Imagine an image of the Super Bowl, or maybe a Beyoncé concert, or a picture of Times Square. Imagine that every object, every ‘thing,’ in that picture had a line drawn from it with the patent numbers of the inventions that it is based on. Now, imagine you zoom in on those patent numbers and see the faces of the chemistry inventors. And alongside them, the faces of the chemists whose publications in journals the inventions were based on. What you would NOT see is a bunch of crazy white-haired old men in stained lab coats. You certainly might see a few of them, but you would also see a little bit of everyone else too. By the numbers, the faces would not quantitatively look like our real global population distribution. But we would all be there.
I don’t think people outside of chemistry truly understand this. That the toothpaste they use was invented by someone standing beside them at their kid’s soccer game. That a component in their cellphone was invented by someone two rows in front of them at church. That the diabetes drug their father takes was invented by someone they passed by at the shopping mall.
Chemistry is everywhere. But it goes mostly unseen. Sadly, society has come to view this invisibility of chemistry as something insidious, like a monster under our beds, lurking, waiting to hurt us. Open up the newspaper, turn on the radio, look on the internet, we all know the stories. Carcinogens, Climate Change, Ocean Plastics. When chemistry is visible, its usually not good.
But it doesn’t have to be this way!
We have so much to celebrate as Chemists! The women and men pouring beakers and flasks in hoods around the world are doing amazing things! There are many things that the chemistry community is doing extremely well, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t do better. As we approach the year 2022, here are some things we might want to try to work harder at:
Broadening the chemistry community.
We are at a crossroads. We desperately need to make our ‘portraits of inventors’ image I described above be more representative of our entire population. There is an urgency here. We need new eyes, new ideas, not only to underscore the things we might do, but sometimes suggest some things we shouldn’t.
(2) Invention Education.
Engineering has been doing a good job reaching into education. Robotics programs and engineering challenges seem to be quite popular. But these activities are mostly mechanical or based on software development. We need to do a better job getting the concept of chemistry more front and center to show how the fundamentals of chemistry solve real world problems – and let people know just how exciting it can be.
(3) Multidisciplinarity.
I am not talking just about organic chemists working with physical chemists, or even chemists working with biologists. Of course, these are all super important. I am talking about shining the spotlight on chemists working with entrepreneurs, with marketers, with lawyers, with sales people, with politicians, with musicians, with athletes! There is beauty in diversity.
Invention with intention requires that we continue to cultivate and celebrate the amazing things chemistry is already well known for. But we have an opportunity to be more accessible to the non-chemistry community. Because at the end of the day, we do what we do – to serve them.
Next year our journal, Green Chemistry Letters and Reviews, celebrates its 15th anniversary! While we continue to provide a platform for the green chemistry community to publish cutting edge research, I think it is useful to take deeper stock in Chemistry’s role in society at large.
I feel that the world is facing so many struggles. Exacerbated by the covid pandemic – too many people feel isolated, alone, with a feeling of not belonging. ‘Us against them,’ ‘We against they’ seems to be part of the reality that we now live in.
But if you think about it, Chemistry is in a unique position here. I feel very strongly that we have an important perspective to offer society. Interestingly, it is the very foundation of who we are!
Is matter a wave or a particle? Chemists understand that it is both.
Is a conjugated molecule one resonance form or another? We are comfortable with it being both.
Are pairs of tautomers an enol or a ketone? We recognize the existence of both.
I want us to imagine a role in society beyond our beakers and flasks. As we explore these foundational concepts of chemistry – creating bonds between people, superimposing points of views to find common ground, and letting we should help people understand that at the end of the day we are all unique assemblies of nearly identical collections of molecules.
We need to embrace within ourselves and teach our students the profound responsibility that comes with the power of chemistry. Decisions in the lab can have impacts on the health of people, the stability of ecosystems, and economic and social justice for our global communities.
Instead of discussing ‘tearing down the silos’ of disciplinarity we must come to terms with the reality, that those boundaries never existed in the first place except as intellectual constructs that end up pushing us apart instead of bringing us together.
I believe that we chemists are a community of dreamers who have an opportunity to function as catalysts and as nucleating crystals. With a nudge here and there, self-assembly might just be exponential.
Let’s invent the future we all can be proud of together,