Failure is an option

Most of the time, baseball batters strike out. Many football passes end in incompletions and sometimes interceptions. Dunks sometimes bounce out. Goals get scored past goalies. Yet the players still remain on the field. That's because without the possibility of these failures, they wouldn't be able to make great plays. The lesson is that the players on the starting squad aren't there because of their lack of failures, but rather, because they make enough outstanding plays to make up for their comparatively infrequent failures.

So why is it that we tend to expect that our research scientists (and professors) be infallible? Except for public performances (like when we are teaching or lecturing), we do have the opportunity to edit and refine our work before it is embedded in the literature thereby avoiding some failures. Nevertheless, typos, misplaced theories, erroneous results, incorrect analyses, and other such failures manage to be written by us. But this is not the worst offense. I would put forth that the biggest problem is that we don't have more magnificent and more frequent failures. After all, such bright failures can only arise if scientists launch truly ambitious programs that just went too far outside the box. But the risks are too great for most scientists to make such bold leaps. If she or he fails, then there will surely never be funding for another idea (no matter how conservative.)

The trouble with highlighting examples to give this blog topic substance is precisely the fact that failures are not  reported and the victors rarely want to discuss the torturous path it took them to get there. Here lies the fundamental problem inhibiting the next generation of truly innovative research. At present, the funding models are too conservative. Review panels focus on preliminary results —read several papers already published— and proven accomplishment —read established lab with over 10 years of operation. It's hard to fault them because the risks for both the individual researcher and the individual sponsor are great. It's simply too risky to include failure within the realm of possible outcomes even when the potential is high. The true loser of this game is society because the growth of science is partly stunted. The solution has to be for institutions and funding agencies to provide a safety net for researchers that stray far outside the box. And failure has to be an option.

Seeing chemistry through an Olympic lens and beyond

If science were an athletic pursuit, then chemistry would be a sport. Each of our chemistry departments would be like a team in the Olympics (think Nordic skiing). In chemistry departments, each faculty member competes in a given event such as organic chemistry (think biathlon), analytical chemistry (think cross-country) or computational chemistry (think jumping). To be successful we must conduct our scientific programs to be world (or better, international) class. The commitment that each faculty member must put in towards success is priceless. She or he must work countless hours, read and write papers, read and write grants, and sharpen their skills to see what has never been seen before. Scientists don't do this alone, of course. They build research groups of students and professionals that are critical to doing the work and advancing the ideas while at the same time they are being trained towards their own career objectives. The sacrifices are consequently not borne exclusively by the principal investigator. Looking at the winter Olympics over the past couple of weeks, it is clear that while any given athlete wins a medal, there is a corresponding team of people that is essential to the success and who share in the excitement of victory.

Just like Olympic events, some areas of chemistry are more "exciting" than others at any given moment. From time to time, new events such as materials or sustainable chemistry come along and they receive special attention (both in terms of funding and presence in the hot journals). That means that depending on your event (or research area), there are varying amounts of support available. But you can't work any less hard if you are to be the best in any given event. And there lies the problem. You have several teams of chemists in a department, all undertaking world-class research, but some have more money than others to do it. It's clear that Olympic sporting committees face the same problem. A few figure skaters, for example, are pulling in millions of dollars in endorsements while some of the bobsledders practically had to pay their own way to Sochi. So in the Olympic spirit, it is essential to look for ways to fund all the scientific events and their "athletes" well so that we are competitive across the board. The payoff for investing in science (and chemistry in particular) goes beyond the medals as the solutions that we create literally transform the human condition.

Why I'm running for ACS District IV Director (#hernandez4acs #district4acs @AmerChemSociety #ACSindy)

Today, my campaign remarks are being recorded just prior to the start of the ACS National Meeting in Indianapolis. I'm not quite sure how the video will be used during the meeting, on the ACS campaign website, or anywhere else. A draft of the transcript that I'll be reading is included below. I'll be a talking head with no audience participation so it won't be too exciting! Feel free to send me suggestions, though, as I've got until about 3:00PM EDT today to change it.

"The American Chemical Society is our fellowship. It provides both physical and virtual meeting places for networking with like-minded chemists. ACS has brilliantly recognized that the meaning of like-minded is both very diverse and evolving. It includes many different flavors of chemistry such as molecule making, measuring, and simulating; it ranges through the fundamental sciences, engineering, and manufacturing. ACS also recognizes that chemistry has a human side and it must be diverse. The challenge lies in continuing to adapt our structure to best serve the needs of our fellowship.

I see three areas of which we must be ever mindful: (1) The value proposition of ACS membership, (2) Education of the chemical workforce, and (3) Science advocacy. The diversity in age, experience, backgrounds, geography, citizenship, race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, and abilities that makes our fellowship stronger must be addressed through everything we do. My championing of diversity equity on task forces, on boards, and as the OXIDE director demonstrates my strong commitment to advancing these critical issues within the chemical workforce.

As members of the ACS, we also have a responsibility to give back to our profession and our world. Chemical tools, chemical analytics and chemical products will solve the challenges that confront our world. But it's the job of the ACS Board to make sure that congress and others make the investments to ensure that we are around to innovate. Given my past work in science advocacy, including serving on the National Academy's Board on Chemical Sciences, I believe that I have the experience to advocate effectively on your behalf as the District IV Director.

We are ONE ACS, but each of us is also an individual chemist with particular interests and needs.
The role of the ACS is to facilitate our interactions, enhance content dissemination, advocate for the chemical sciences, and support anything that advances chemistry. As a member-driven society, none of these things can happen without you. So I ask that you join me in advancing our society. Contact me electronically or personally through the links at tinyurl.com/hernandez4acs, follow me on twitter at EveryWhereChem, or read my posts at EveryWhereChemistry.blogspot.com. VOTE for me so that I may work with you and our fellow members to advance your ACS."

What makes a university?

Students and faculty. Simple answer. It's not the administration, though they can affect students and faculty significantly, for the better and the worse. (So you should hire good staff, deans, presidents and such. Just not too many of the latter.) It's not the physical plant, though you do need good facilities. A beautiful location—like one that is next to a beach, a mountain, a fabulous airport, or great restaurants—doesn't hurt. But you can build relatively good facilities given a reasonable amount of money almost anywhere. It's not just having a large endowment though that doesn't hurt. Meanwhile, I'm not forgetting alumni of former faculty. They were once current faculty and students and thereby remain critical to the definition of their university.

So why do I favor students and faculty? It may seem both self-serving and forgetful of the three most important factors in choosing a home: "location, location and location." But the thing is that universities teach students. Students are attracted by the quality of the faculty AND their fellow students. Meanwhile faculty are attracted by the quality of the students AND their fellow faculty. These two groups therefore come and go hand-in-hand. If you lose one, you'll lose the other. The fact that they are people and not bricks-and-mortar doesn't change the equation. Good faculty and students attract the next round of good faculty and students. That is, the individual faces change from year to year, but the nature of the university remains through the continuously refreshed set. This, of course, relies on universities continuing to invest in maintaining the quality of their students and faculty. AND they need to empower the faculty to make good decisions through enlightened self-interest and thereby trust them to refresh themselves well. So why do universities sometimes forget to fill positions as faculty retire rather than maintain or grow their numbers? They are, or course, driven to that direction because doing so appears to save money, at least in the short run. But they are leveraging their future as the degradation of their student and faculty quality redefines their universities. Sadly, often not for the better. When the economy is tough, I would suggest that's the time to invest even more money (because it's less expensive to do it then.) So far Georgia Tech has done this right as we have grown for the past 15 years or so at a dramatic pace while the economy was topsy-turvy. Hopefully, this trend will continue!

Iron Man & Scientists...

Lately, it seems that being a scientist is cool. This has been a seesaw over the years. Everyone wanted to be a rocket science during the space race. On the other hand, no one dreams of being Dr. Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll, or Dr. Strangelove. Engineering of the type that produces 007 gadgets has certainly been popular. But lately it seems that advancing fundamental knowledge about nature—science—is being recognized as a critical driver for technology and our economy. That is scientists aren't far from the über cool title of entrepreneur. To wit, in the make-believe world that appears to form our culture's reality, Tony Stark is able to keep himself alive in Iron Man II because he discovers how to create a new high-energy containing element. It's fiction, of course. Nevertheless, it illustrates the present positioning of science in a critical role for advancing/saving our world from the current challenges in the environment, energy and health sectors. It also says that being a scientist is cool again.

Unfortunately most scientists don't have Tony Stark's resources, and they need money to pay for the experiments and the highly-trained human capital required to run them. Meanwhile the nation's science budgets are being cut. So how can we leverage the nation's recognition that science is a critical economic driver to affect our nation's scientific policy and its level of investment therein? Equally importantly, how do we articulate the need for continual investment in such long-term payoffs in favor of say, balancing the budget today? A key idea lies in the fact that today's solutions come from investments made years ago. So those solutions won't be there in 20 years if we don't make the investments now. Again, this is very convincing to a scientist, but how convincing is it to a member of Congress who is looking at reelection in two years?! Sadly, the analogy to Iron Man also holds true here because the fictional politicians are often equally unconvinced...

Legacy admission for and against diversity

According to the April 24th issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, this year's admission rate—7.29%—for the class of 2017 was their lowest ever. Rest assured, that is behind Stanford at 5.7%, Harvard at 5.8% and Yale at 6.7%. Those are low odds, and any advantage is clearly welcome. That's one reason why the Fisher v. Texas case before the Supreme Court over the use of affirmative action in college admissions is so compelling. Equally notable, though, is the fact that children of Princeton alumni (so-called legacies) make up 9.7% of admitted students, compared to 9.5% in the previous year. Is a given university merely recording their legacy student demographic or is it using it to create an artificially higher (or perhaps lower) percentage of legacies in their student body?

It's surprising to me that legacy admission is going up (in terms of the percentage of the total) in light of the recent rhetoric arguing against it. Namely, the argument goes that legacy admissions are primarily good for bringing in money (from happy alumni parents), and they keep the demographics of a given campus tuned to that of a generation ago. The former is presumably good for university finances but some argue that it comes at the price of academic quality. The latter has the potential of maintaining the demographics on par with a much less diverse student population of yesteryear, and some argue has the effect of anti-affirmative action policies. For these and other related reasons, there has been significant opposition against legacy admission (including op-eds in the Princeton Alumni Weekly). Yet at Princeton (and likely other places), legacy admission is actually increasing, at least for the moment. Meanwhile, the April 24th issue of the Princeton Alumni Weekly, also reported that 48.4% of the admitted student class identified themselves as students of color. This suggests that legacy admission may not be entirely coupled to the demographic distribution of the entering class.

So where do you stand on legacy admission? It likely depends on whether or not you are a parent, and whether or not your children stand to benefit from it. Like politics, this can be very local. In my case, my son would obviously stand to lose if legacy admission were to recede. Here also lies a bit of irony; he would be a student-of-color admission. That is, just as the diversity complexion of undergraduate campuses is starting to reflect the broader demographics of this county, is this really the time to remove the alumni privilege of legacy admission?

Politicians don't do science, Scientists do (#NSF #FundScience)

As reported in ScienceInsider, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) would like to draft the "High Quality Research Act" that would rewrite the criteria that the National Science Foundation (NSF) uses to assess research grants. (Look also at an op-ed in the Huffington Post.)  The proposed language suggests a desire for immediacy to the impact of a given scientific effort directly on the public as well as a lack of flexibility in the degree to which the research may be pursued. Moreover, his recent actions also suggest a desire to have a political review of research grants beyond the traditional merit review performed within the scientific community. The NSF has necessarily responded to this political attack by countering with political tactics such as stonewalling. One of their main arguments has been that the review criteria just adopted in the past 6 months had gone through significant vetting, and therefore should not be reconsidered at this time. The NSF is also arguing that piecemeal reevaluation of individual grants by politicians undermines the peer review process, not to mention that they would require Congressional oversight at a microlevel that Congress has presumably empowered the NSF to act on. Clearly such review would be at best pennywise and certainly pound foolish.

To most scientists, such discussion is opaque because it seems to be directing the focus of the discussion from a fundamental academic point. That is, the progress of science is not a straight line. It's a highly connected (likely scale-free) network with new discoveries often dependent on advances in distant arms of science. That's the reason why we need to allow for science discovery broadly rather than attempt to pre-select the winners today. For example, medical schools decades ago would not have funded and did not fund the development of lasers by chemists and physicists or the development of control theories by mathematicians and engineers. Without such advances, we wouldn't have refractive eye surgery or laser scalpels. That is, if we use the current dogma to pick the best new science with immediate impact, we will never break from its paradigm. The fact that this intellectual argument doesn't win with some politicians is simply a reflection that scientists don't do politics.

The irony in all this is that basic science is working for our country. The return on the investment of basic science is at worst even (dollar-for-dollar) and as much as a factor of 100 in GDP per $1 spent on the NSF, depending on how the ROI is calculated. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) specifically states that "federal spending in support of basic research over the years has, on average, had a significantly positive return, according to the best available research." The science in universities is generating countless companies. (For example, according to this Boston Magazine article the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well at universities like MIT which is among the leaders of the digital age. According to Forbes Magazine, my own institution is in the top 10 of incubators as well!) The rest of the world, particularly China, has noticed this, and several countries are increasing—if not outright outspending the U.S.—their investments in basic research (in terms of percentage of their GDP). It's often quoted that peer review is not ideal (and this is particularly true when the system is stressed to funding levels well below 20%), but that it's the best system we have. It's hard to argue against this given our track record for driving the economy.

So please tell politicians to keep doing the politics and to keep funding scientists to do the science. Our nation will continue to advance much better that way!