Chem Coach Carnival, Day Four

Throughout this carnival, I love hearing stories about folks finally giving in to that urge to blog. For some of our entrants, this was their very first post! (Honored, really). For others, today's post serves as a milestone of ups-and-downs in the sci-comm universe. Today we have executives, grad students, directors, 'instrumenticians,' and metallurgists. Read away...

33. SoS, UK-based graduate student. In this context, "SoS" means Sounds of Science, not (luckily) "save our ship." SoS specializes in organic materials, one of those coolio new "green" technologies I'm sure we'll hear more about soon. SoS had a close encounter with the always-tricksy DIBAL, which resulted in a decent-sized fireball and full building evacuation.

34. Chemerson, Analytical Chemist, Research Institute. Chemerson blogs at The Collision Cell. Instrumenticians, represent! He actually gets into the nitty-gritty of analyzing designer drugs and tobacco. To tease out components, Chemerson has a buyer's choice of fun instruments to play with. Ask him about the time he tried to analyze a 'Lazy Cake' by mass spec.

35. Susan, Executive Director, CSU Biotech Program. Susan blogs at CSUPERB. Susan was kind enough to prod some other scientists into answering the #ChemCoach call (Grazie!). She spends her days serving as the "glue" for a disparate group of folks - scientists, VCs, academics, etc - who wish to go into business together. Susan spent some time in a "white-knuckle" pilot plant, and knows what cryofills and GCs are - still a chemist in my book!

36. David, Director of Sci Comm, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. David, another blog stalwart, scribes at Terra Sigillata and now a high-profile gig at Forbes' Take As Directed. From professorship to writing to sci-comm, DK's done it all, and this post's no exception. From a great hook inspired by another "David" (Byrne), he wends through his career with a philosophical eye, stopping to turn down two tenured faculty positions, run a department, jump into blogging and outreach, and just generally serve as a positive force for public chemistry awareness. David closes out with a "Sunscreen List" of advice for chemistry n00bs out there.

37. Mags, Chemist / Metallurgist / writer. Mags blogs at Philosophically Disturbed. Her entry ushers in turns of phrase like "cranial stretches," "work in uncertainty," and "patchwork quilt career" (all sound familiar). Mags points out that passion should be the underlying factor in everything you choose to do. This may be the first time I've ever heard chemistry compared to Paris Fashion Week...

38. Chris, Senior Director, TB Alliance. Chris comes to us through intrepid reporter Lisa Jarvis (thanks, LJ!), and posted his entry at The Haystack. He's been all over the pharma landscape, from Ciba-Geigy to Pfizer to BMS, and now directs a global initiative to research new treatments for tuberculosis. The existing 'standard of care' cocktail combo just turned fifty, so it's time for some fresh blood! Chris reminds us to constantly tend and care for our extended professional network; he encountered an old colleague by complete chance on the cobblestoned streets of France, 25 years later.

39. Matt, Asst. Prof, American University. Matt hosted the last carnival (Toxic!), and blogs primarily at ScienceGeist. Matt reminds readers that, when applying for professorships, "...faculty can't read, but they sure can count." He's busily building an academic group, lecturing, and serving on recruitment committees, so he probably has an inside scoop. Why is his nickname "Smokey," anyway?

40. John, Physicist, Engineer, Rheologist, and "polymer guy." John blogs at It's the Rheo Thing. Another blog champion, he provides we Organickers with perspective on how material and bulk properties change based on groups hanging off main polymer chains. John's a "Big C" Chemical engineer, not "Big E" like many others in his field. His work in contract R&D ensures he never sees the same day twice (quite a common theme, eh?). Spoiler: "How many Ph.D.'s does it take to lock themselves in the oven?"

41. James, Online Chemistry Tutor / small business owner. James blogs at Master Organic Chemistry. He spends between 8-11 hours a day tutoring folks via Skype; when not teaching, he "spends a lot of time in ChemDraw" to construct learning materials. James actually started M.O.C. on the side, while a postdoc in Jerusalem. His current site was 'inspired' by Tenderbutton, Not Voodoo, and...Chatroulette (presumably the non-sketchy part). Ask him about life in the Old City.

42. A surprise entrant! Click here to find out more...

43. Mike, Professor, small liberal arts college. Mike blogs at I Heart d-Orbitals. He's part of the continued trend (Adam, Michael) of profs who realize their time is best spent educating others. His wife jokes that he "...walked onto a college campus [and] never left!" Mike's an organometallic chemist by training, so I'm sure he still thinks 'metal-centric' (like me!) Sage advice: "Sometimes you have to listen to what the world is trying to tell you."

44. JustAddEther, graduate student, "Mysterious Midwest College." (Perhaps where Dr. Bodwin works?). Just chimes in with more graduate perspectives, including why high school counselors shouldn't sell you short of a STEM career. She actually returned to school later, having worked previously as a stylist and bartender (Good training for chem, bartending). Wish JAE luck, as she attempts to join a very sought-after research group - against ten other entrants!

Chem Coach Carnival, Day Two

Happy Mole Day, everyone! With all the momentum of a rushing freight train, #ChemCoach Day Two descends upon an unsuspecting public. Could we possibly do better than the seven (7) entries from Day One? Of course! Today's crop truly dispels the notion of scientists as routine-craving critters forever chained to their benches. Read on to find out more...

8. Renee, Analytical Research Chemist, Australian Government. Wow, our first contestant outside the U.S.! Renee blogs at Lost in Scientia. She gives lab tours (!) if you're interested. Renee credits early lab experience with her future career success. The police have apparently used Renee's hood to make meth. Seriously.

9. Leigh, Freelance Science Writer / Roustabout. Leigh blogs at The Bunsen Boerner (pithy!). She's written for Reuters Health, ACS, and landed a coveted AAAS Media Fellowship. Leigh shares lots of great tips to maximize efficiency and spur networking. Her (pleasant) conversational writing style provoked strong responses from a stuffy former academic.

10. Jess, Physical Organic Chemist / Postdoc. Jess (The Chemist) blogs at The Organic Solution. She's still active at the bench, shoots coloured lasers, and is currently "in fellowship application writing hell." She is quite British. Jess almost went down the gold-plated highway to a banking job, but decided to detour to chem: "Who wouldn't want a job where you play with liquid nitrogen?"

11. Steve, Graduate Student / Blogger. Steve blogs at Scientifics. He strongly recommends actual discussion and discourse with fellow lab mates as the key to figuring out chemical problems (Who knew?). Steve fondly recalls that time he took an inadvertent 6N nitric acid bath.

12. Carmen, Science Reporter / Editor. Carmen, like Stu, dabbles in writing at The Haystack, Newscripts, C&EN, and previously at She Blinded Me With Science. Her writing covers orders of magnitude, from 140-character tweets to 1500-word stories. She even came prepared with a pie chart! Carmen advises the burgeoning ranks of young sci-writers to steel themselves for a tough job market. Ask her grandma about 'Eddy.'

13. A post with Star Trek references and one-liners? Must be mine... (lucky #13!)

14. Marc, Self-employed consultant / chemometrician, Salthill Solutions. Marc blogs at Atoms and Numbers. A statistician and programmer at heart, he spends his day analyzing blood samples by "remote" Raman spectroscopy. Never works 9-to-5. Marc previously taught at a school he refers to as "St. FX," where he overcame a "fear" of pushing electrons to conquer o-chem lecturing.

15. Chemjobber, Process Chemist (Shockingly, blogs at Chemjobber). To steal from quote Deborah Blum: "a great portrait of a chemist at work." CJ shares his experiences with bench-to-plant processes, including the joys of being on-call at all hours and the importance of in-process controls. Even if those controls are as simple as...TLC plates.

16. Steve, Senior Director of Biology, start-up. Steve blogs at the eponymous Stevil. Like many kindred spirits here, Steve is pro-internship / anti-jargon (a good combo). He points out the fantastic role that chance, random encounters, and uncertainty play in shaping modern science careers.

17. Glen, medicinal chemist, Lieber Institute. Glen blogs at Just Another Electron Pusher. Like many others here, Glen dispels the notion that anyone in biotech works a "standard day" - his day includes work as Chemical Hygiene Officer, procurement, and equipment repair...on top of designing drugs! His school 'advisor' was the great 'chemist' Bill Pullman (Lone Star!).

18. Chris, Chaired Prof., University of Minnesota. Chris "blogs" on his faculty webpage! (Seriously, though, ask him to share his "lab expectations" letter sometime). Despite his multiple highfalutin titles, he seems like a down-to-earth, approachable guy, possibly a lifetime influence of honorable military service. I'll cop his best line, re: time management: "Anyone facing a 50/50 commitment...prepare yourself for what is actually a 75/75 commitment!"

19. Andrew, Asst. Prof., "small college." Andrew's full entry below:

Your current job.

Assistant Professor at a small college teaching Organic Chemistry

What you do in a standard "work day."

Lecture about 20 students in organic chem, prep lab experiments by cleaning up the lab, making solutions etc. I work with a lot of students one on one in office hours helping with homework problems. I also help my research students in the lab most days and give directions to a work study student (lab assistant).

What kind of schooling / training / experience helped you get there?

B.S. in chemistry and a PhD in chemistry. I had no real job experience but took free teaching courses while I was in graduate school. I skipped a postdoc and searched for college level jobs with no research or grant writing  requirements and applied at all of them.

How does chemistry inform your work?

I teach the basics every day, really and have used my science education to branch out and teach other classes like a science in popular culture course I developed myself.

Finally, a unique, interesting, or funny anecdote about your career*When I interviewed for my job I was describing energy diagrams in organic chemistry and make the comparison between spontaneous reactions and spontaneous human combustion, complete with stick figure drawings of a guy, guy on fire and ashes in a pile. I still go the job!

20. Eva, Health Care Reporter, Bloomberg News. Eva's full entry below:

Your current job.
European health care reporter for Bloomberg News

What you do in a standard "work day."
I write about pharmaceutical companies, and also do some of the basic science writing, mostly papers that appear in European journals. So my day is a combination of finding new stories, reporting the stories I found and writing up my reporting. Some of the finding is done by meeting people at conferences or just for lunch or drinks, and some is reading. Much of that reading is combing through financial releases, news releases or research papers(I love it). The reporting is either done in person or via phone calls. The writing part is based here in my office in Munich, and fueled by Bach and black tea (w/ milk, no sugar, please).

What kind of schooling / training / experience helped you get there?
I have a MS (German Diplom) in chemistry and did quite a bit of work in biochemistry at the Max Planck Institute in Martinsried. I also have a MS in journalism from Columbia's J-School.

How does chemistry inform your work?
I find I rarely need the rafts of name reactions I crammed, but chemistry helps me in a number of different ways. The most obvious is the ability to quickly understand and evaluate new research. I also find researchers will quickly open up and talk to me when they find out a fellow geek is on the phone. Bloomberg is about financial news, and my left-brained self is really helpful to understand abstract concepts.

Finally, a unique, interesting, or funny anecdote about your career
How did I find out I don't have lab hands and decide to go into journalism? Maybe when I almost blew up a lab doing some kind of ill-informed ether distillation.

Petition Expedition – Cancer in Laundry Detergent?

On Facebook and other social media sites, online petitions quickly gather steam. Users see others’ posts, rally to the cause, and spread word to their friends and families using “Likes” and “+1s.” However, this rush to join also belies a lack of judgment; as the petition becomes easier to circulate and sign, critical reading of its content diminishes.

Source: P&G

Take the example of Tide Free & Gentle, a popular laundry detergent advertised as free from dyes and perfumes.  Political site change.org has recently posted a petition titled “Tide: Get Cancer-Causing Chemicals Out of Laundry Detergent.” This petition focuses on one specific compound purportedly isolated from detergent: 1,4-dioxane. As of March 6, it had amassed >68,000 signatures, just under 1 month after going live (I caught it making the rounds on both Facebook and Twitter).

The petition references data from a recent report, published online last November by Women’s Voices for the Earth, an environmental awareness organization based out of Montana. Dubbed Dirty Secrets: What’s Hiding in Your Cleaning Products?, the report aims to expose “hidden toxic chemicals” in household products, cleaners, and air fresheners (see here for P&G’s published Tide F&G ingredient list).

(Disclaimer: I am a chemist by profession, and I’m not advocating corporate secrecy or consumer harm. I’m just trying to critically analyze the data before making decisions.)

I think this post might function better as a Q&A.

 Q1 – What is dioxane, anyway? Can it harm me?

1,4-Dioxane is a cyclic diether (2 oxygens, 4 carbons, 6-membered ring). Chemists use it to dissolve compounds for reactions. It possesses specific properties (chelation, high-boiling, water solubility) that make it attractive for certain reactions over other solvents. According to its MSDS, dioxane can irritate the skin eyes, and nasal passages, but only by acute (large amount in small timeframe) dose.

Q2 – Does it cause cancer?

Dioxane lists as a 2B – Possible Human Carcinogen.  Note the exact wording there. Two other levels exist for compounds known to cause human cancers, 2A (Probable) and 1 (Known Carcinogen). If you enter “dioxane” into TOXNET and browse the carcinogenicity data, you’ll find studies on rats where ~1.0% dioxane in drinking water caused liver tumors in many cases, also squamous cell carcinomas, and a single report of mammary gland tumors over two years’ exposure (Dirty Secrets mentions only breast cancer, and calls dioxane a “known cancer-causing substance”).

Q3 – Well, what did the report actually find?

Good question. Page 10 of the report lists the data for Tide Free & Gentle, which indicates 89.00 ppm dioxane, and 0.8 ppm limonene, a fragrance isolated from citrus peels. Now, ppm? Parts per million, meaning that 89 milligrams are found in each liter of detergent. Put another way, if you round up to 100 ppm, it becomes one part in 10,000, or 0.01%. If you paid 0.01% sales tax, you’d pay $1.00 on a new $10,000 car. Remember the Ivory Soap ad, with “99.44% pure?” Relative to dioxane content, you could still state that Tide F&G was “99.99% pure.”

To compare against the animal data – 1.0% in drinking water – we’re more than two orders of magnitude (100x) off . . .and, last time I checked, most people don’t drink laundry detergent.

Q4 – But these are chronic exposures, so doesn’t it build up over time?

If the entire detected amount were to be absorbed into your body each time, maybe so. However, given dioxane’s high water solubility, and the large amount of water used to wash clothes relative to the tiny volume of detergent added, it’s likely that only a vanishingly small amount ever ends up stuck to your T-shirts.

Q5 – Tell me more about the science.

He wants to know your L.O.D.
Source: P&G / Tide

I thought you’d never ask! To start, the samples were analyzed at Analytical Sciences, LLC, in Petaluma, CA, using selective ion mass spectrometry. Theoretically, this selectively targets the ion of interest and increases the sensitivity of the instrument for this analyte. However, note the Limits of Detection (p. 15) for dioxane = 250 ppm. So, how are they accurately measuring below their L.O.D.? Where are the error bars, or ranges for multiple runs? No analytical chemist ever uses a single data point to prove an argument. Add in pseudo-scientific statements such as “analytical analysis,” and “very specific mass spectral ions,” and you wonder who Q.C.’d this report! The nail in the coffin, however, has to be the asterisks (***) that litter the analysis section, including these statements in tiny font, buried under the data:

*These measurements represent levels detected in laboratory testing, and may not represent actual exposure levels experienced with use of the product in the home… 

***In most cases, research has never been conducted to determine if exposure to the chemical through use of the cleaning product is associated with the health outcome.

Wile E. Chemist
Source: Chuck Jones / Looney Tunes

Despite the obviously inflammatory titles of the petition and the report, and the overwhelmingly negative bias towards all those “dirty chemicals” made by wily chemists, I can empathize: the petition addresses moms, and its message aims to keep children safe. I’m sure the scientists at P&G, many of whom have their own kids, want to keep children safe, too! However, in my opinion, this report should not be the ideological or scientific basis for thousands of social-media-equipped petitioners to vent their frustration.


(Update: 3/8, 2:30AM - Minor grammatical changes)