Dan Singleton 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
@dasingleton
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Organic Chemistry Prof, Texas A&M, Isotope Effects, Dynamic Effects, AC Cope Scholar, TAMU AFS Awards In Teaching and Research, Well Fargo Honors Mentor of Year
Joined February 2009
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An idea we need to get across to the public is that there is no such thing as an irreplaceable genius. The jobs and trainees and grant money will go to other spectacular scientists, who will do great work, without the sexual harassment. Genius is a dime-a-dozen.
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Oh my God, Oh my God. I just realized I taught Organic Chemistry to one of the Arkansas meth profs, and then he did undergraduate research in my group. Good student.
Still processing. It kind of makes one proud ...
or suicidal.
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Too many leave science or abandon their ambitions due to the mystique of genius. I tell my students that all of the gods of science I know are flawed gods, so they can surely compete and often win.
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Call them geniuses or not, I don't care (if they haven't qualified, who has?), but the fact is that there are a tremendous number of people with the multiple talents it takes to do great science. All of those talents are continua and can be improved, with no unbridgeable gap.
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A true story, with no guns:
In 1983 I walked out of a south Minneapolis laundromat to find a guy using a hanger to break into my car. He was busy and didn't see me, and I walked up behind him and kicked him hard in the ass, figuring he would run off. Instead, he turned around 1/
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I have published collaborative papers with two Nobel prize winners, would call a couple of others friends, and have known quite a few. They are mostly great people, bright _and_ kind, but you would not be able to pick them out from a thousand others I know.
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I wrote this thread a long time ago but decided not to put it up. Today, because of other things on twitter that you will recognize, I have dusted it off. It is a little raw.
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Working my way through faculty applications one again, and I am afraid I have to do this with a bottle of wine, because it is the only way I can keep from screaming. There are so many great people in the pile, people who dedicated all of their twenties and often half of
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1. Ok, this is the thread to end all threads, or possibly my career. I am about to trash a new paper in
@sciencemagazine
, its editors, its reviewers, C&E News, others who stated or wrote adoring commentaries, anyone who looked at the paper or its commentaries without seeing
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Finally, a game that teaches you how to get a Ph.D.
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There is surely a lot of credit to go around, but mRNA vaccines are built on a half century of basic research, funded in many places but by no one more than the US government, with largely bipartisan support. Today I am thankful for that.
It did cost a lot. It was worth it.
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High school seniors: if you choose Texas A&M instead of that ivy, you can keep keep your soul, most of your money, and your parents out of jail. And I am a better teacher than you will get there anyway.
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Ok, here I go, kill me.
Organic chemistry is the first course that many students ever take where:
-being a rich asshole who has had every prior advantage is little help
-being lazy but very bright but lazy won’t cut it
-falling behind then cramming is a sure recipe for doom
Officially ~20 days shy of becoming a doctor so now I can say, with my entire chest, that there was absolutely no reason for me to take Organic Chemistry. Not a single one.
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Order, chaos, bah. This is chemistry, in fact it is my entropy and free energy lecture. We teach both so badly that most chemists, for God’s sake, understand neither. I use analogies like this, or a simple marble shaker, to show the ideas. Let’s go.
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A sad story, then some possibly timely lessons for young scientists.
A long time ago now, I caught that a student had faked data. This was in the late stages of manuscript preparation, with a draft in hand, and I caught it on a Tuesday.
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Wait, I am a chemist, listen to me, the best disinfectant for your lungs is O3. It is known to kill viruses very rapidly, plus we know that Covid-19 patients need oxygen, and O3 is 50% more than O2.
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@kennedytcooper
Sounds unbelievable, except similar happened to me. My truck was stolen by man who distantly knew my son. Cops no help, no arrest, much wasted time (“Are you sure you didn’t give him permission?”), about par for lifetime cop experiences. Had to find and steal back my own truck.
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It is not nefarious, God what some people say. You run a fair search, and that means you avoid a bunch of things that were intrinsically, subtly or not-so-subtly, unfair. And hey, you know what, not one word of this gets us less qualified hires. It’s exactly the opposite.
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It is a simple rule and a good one. Don't have sex with anyone where you have professional power over them.
I don't think that should be controversial.
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A new graduate student shouldn’t have to hide an interest in a work-life balance when picking an advisor.
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Fun explaining to my class about the Nobel prize, as we had just finished stereochemistry. Showed them the List proline Aldol mechanism, and we have done enough mechanisms for them to get the idea. Now they realize that organic chemistry is simple!
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A whole generation: my loans are killing me, my rent is sky high, my job is iffy, and have you seen the cost of daycare? Another kid? LOL
Economists: it must be the size of car seats.
Because people can’t fit three car seats in a standard car, the birth rate may have been depressed due to car seat laws.
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And oh, sure, talent is good and matters. But there is no one in modern science who is so important that they should get a pass on rules that are not just moral but also are critical for the progress of science as a whole.
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main profit of someone else, just to be in a position to get rejected for jobs at an age where 40 years ago people reached Full Professor. Fuck
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Dear Fellow Profs.
We need to talk. Your lectures are clear and eloquent, you use the latest classroom innovations, and you care about your students.
But your exams suck. This undermines everything else you do.
(tl,dr: collect and use data, test achievement)
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What makes more sense?
- that the nature of young people has changed and now they are all just lazy and dependent
- that rising rents and college costs and a dearth of middle-class opportunities has made independence more difficult, making help, if so lucky, a necessity.
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are not always as responsible as they think they will be, and it can be a struggle just to maintain. And people get depressed. Defense against the bad guys can turn into another senseless death, of an innocent stranger, of a family member, and most likely of all one's self.
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their thirties to science, at poverty wages, when I know that very few of them will get an academic job, because there is so damn many of them. Science is eating its young. Chemistry being better than many other areas is still not good enough. They deserve better. They deserve
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When you finish a PhD in organic chemistry they take you in a special room and tell you that all of the mechanisms you have learned are fairy tales made up by fantastic experimentalists who never actually understood reactions.
Oh crap, I think I’m doing this wrong.
When you finish a PhD in chemistry they take you in a special room and tell you that tenure-track professorships aren't real and all professors are just really old postdocs.
I am posting this at great physical risk to myself and my family.
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@michellecyca
I have gone to the local library with one or two granddaughters every Saturday for six years, averaging 10 books a week, so 3000 books, at least $30,000 worth. Free. Best tax use ever.
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Denounce, certainly, but I think we need to explain also why this view is wrong. It is not enough to state what is right; we must teach, we must build understanding.
When I started my academic career long ago I thought I knew everything about discrimination. I didn’t know squat.
Hey
#ChemTwitter
,
Now is your time to put your money where your mouth is, I want to know how many established white male professors will publically denounce the latest pathetic excuse for an opinion by Tomáš Hudlický published in
@angew_chem
.
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@vplus
@wolfblitzer
The evidence was right under Obama's Kenyon birth certificate but it got destroyed in the attack on Sweden.
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In a world where everyone thinks of themselves as a good person, everyone thinks of themselves as responsible, and we only have to worry about the few bad guys, people seem to forget that life is complicated. Families fight, people get drunk, misunderstandings happen, people 5/
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So why is it that whenever an academic scientist publishes something critical of diversity efforts on campus, it has all of the depth and nuance of my brother-in-law’s homemade Facebook memes?
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If you care about STEM immigrants because we need them to advance our economy (and you are right - I’ve written that many times), can we also talk sometime about treating undocumented immigrants fairly?
Humanity doesn’t stop at STEM.
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I would like to weigh in on this a bit. Upfront, Mait is long-time friend, and I have used his textbook for teaching chemistry majors three times, twice in the early 2000s then again in 2012-2013. I did switch away from it after that, not because I did not like the book but
NYT article about Maitland Jones, Jr.'s firing by the NYU administration | lots of interesting quotes from the NYU chemistry community
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Add skills.
Learn broadly.
Read.
Write.
Question.
Wander.
Talk to diverse people, and listen.
Build yourself, and take care of yourself.
Oh, I have so much advice, often born of regrets, and some requires much work, but “work weekends,” which I surely did, is nowhere on my list.
Unpopular opinion: the best thing young people can do early in their careers is to work on the weekends.
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I am been repeatedly accused of not reading the Bari Weiss article. I have but I would ask some questions in return. First, have you not read anything else? This has been going on for a while.
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to have had a real job working for themselves or working their way up in a company five years ago. This is wrong, and each year it gets worse. This makes achieving diversity harder and harder - one has to have every advantage to be able to work so hard for so long, for the
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If you have read other things, are you really going to discount everything the woman says? I suppose in your universe women are constantly killing their own career and reputation to bring down powerful men, because, ah, something something. In my universe that is rare.
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Second, can you really not recognize and critically judge a crafted, strategic discussion? The Weiss article is probably good instruction for academics writing grant proposals, when the proposal itself is shaky. Put obvious problems upfront then act like they are no big deal.
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Ready for your Skype interview for a tenure-track job? Some tips:
1. Make sure you know exactly how much time you have. Expect that times may be enforced exactly, since another person may be scheduled right after you.
2. Get to the point. A common mistake is to spend too much
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If you don't understand the power difference here in academics, that a famous professor can either aid or destroy with a few words the career of a young person in the same field, then I can't help you.
In judging her actions, remember that she had to recognize this power.
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there was a car just like mine, same model, same color. He mumbled something about that explaining why his key wasn't working, and being sorry, and he walked away.
Now I always imagine this happening with the changed detail that one of us, or maybe both of us, has a gun. 4/
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Two things I would like non-scientists to know:
1. Scientists at Hudlicky’s level are a dime-a-dozen. We are not denouncing Einstein here.
2. A main value of our science is education. Hudlicky has screwed that pooch.
Bonus 3. The rest of Hudlicky’s paper was, well, drivel.
Hey Jordan Peterson, I'd reply to your screed, but as a "hard scientist" and Canada Research Chair myself, I'm too busy actually doing science.
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@dryeeseeks
Every single time I ever had a good idea I looked it up in the literature and it had already been done.
But, often ...
they hadn't done it the way I planned, and they hadn't foreseen the applications, and they hadn't really made it work.
Creativity is you, not one idea.
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If you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to eat out.
If the local costs mean you can’t give TAs & Adjuncts a living wage, you can’t afford a university.
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Hey,
@theNASciences
, if you get there by having a bunch of very talented people spend their entire 20’s working >60 hours per week, and you haven’t, say, cured cancer or such, then you are just a club of immoral jerks.
I tell my graduate students and post-docs that if they’re working 60 hours per week, they’re working less than the full professors, and less than their peers.
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If you want a beautiful set of conflicting mechanistic papers to work through for a group meeting or advanced class, I strongly recommend the Christmann, Vetticatt, Tantillo, Thiele, & Pagel ChemRxiv and the Blackmond response Wow.
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I have told my story before, I think, but it is perhaps interesting to tell here for its differences with this story.
We were in the last stages of putting together the SI data for a fully written paper that would later become, after new data was obtained, a terrific JACS comm.
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As of 20 minutes ago, Robert A. Welch Foundation Announces 2022 Welch Award Recipient Carolyn Bertozzi
@WelchFoundation
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This is true. I have never had a fully original idea in my life.
And yet...
you mostly find that prior workers hadn’t done it right or hadn’t thought through the opportunities or hadn’t understood it or hadn’t done the key experiment. Creativity is what you make of something.
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This being twitter, I know that a rational discussion with everyone will solve everything, so have faith that I will respond to every comment and criticism shortly. My great thanks to many of you.
I will address one issue because there are interesting lessons involved.
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If a student does 20 points below average on an exam with a 40 average, they won't blame themselves and change, they will blame you. If the average is 80 and they score 40 points below average, they might reflect on what they did a bit. There is no value to a low exam average.
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Debated on sharing this, but there is a broader part of the story that seems worth considering.
We took pretty careful precautions all along until one thing recently. We did not become hermits but we kept our distance and did all the little stuff, with no bars, no restaurants,
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Putinism is an illness facing all nations.
The way I see it, the Ukrainians are fighting for my freedom.
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So about 36 years ago, I, along with the rest of Gassman group, found the Gassman letter and the famous Meyers letter on our desks when we got in. Here was the effect on me: I ripped the letters into little pieces, threw them away, and hung up a sign in the lab that
Paul G. Gassman:
“I feel that anyone desiring to become a good organic chemist should be putting in a minimum of 60 hours per week in improving their knowledge and ability in the area of organic chemistry. At least ten hours of this time should be
spent reading.”
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Here is the advice I've given for 30 years to students choosing grad schools and advisors. Chose something that you will enjoy doing each day. The big victories in science don't come every day or week or month or year, and their dream can't sustain you if you hate each day.
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Completely discount the counter arguments. Ignore any subtle problems that the grant reviewers or other readers won't think of. Count on them not knowing about anything outside of what you are telling them, because if they do, and haven't prejudged you, you are doomed anyway.
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Two things I notice when letting students work in groups to solve hard problems:
1. For many problems, groups do worse than individuals.
2. When someone comes up with the right answer and quietly states it, most of the time the group simply ignores them and goes on.
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Horseshit. To even have this conversation, they have to start by dismissing all of the amazing things that we can do, that come out as a firehose every day, that weren’t even dreamed about when I started my career.
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I don’t want a picture on your CV. I don’t want a picture on your promotion package. I don’t want a picture on your award nomination. I don’t want a damn picture.
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Perhaps there was never any intentional bias. Perhaps what we did was arguably rational business, hey, making offers to people most likely to accept. But don’t even try to tell me that it was all based on merit or 'most qualified,' or that fairness was a high priority. Nonsense.
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This was a year after the big rise in the
#metoo
movement, but it is the kind of thing that could have gotten you fired 20 years ago, even at Texas A&M. Admitting it upfront does not make it all ok.
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Heavy sigh.
Ok, I was for a year the chair of our local ACS section. Cotton was holding an international conference at A&M, and we had the initiative to give money to the conference in exchange for the conference letting local students attend for a nominal charge instead of
@dasingleton
Wow…that’s terrible. His “not so kind” reputation is well known.
Why did he hit you?
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When Al Cotton hit me, with considerably less provocation, it was just a funny story for everyone to tell.
I was upset. Departmental response: meh. It’s academics.
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For thirty years I have made my group give their departmental seminar as a chalk talk. Today Kai-Yuan Kuan demonstrated that he is Barry Trost with the chalk.
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Like 2.7 million Americans, my wife and I are grandparents who are raising grandchildren. For their sake, we would actually prefer to live.
Tx Lt Gov Dan Patrick says grandparents would be willing to die to save the economy for their grandchildren
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The idea that our science can be, should be, or ever has been separate from our humanity is complete dumbassery.
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Ma’am, I teach organic chemistry.
If you know of a college in Texas that is currently using state funds for satanic activites, please DM me.
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Argh, this again. Sorry. To understand what is going on here and the actual nature of the question, it really helps to first figure out the pKa of dilute 18OH2 in regular water. Spoiler: it is unambiguously and without choice 15.7. Follow along.
🌊 ⛲ Are you ever asked "What Is the Real pKa of Water?"
In a special tutorial video,
@J_A_C_S
Editor-in-Chief Professor Carreira speaks with Professors Neils
@grcc
& Silverstein
@willamette_u
to set the record straight:
#JChemEd
@ACSDivCHED
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Yes, there are HR forms you can fill out to make this acceptable at institutions, but acting like this was just a simple bureaucracy mistake is just gaslighting.
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A question I have put on finals for Organic II. Not the easiest, not the hardest.
Mechanism?
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Near my 40th anniversary with a feminist and I can’t understand wanting anything different. For men wanting non-feminists, what sick shit are you thinking? The goal is to build a life with a partner, not stroke your ego, and you damn well want someone who demands equality.
I bet a lot of feminists can't figure out why they're single.
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@RadioFreeTom
Oh, the horror that people will spend money on any number of things that make them happier, then have the temerity to complain about some things. Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?
Come on, don't dilly-dally, just say plainly that you hate poor people.
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“Scientific progress is slowing.” - an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani
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@tomfriedman
Anyone who can’t figure out why this idea is dirt-dumb in about 3 seconds has no connection with the real world.
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I have been talking with ChapGPT about organic chemistry. No, it never gets anything right, it is gibberish, but very good gibberish. Pretty sure I have seen worse YouTube videos. Scary, if it turns in all of its work it might get a C in my class.
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Yes, you have to try to pick the best, but Michael Jordan was drafted third, and we are immeasurably better at predicting basketball success than faculty success.Even later, looking at the success of early faculty award winners is bad prophecy, except as self-fulfilling.
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A story, and an important safety lesson: A grad student of mine did a reaction on a small scale many times to work out the procedure. No problems. He then went up to a mole scale, and the reaction blew out of the flask, geysering to the roof of the hood. Luckily, no one was hurt.
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But, if you must, ignore all that. The one thing that is undisputed, so had to be openly stated upfront in the Weiss article, is that they had a sexual relationship. Don't read past that without reflection.
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Scientists: You need to understand, this thing grows exponentially.
Politicians, twitter blue checks, about half of everybody: Oh, I understand that but I don’t see why I should be concerned when only 15, er, 30, er, 60 people have died.
Scientists: 🤦♀️
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And, though not really relevant for grant proposals, arguments including a bit of innuendo that suggest bad motives for institutions are really very popular.
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Oh, chemistry, you are so big, and I am so small.
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Ok, so I have now gone through two MOOC courses on climate change, the older David Archer Coursera course and Michael Mann edX course, and I have some recommendations for my fellow non-climate scientists.
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A second goes by, both of us pissed as hell but not quite clear on the next step, when my response dawns on the guy and his face changes. "Your car?" He looks around down the row of cars, points and says "Oh, crap, that is my car down there." Sure enough, about four cars down 3/
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When people are paid subsistence wages for working extremely hard for my benefit, and that of my colleagues, and that of the US and the world, you will not hear the words "pretty sweet deal" out of my mouth.
It may be that grad school is a correct choice anyway,
(9/12) Bottom line is that going to graduate school in STEM is a pretty sweet deal. You get the chance to pursue a field that you are passionate about, you get paid to pursue that passion, and once you have an advanced degree, you have minimal to no debt compared to many others.
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The Strickland Nobel reminds me that I love science not for the thousands of papers that fill out a field, but rather for that magic moment when you get an idea, or the critical experiment works, or a result takes you in a wholly new direction. Such joy, so rare, so beautiful.
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Interesting thread/comments, but I think it misses something important. It is of course true that science criticisms should be professional and not cruel.
But the very worst, most devastating criticism is the one that no one tells you about.
I have so many stories. 1/n
How did it become part of academic culture to prove how “rigorous” we are by trashing others? How does that advance our field? If we really care about the research, we’ll lead by example in holding ourselves to a high standard and aim our feedback at building up not tearing down.
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But those rules are for politicians, not us. In science, and in many other professions, a single act of dishonesty can cost you your career. The rest of real life is like that also. A single act of dishonesty can cost you your job or your family or your education.
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As so we are now taught better. Taught to run a planned fair search with set procedures, taught to push for a wide and diverse pool of applicants, taught to make all candidates feel welcome, taught to avoid conflicts of interest and domination of the search by powerful faculty,
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Great thread, but it misses, as is usual, Goeppert Mayer’s contribution to chemistry in the theory of isotope effects. The story as I understand it was that during the Manhattan project Jacob Bigeleisen was working on a theory of isotope effects on a chalk board, and Goeppert
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Ok just to be clear, because 20% of all people cannot understand sarcasm, USING OZONE TO TREAT ANYTHING IS BATSHIT CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!
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Thanks to all with their well wishes. So far we seem somewhere in the middle range if cases.
Just don’t tell me to smile and keep a positive attitude or that you know I will be ok because I’m a fighter, because I will personally come and kick you ass.
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