Ramblings: September 2021
30 September 2021
Here are some collected Twitter ramblings from September 2021.
I always wanted my own walk-on music. Scientists are just as badass as pro sports players, right?
Continuing the slow push to make #SynthesisSaturday a thing!
Never trust a chemist who can’t cook. I cook all the time, and I should post more of my creations and hashtag ‘em.
I mean, accurate. There is sooooo much VC money sloshing around the biopharma sector right now. I could write a proposal and get this company funded. Maybe throw in some AI algorithm to sweeten the pot.
9/11 will never not be a hard day for me.
Indeed accurate.
Zoë Ayres is another one of my favorite Twitter follows. She’s a strong advocate for mental health in the sciences, and in academia more particularly. If you need to have the bubble popped that academia is some career zenith, intellectual wonderland where everything is equitable, look no further. She has zero fucks to give about all of the toxic shit in academia, and I just love that. As someone who’s spent a career in industry, I feel that we’ve been unfairly relegated to a distant second place. By academics, whose realm everyone passes through and imposes their values on en route to their eventual career destination. I’ll die on the hill fighting to show how vibrant and rigorous industrial research is.
This resonated. Everyone is having a hard time hiring right now. I’ve never seen the labor market for chemists this tight in my nearly 20 year career.
They’re a punk band.
I used to work with a guy at a previous job who had a reputation for trying to kill everything off, and in so doing curry favor with management for his brilliance. Everyone else hated him. We called him Dr. No.
Med chem never, ever goes down the way it’s written in papers. I’m tired of the sanitized version. I’d learn a lot more from hearing what really happened.
tl;dr Get out of my way. Or like Nike: Just Do It.
This was the most hilarious thing I’ve read in C&EN in a long time.
Ok, so I’ve mentioned before my side obsession with space exploration. This month we saw SpaceX launch the first all-civilian crew in history into orbit. I enjoyed every last minute of it, and I’m beyond jealous of these guys. This video clip was a highlight of their journey for me. Because they’re mostly ordinary people (billionaire Jared Isaacman, who paid for the trip, excepted) and their reactions to this mind-blowing thing are so genuine.
This is the sharp edge of Twitter. Sometimes a little discretion is the right course. Be nice to people. It’s easy to attack folks and tear them down. It’s harder to have a constructive dialogue that moves our discipline forward in a way that doesn’t bruise too many feelings.
Have used this exact analogy in talks many times.
Still grates me. Synthetic organic chemistry is not a recipe.