The Southeast Regional Meeting of the
American Chemical Society (
SERMACS 2013) started last night and runs through the rest of the week here in Atlanta. The
Georgia Local Section is hosting it, and my colleagues are doing a great job staging it at the Loews Hotel. The last SERMACS held in Atlanta in 2003 broke records for regional attendance. It also left our section with a reserve that has enabled us to initiate and continue several new member and outreach programs in the Atlanta area. The official attendance of SERMACS2013 will likely be between 1500 and 2000 chemists, though there may be many more unregistered attendees. This means that there will be a lot of chemists walking along Peachtree Street in midtown Atlanta over the next few days. (Yes, this is the one *true* Peachtree Street not to be confused with the thousands of other Atlanta roads bearing the name Peachtree in on form or another.)
So this begs the question as to whether a given person walking along Peachtree Street this weekend is a Chemist or not. It's easy when you know them by name or from seeing their picture as you have trolled chemistry departments on the web. It's also cheating if you spot their SERMACS name tag or schwag. It used to be easy to spot us because we formerly wore pocket protectors, carried periodic tables, and occasionally wore our stylish prescription goggles outside the lab. These days, however, it's nearly impossible to play "Spot the Chemist" because we are increasingly representative of the national population. So I challenge you to play Spot the Chemist on Peachtree Street this week without cheating. My guess is that you will be far from batting 500...
I credit the ACS with helping me to mainstream. I display the periodic table (or parts of it) on the anniversary mugs I take to the lunch room, coffee shops, and symposia; I think it's cool way to show my enthusiasm for chemistry and I will not be convinced otherwise.
ReplyDeleteAlso, an anecdote about 'spotting the X': a recent weekend bike ride took me to a coffee shop in Batavia, IL (home to Fermi lab). I sat a table over from a group of 4 that I immediately guessed to be physicists at the lab, which conversation later confirmed. I think partly I was biased by our proximity to the lab, and partly I picked up on a 'distinguished disheveled' look that seems to be popular among national lab scientists. But to your point, another clue was their diversity - in this case generational diversity… in many settings a social group of 4 spanning 4 or more decades is rare, but scientists frequently form social groups like these.
I like your point about the diversity in social groups within academia… But it doesn't have perfect fidelity because small companies are also flat and hence should have cross-generation social groups.
DeleteOn a related note: While at SERMACS I was asked by one of the exhibitors if I lived in Marietta. When I replied in the affirmative, he indicated that we are neighbors, living on the same street for years and only having indicated hello in passing. While he is a biologist by training, he is now the 4th "chemist" living on the same street (that I know of).
ReplyDeleteYours is clearly a street with many high quality people! I like the fact that you had to "discover" that your neighbors were chemists. Clearly chemists are people just like your next door neighbor. :-)
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