.D.s is in at Chemical and Engineering News. While most of the letters rehash many of the arguments that we've all had (Yes, too many chemists! No, not enough chemists!), there were a couple that presented some interesting viewpoints:

Entrepreneurship? Stephen Greer of Lansing, Michigan writes the following as part of his letter:
Nowhere in the article did I see a mention of young Ph.D.s striking out on their own and commercializing their own ideas. It’s called entrepreneurship. It’s been happening for years with biologists, many of whom founded those biotech companies. Ditto for those midcareer chemists who find themselves in a downsizing crisis. Entrepreneurship is now part of the culture in the U.S. Scientists have been doing this for 200 years, going back to E. I. du Pont de Nemours.
There should be plenty of jobs for chemists, especially in materials science, a specialty that is on the vanguard of a revolution. And materials science spans many different chemistry specialties: polymers, inorganics (batteries), and more. But these jobs will likely be at smaller companies. Some of those chemists should be encouraged to nurture their own ideas and commercialize them. It is a hard way to make a living, but very satisfying and with the potential for profound success. Professors should be telling their students starting in the undergrad years to be open to striking out on their own and forming their own enterprises with the ideas only chemists can conjure.
While I actually think entrepreneurship is a great idea for every young chemist, the problem is this: not every research problem can be commercialized. In addition, who's going to fund this boost in entrepreneurship? Venture capitalists are not exactly handing out free money these days, you know? More business acumen is going to be a handy solution, but it's hardly going to be a panacea for unemployed chemists.

Cui bono? Michael Baird of Kingston, Ontario writes:
Indeed, while one might well carry out research in chemistry because one enjoys it, no one should limit his or her horizons to what a supervisor does or, worse, to what a supervisor deems fashionable. What one really accomplishes in a quality graduate program is developing the abilities to reason, to solve problems, and to work effectively. With this broader purpose in mind, doctoral candidates should be mentored to understand that there can be interesting jobs, often involving research that is extraordinarily challenging, outside of their current, necessarily very narrow areas of expertise and interest.
I suspect that most chemists know this to be the case. However, I suspect that most chemists wish to stay within their field for any number of reasons (comfort, direct expertise, etc.) but one psychological one in particular: it justifies the cost of graduate school. I'll even give it a name:
CJ's fallacy of graduate school sunk costs: If you can find a job in your field of chemistry, that means that X grueling years of graduate school were worth it.
One can easily imagine the other thought process: I spent 5 years learning ABC chemistry, now I can't find a job doing that, but I did find a job doing MNO chemistry. Guess those 5 years were wasted! Of course, this is a faulty line of thinking. But I'll bet that it's common.

Finally, who benefits from this line of mentoring? Not the mentor, that's for sure.

Huh? Readers, if you can find a common thread in William Larsen of Southington, CT's letter, I'd like to hear it. Here it is, in all its glory:
Although one must admire John M. Deutch and George M. Whitesides, their collective perspective on the state of our art represents that of but one town (albeit quite a town) in an ever more multifaceted technical world.
The chemistry profession is not responsible for the financial boondoggles that are stripping government research funding bare. At General Electric (my employer, once home to a fellow named Langmuir), 39 new U.S. openings for scientists have been posted in the past 28 days (www.ge.com/careers). Not so bad.

My advice to college students: If I were an aspiring young chemist (I am old), I would again major in chemistry or chemical engineering. But because of the changing times, I would now minor in geology and attend with glee any ACS symposia on the early- and late-transition metals and the lanthanides. Who else but surface scientists (that is, chemists) are going to bring the concentration of atmospheric CO2 in for a landing?
I regret to inform Dr./Mr. Larsen that there are only 3 current chemistry openings at GE.

Ultimately, I think he's right -- there are a lot of Big Problems left for chemists to solve. But those positions don't seem to be coming anytime soon for all the unemployed Ph.D. chemists that are out there. Let's hope that things will change sooner rather than later.

24 comments:

  1. I was just reading all of those comments. Makes me think that the 4 of us should have put together our own letter to CENews.
    I do feel that entrepreneurship is a problem that chemists don't face as well as people of other professions. I understand that there is a lack of VC funding available and that not all projects could or should be commercialized. However, entrepreneurship is somethings that we need to do better for the sake of our field.

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  2. Wow, Dr. Larsen (4th letter-writer), here's my wounds, want to rub a little more salt in them?

    One of the tougher "generation gaps" we young scientists have had to overcome is the perspective by chemistry "lifers" over 60 that jobs are always there if you work hard enough, with pensions, travel funds, blah blah blah. I hear stories all the time about chemists coming up in the '70s who did their 3-year PhDs, then simply had their advisors pick up the phone, and they got a 30-year career at DuPont...or a FACULTY job!

    Well, that gravy train is over, folks.

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  3. Matt, a question for you the professor:

    What's the difference between an original proposal examination and an entrepreneurial pitch for VC funding? Not much, I'll bet. (I hope a reader will prove me wrong.)

    In that (optimistic) case, the skill set's already being taught.

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  4. I agree it's a conundrum. Chemistry is as important, if not more important, than it ever was. Why isn't this translating into jobs? Is it all going to go overseas?

    There is entrepeneuer money out there - but it's mostly going to innovating in the financial world (Lord save us). I feel like we're in a bit of a dark ages now - we have members of Congress harping on light bulbs of all things.

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  5. CJ,

    The money/financial side of pitching a business plan is not covered at all in chemistry training. That's at least as important as the technology side.

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  6. @CJ
    In any proposal exam I have been a part of the main thrust is: what are you trying to measure, how are you going to measure it, is this different than what's been done, and what are your contingencies. Not a bit of these has to do with commercialization and venture processes.
    The skills you learn by doing a prop exam can be applied to a VC pitch. However, the two are worlds apart in the aim and focus and what is discussed during the talk. And, unfortunately, this is the part of the "business" that we are never taught/never really work on.

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  7. I find Baird's argument pops up whenever someone questions the utility of a Ph.D. If, as he suggests, graduate work is there to improve problem-solving and reasoning abilities, then why do we collectively invest billions in hardware? We could accomplish Baird's goals with paper and pencil. Establish a Department of Puzzles and Brain Teasers at every college.

    Scientific graduate work is training to interrogate Nature using a discipline's hard-learned tactics. If Baird (and a good portion of Ph.D.-holders) are unclear on what the educational process actually is meant to produce, then I have to question whether that process is currently doing much of anything at all.

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  8. I'd have thought that Baird's argument "What one really accomplishes in a quality graduate program is developing the abilities to reason, to solve problems, and to work effectively." would be debunked by the observation that these are things that one should have learned prior to entering grad school.

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  9. "Who else but surface scientists (that is, chemists) are going to bring the concentration of atmospheric CO2 in for a landing?"

    30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide are produced each year...that's 4E38 molecules. Assume a monolayer is approximately 1E15 molecules per cm^2, and you'll get 4E23 cm^2. Apply that to the dimensions of a sphere, and you get something with a diameter of ~ 4 million km EACH YEAR. (For reference, Jupiter is a mere 140 thousand km wide.)

    Obviously, Dr. Larsen is right: We're going to need a lot more surface scientists.

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  10. You know, I've always been interested in the fixation of CO2 as a solid; maybe sodium carbonate? With that in mind, I calculate that (using the density of Na2CO3 at 2.53 grams/meter), you'd generate about 7.23E+10 metric tons of the stuff a year (if you captured it all.) Maybe I did my math wrong, but that works out to a cube that's 3 km on a side or so.

    I think we could start piling that up in the Mojave, really. (I mean, who would notice?)

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  11. Why not just build a giant (okay truly huge!) chimney and pump the gas out into space?

    Mankind 1 - Greenhouse Gas 0

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  12. Implementing an entrepreneurial component to PhD programs should be easy, it's all about presentations:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704101604576247143383496656.html

    No need to fiddle with several elements of the periodic table...

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  13. @Chemjobber

    Shhh, don't let your simple idea on carbon capture ruin someone's next grant on a super complicated method:

    http://yaghi.chem.ucla.edu/attachments/01ucla-newsroom.pdf

    Nature has been giving us some hints for awhile now:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limestone

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  14. Love the idea of graduate school sunk costs! These are definetly present and are a huge emotional barrier to many.

    Could extend this principal to the Net Present Value of one's career decision at any point of time.... Time value of money is important in making decisions. Why switch careers when you can potentially make 70-110K if you just find the perfect job in your field of study? However the future must also been accounted for... For example, if you accept a big salary at pharma, will your salary be high until you hit your mid 30's or 40's then drop off to slightly above minimum wage? Would it be better to accept a lower salary and work up to a higher salary later in life?

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  15. "What's the difference between an original proposal examination and an entrepreneurial pitch for VC funding? "

    The original proposal examination focuses on 'can this be done'. It also has a touchy-feeling component of a sense of pride and accomplishment of showing how smart you are for thinking of it.

    An entrepreneurial pitch focuses on 'should this be done'. It is simple numbers and some complex business (and in some cases technical) assumptions. The assumptions may include a risk component which may include the 'can this be done' component. The business aspect looks at the project that one has such a sense of pride for, and reduces it down to a simple question. If the project is accepted by the VC, will the risk adjusted Net Present Value of the project provide more money than any common investment tool (i.e. bonds) could?

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  16. Re CO2 fixation and conversion to cement. A Bay area co, CDXS, has received tens (hundreds?) of millions so far to develop enzymes to help do this. I get that there are issues with this idea, but it's millions of times better than the rubes from the UN (I assume with help from BCG or McKinsey...) who postulated the notion of taking CO2 and dumping in magical pockets under the ocean. No, really, these people are serious....

    on VC pitches, no, they're not entirely different than science. In both one takes in data, looks at it relative other factors, and synthesizes a value. Pretty simple. The difficulty in comparison to chemistry is that the constants one uses to assign a value (P/whatever multiple, discount rate, time to cash flows) are unknowable and subject to massive uncertainty. VCs (and HF guys on wall st) value projects based on projections of sales 5 to 10 years in the future for a drug that may or may not get approved. Impressively, they are able to do so with 2 decimal point accuracy....

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  17. "Impressively, they are able to do so with 2 decimal point accuracy.... "

    And there you have it. This is why those on Wall Street will always make more then chemists.

    They have a gift for b.s., and the bravado to convince those with money.

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  18. ...to convince those with money to part with it.

    A short comment on E.I. DuPont, referred to by Stephen Greer as an entrepreneur: DuPont was the son of a French aristocrat, and due to his wealth was basically a gentlemen scientist (no lowly graduate school stipend for him) who was able to study under Lavoisier . DuPont was strongly encouraged by President Thomas Jefferson to come to the US and manufacture gunpowder, which Jefferson wanted for the US Army. DuPont took Jefferson up on his offer.

    So there you have it - a wealthy scion of an aristocratic family, with a major customer already lined up before the first ounce of gunpowder had been made. None of this would have been possible without DuPont's advantaged background. This wasn't some poor chemist pulling himself up by his bootstraps, and it wasn't (isn't) the typical entrepeneurial story.

    Though I've tried googling Stephen Greer's name, I have been unable to ascertain if he's some kind of entrepreneur himself, or what.

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  19. "Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living at it.." Albert Einstein

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  20. Humm, Where to start with all this stupidity?

    Entrepreneurial is a hard word to apply to chemistry. It is not like you can write code in your basement and become a zillionaire. No, you need to work with chemicals and that is a prohibitively expensive problem. I just shut down a biotech chemistry lab. I would never ever start up one in this country again. The personal liability, the permits, enviromnental issues, safety, waste disposal, lab energy costs, fire control systems and employees make it very, very expensive, and it just not feasible to have a working chemistry lab without tons and tons of money at your disposal. Try doing it in your garage and find yourself in jail for violation of some law related to chemicals: inorganic, organic and biochemicals are all have same problems for basement labs. This is no longer the age of chemistry entrepreneurs that ended in the 70s or even earlier. You can only do chemistry at home if you are a theoretical P-chemist working on a computer, but then there is no money in big P-chemistry thoughts unless you apply them to finance.



    As for the guys with big money, the VCs, they were all badly burned over the past 20 years funding small molecule drug discovery and are not about to go down that path again. I have yet to meet one who will not turn and run away screaming in terror when medicinal chemistry is mentioned. Even if you can corner them and compel them to talk to you about preclinical drug discovery, when the subject of medicinal chemistry is broached, they say: “and of course you would do that on the cheap in Asia, right?”



    The sunk cost problem is real. I was trained as an organic chemist in the 70’s and getting a job back then was very difficult for anyone except the Woodward/Corey people more or less. The supply of PhD chemists coming out of the 60’s was much too high for the depressed job market in those times (although the ACS would never acknowledge it was so and an ACS president also a tenured professor even told us all we had "no devine rights to a job"). Things began to improve when the annual number of new PhDs dropped by 25%. During those times, I interviewed for any job, and there were only a few, with organic chemist in the title. I got a post doc. I never thought that I was qualified to interview as an analytical, inorganic, bio or P chemist and no one interviewing for those positions advised me otherwise. So my sunk cost was in my ORGANIC chemistry degree. Had organic chemistry totally withered away, I would have had to start over at square one. Training in organic chemistry is not interchangeable with training in inorganic chemistry which was more or less an entirely different field.



    Like so many of your readers I also love chemistry and have done chemistry since age ten when you could have a back yard lab. But had I been advised that following my heart chemistry had the same employment prospects as being an actor or muscian maybe I would have to have my brain overrule my heart. There is just no reason to spend 13 years in school to wait tables or be a store greeter. It is better to do what most people do: work to get money to pay their bills and find something else outside of their work life for fun.



    As for GE, it has created more science and engineering jobs in Mexico, India and China in the past 15 years than it currently has in total in all of the US. When Mr. Larsen retires, you can bet his job slip most likely will rematerialize in Asia, not in the US for the people he is cheering on.

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  21. Uh, that's 2.53 grams/cubic centimeter.

    Anon10:32p: Thanks for the fairly detailed note -- it's educational and appreciated.

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  22. Think anyone would notice that carbonate block NOW, CJ? :)

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  23. Heh. I used the correct density (I hope) for the calculation; I just transcribed wrong.

    I mean, this thing would be the size of a Borg cube or something. Actually, according to Wikipedia, this solid block of carbonate would be exactly the size of a Borg cube.

    (Thank God for the internet!)

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  24. Thank God for Borg cubes! I mean, what else would be our frame of reference? Asteroids, pshaw!

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20