Whitesides' Chemical Future

As part of the "Future of Chemistry" essays sponsored by BASF, professor George Whitesides opines in Angewandte Chemie Int'l Edition that chemistry must change in order to keep pace with societal demands and changing scientific landscapes. 

Familiar themes pepper his prose: the tension between "curiosity-driven" and "directed" research, between organizational behavior, motives, and rewards, and several pressing calls to action. After setting some ground rules and introducing us to his main actors - academia, industry, and government - George shifts his essay towards some familiar* grand challenges:

"What is called 'chemistry' now may only be a distant cousin to the chemistry of 50 years from now."

Origin of Life. Informatics. Energy generation, storage, and usage. Cognition. Human augmentation. Death. In twenty-two points, he covers the entire human experience from life to death, from single cells to complex global societies, then leaves himself two outs: numbers 23 ("All the rest") and 24 ("Combinations with adjacent fields").

"Chemistry tends to be excessively modest in its ambitions. Excessive ambition might sometimes be a better strategy."

Hold on for a minute...anyone feel a strange sense of déjà vu? For the past three decades, Whitesides has been in the business of not just inventing the future, but actively predicting it as he goes:

2013: Reinventing Chemistry - RSC Roadshow
2013: Memo to Chemists: Move Away from the Molecule
2013: A Glimpse Into the Future of Diagnostics
2012: Whitesides on Discovery and Development
2011: Whitesides & Deutch on What's Wrong with Academia
2011: Chemistry and the Worm
2010: Towards a Science of Simplicity
2007: Revolutions in Science
2004: Assumptions: Taking Chemistry in New Directions
2001: The Once and Future Nanomachine
1999: Complexity in Chemistry
1995: Holy Grails of Chemistry
1990: What Will Chemistry Do in the Next 20 Years?
1988: Materials for Advanced Electronic Devices - Chemistry for the Future
1986: The Role of Chemistry in Materials Science

Certainly, this essay reads like anything other than a traditional chemistry text. We hear about chemical granfalloons** -- who are synthetic organic chemists, anyway? -- catalytic networks, Facebook and Twitter ("avatars of social engineering"), and even the rather Huxleyan concept of population control. Pasteur's quadrant, aka the choice of research that solves social problems while inventing fundamentally new science, represents for Whitesides the idealized goal, though he admits we're presently much more stuck in the "Liebig apprentice model" of traditional research groups.

Especially resonant for me were the areas Whitesides identifies at collaborative interfaces: megacity logistics and cancer prevention involve far more cooperation along "unfamiliar boundaries" than I had perhaps realized: social, environmental, computational, psychological, and (of course) chemical.

Flying cars - Still not a priority for chemists...yet.
Source: Terrafugia

I found Whitesides' friendly, casual conversation with the reader, breaking down traditional scientific narrative for a personal exchange, rather refreshing. You can actually hear him speaking through the page, his calm, familiar cadence and confident, challenging affect. Recall that George himself has opined often on just how to communicate scientifically; looks like he indeed follows his own presciptions.

I recommend a full read-through for those so inclined. I'll close this meta-review with two points. First, a strong piece of advice from Whitesides' 2007 Priestly Medal address:

"Chemists are the natural leaders for much of the research that needs to be done. But physicists can learn molecular detail, and biologists can learn differential equations. If we do not wish to work on these problems, others certainly do. If it is not our revolution, it will be someone else's."

Finally, Whitesides offers a poignant answer to the age-old stuck-on-an-airplane question: What do chemists do? I won't give away the answer here, but suffice to say it's both more direct and more engaging than how I've traditionally answered. Go have a look.

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*So familiar, in fact, that he references two of his own previous predictive essays. See also, from Philip Ball, here. 
**I'll follow professor Whitesides' daring example of directly citing Wikipedia for this Vonnegut quote.

The Future is Now

The Graf Zeppelin. Source: Ad Orientem

I’ll admit it: I love to look at antiquated predictions of how the world will be in 50 or 100 years. These glimpses into the future strongly reflect their era; the audience had to grasp the author’s intent and direction using metaphors and extensions of the technology they knew. 


We chuckle at predictions such as world zeppelin travel and automated horse-carriages, much like future generations might wrinkle their noses at our notion of a “world wide web” or “smart phones.”

A new (old!) article, published in the 1901 Ladies’ Home Journal by one John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., puts forth several such predictions (thanks to the Saturday Evening Post and the BBC; see reddit or imgur for the full article). Mr. Watkins apparently spoke with “the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning” in a quest to determine what “…will have been wrought…before the dawn of 2001.”

All told, Mr. Watkins made 28 predictions in his article, and the BBC article covered 14, the Post 17. Since this is primarily a science blog, I’ll comment on some of the tech highlights; sadly, most of these didn’t make the cut for the preceding articles.

The drug designer's "killer app"

 “Few drugs will be swallowed or taken into the stomach” – Drug designers, aiming always for the killer app of oral availability, would be amused to hear this. The author was correct about a later statement in this section, though: “The living body will to all medical purposes be transparent.” Mr. Watkins waxes about invisible rays allowing physicians to operate on human organs directly, which, with the advent of MRI, PET scans, and endoscopy, is much closer to reality.

“…utensils shall be washed in chemicals fatal to disease microbes” – Antibacterial hand soaps, bleach, and wastewater sanitation systems maintain healthy conditions in large restaurants.

“There will be no C, X, or Q in our every-day alphabet” – Uh-oh, don’t tell any organic chemists! C is, of course, carbon, and X is a placeholder for halogens, a math variable, part of road signs (X-ing), holidays (Xmas), and of course where pirates bury their treasure!

“The soil will be kept enriched by plants which take their nutrition from the air and give fertility to the earth” – Nitrogen fixation, anyone? Legumes such as peas, beans, and carob are often rotated in with other food crops to ensure proper soil nutrients. In 1901, Watkins still had no inkling of the Great War to come, or how the Haber-Bosch process would lead to cheap fertilizers and increased munitions.

Might there be a Schrock-Chirik process in our fixation future?

“Plants will be made proof against disease microbes just as readily as man is to-day against smallpox” – Mr. Watkins refers, of course, to Jenner’s development of the cowpox vaccine for smallpox treatment. In the 21^st Century, industrial conglomerates such as Dow Agro, DuPont Crop Science, BASF, Syngenta, and Monsanto work towards pest-resistant crops and pesticides.

An FDA inspector checks a salad bar. Source: FDA Flickr.
(Did you know the FDA maintains a Flickr account? I didn't!)

 “Storekeepers who expose food to air breathed out by patrons or to the atmosphere of the busy streets will be arrested with those who sell stale or adulterated produce” – The modern FDA, presaged 5 years before its formation in 1906, now inspects both food and drugs from production through sale to consumers.