SEPTEMBER 2011 CHEMISTRY BEYOND THE BENCH Supplement to nature publishing group © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved INSIGHT | CONTENTS Chemistry beyond the bench he designation of 2011 as the International Year of Chemistry (IYC) Tby IUPAC and UNESCO provides an ideal time for chemists to take stock: to examine their place in the wider world, reflect on chemistry’s history and look ahead to future opportunities and challenges. Inspired by the themes that IUPAC has created for the IYC, this collection of Commentaries considers a broad spectrum of the issues facing chemistry today. Chemistry needs to improve its relationship with the wider public, many highlighted the limited availability of many of whom seem unaware of its benefits, and mineral resources. COVER IMAGE even suffer from ‘chemophobia’. And with How can the inadequate educational The designation of 2011 as the International this image problem, what can be done to resources be improved in developing Year of Chemistry by the United Nations inspire the next generation of chemists to countries? This problem, in addition to poor offers our community an opportunity not study what can seem like a daunting and general infrastructure, severely restricts only to celebrate its successes, but also to demanding discipline? Once their studies access to the many potential benefits that look critically at the challenges it faces. are over, how can new chemistry graduates chemistry offers to improve people’s lives. COVER DESIGN: ALEX WING. IMAGES: DUCKS, © HEATHER and postgraduates respond to the changing Even in more developed countries, other BUCKLEY, WWW.HEATHERBUCKLEY.CO.UK; MARIE CURIE, © industrial job market? barriers have hindered access for around PHOTOS.COM/THINKSTOCK. OTHERS: © ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/ L TO R: JAVARMAN3; MAREK ULIASZ; OLIVIER LANTZENDÖRFFER; Although there have been many half of the population; how have things CATENARYMEDIA; CHRISTIAN WAADT; BANKSPHOTOS; JAMEY chemical triumphs in the design and changed for female chemists in the 100 years EKINS & ANDREY PROKHOROV; UYEN LE. production of new medicines over the since Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel NPG LONDON past century, there are constant worries Prize in Chemistry? The Macmillan Building, that the drug pipeline may be running Chemistry has achieved great things 4 Crinan Street, London N1 9XW dry. Will a better understanding of the in the past century, playing a large part in T: +44 207 833 4000 physical chemical behaviour that underpins creating the modern world as we know it. But F: +44 207 843 4563 human biochemistry improve the drug- improvements in communication, education [email protected] discovery process? New drugs aren’t the and accessibility are needed to ensure that INSIGHT EDITORS only things in short supply: recent concerns chemistry has a global and sustainable future GAVIN ARMSTRONG STUART CANTRILL over the scarcity of rare-earth metals have in the next 100 years and beyond. STEPHEN DAVEY ANNE PICHON NEIL WITHERS CONSULTING EDITOR COMMENTARIES LAURA CROFT Sex and the citadel of science SENIOR PRODUCTION EDITOR Michelle Francl 670 ALISON HOPKINS SENIOR COPY EDITOR Communicating chemistry for public engagement JANE MORRIS Matthew R. Hartings and Declan Fahy 674 ART EDITOR The two faces of chemistry in the developing world ALEX WING CONTENTS C. N. R. Rao 678 EDITORIAL ASSISTANT REBECCA CARTER From crazy chemists to engaged learners MARKETING MANAGER through education LOUISE PORTER David K. Smith 681 PUBLISHER RUTH WILSON The changing landscape of careers in the EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, chemical industry NATURE PUBLICATIONS Keith J. Watson 685 PHILIP CAMPBELL Minerals go critical Roderick G. Eggert 688 Getting physical to fix pharma Patrick R. Connelly, T. Minh Vuong and Mark A. Murcko 692 NATURE CHEMISTRY | VOL 3 | SEPTEMBER 2011 | www.nature.com/naturechemistry 669 © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved COMMENTARY | INSIGHT Sex and the citadel of science Michelle Francl One hundred years on from Marie Curie being awarded her second Nobel Prize there has been only a handful of female scientists who have received the call from Stockholm. Why are women still under- represented? A lack of ability or passion, or could it be that we create labs into which women don’t quite fit? suspect it was a bacterium that turned me into a chemist. The summer between I third and fourth grade I was sick, too ill to get out of bed for a month. Once I was well enough to be bored, my mother, desperate to keep her invalid child amused and lacking the modern-day sickroom essentials of DVD players and video games, brought me a new book to read. It worked. I was transfixed from the first page, whisked from Chicago’s oppressive midsummer heat to the crisp late-autumn days of nineteenth- century Warsaw to walk along the banks of the Wisla with young Manya Sklodowska and her sister. The tale had everything you would expect to capture a young girl’s heart: a motherless heroine, her odyssey across Europe to find the treasure she sought, wicked men bent on stopping her, a broken heart, true love, tragedy. Disney should have optioned it. I imagined myself in a Paris garret, bent over my books, so enthralled by my studies I barely remembered to eat. It was dark, sophisticated, full of mystery and intrigue, and deeply romantic. Ultimately the heroine — who had fainted from hunger in her Parisian attic — triumphs, winning not just the hand of her prince, but also two Nobel prizes. Long before I reached the last pages of Eve Curie’s biography of her mother, I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up — a scientist like Manya, or as she was known to her scientific colleagues, Marie Sklodowska Curie. I was beguiled by the thought of OF MARIE CURIE © PHOTOS.COM/THINKSTOCK ORIGINAL IMAGE discovering new elements and new A portrait of Marie Curie’s face created from the photographs of around 200 women scientists. physics — and also of having a lab to call my own. Growing up in the 1960s, the daughter of two chemists who met in graduate school, Agnes Pockels to do her pioneering In an interview in the New York Times, it seemed perfectly reasonable to think experiments in surface chemistry in her then ACS president Thomas Lane noted that women could be top-notch research kitchen — work that laid the ground for that Ada Yonath’s 2009 Nobel Prize in scientists. Dinner-table conversations were Irving Langmuir’s 1932 Nobel prize — Chemistry for her work on the structure sprinkled with the names of my parents’ and forced mathematician and quantum of the ribosome reflected “a tremendous colleagues and mentors; more than a few mechanic Emmy Noether to list her classes change in the demographics of the field”, and were women. In 1964 Dorothy Crowfoot under David Hilbert’s name, seemed to have it is true that there has been a substantial Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, attenuated. Why then would it be a long increase in the fraction of women in the first woman to do so since Marie Curie’s 45 years before another woman chemist chemistry since Marie Curie defended her daughter Irène Joliet-Curie 29 years before. would get a phone call from Sweden early doctoral dissertation in 1903 — the first The societal constraints that had compelled on an October morning? woman in France to do so. Almost 40% of 670 NATURE CHEMISTRY | VOL 3 | SEPTEMBER 2011 | www.nature.com/naturechemistry © 2011 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved INSIGHT | COMMENTARY chemistry PhDs in the United States went to proper destiny of women until one sees a women in 2009 (ref. 1) compared with less thousand of ‘em doing something different. than 5% earned by women in 1960 (ref. 2). There is something wrong with it.”4 Despite these enormous gains, women are In the twenty-first century it is easy winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry less to dismiss Kipling’s characterization of frequently, not more. education as unsuited to women as mere If the demographics have changed for opinion. In these more measured times, the better since Marie and her daughter however, statistics — not a satiric pen — became Nobel Laureate chemists, what are wielded to reveal women’s proper hasn’t changed? Or perhaps what has destiny. Larry Summers, infamously changed for the worse? Where are the speculating on the diversity of the US twenty-first-century Marie Curies and workforce, does precisely that: “So my Dorothy Hodgkins, and what stands sense is that the unfortunate truth — I between them and a Nobel Prize? Ability? would far prefer to believe something Passion? Bias? Or could it be that women do else, because it would be easier to address not fit into the halls of science? what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true — is that the Ada Yonath’s 2009 Nobel combination of the high-powered job hypothesis and the differing variances Prize in Chemistry reflected probably explains a fair amount of this “a tremendous change in the problem [the underrepresentation of women in science and engineering demographics of the field”. faculties].” Citing statistics showing more variance in mathematical ability among Many of the theories regarding the males, Summers concluded that a greater underrepresentation of women in science proportion of men are truly gifted in would have been familiar to Professors mathematics, and by extrapolation, more Curie and Hodgkin. In their thorough capable of excelling in science5. review of the current literature on sex A single counterexample is sufficient to © PHOTOS.COM/THINKSTOCK and science, psychologists Stephen Ceci disprove a theorem (though many more and Wendy Williams group the working can be found3). The larger variance in external social constraints, but internal hypotheses regarding the relative dearth mathematical ability among males that cues; maybe the bulk of girls won’t take it of women doing science into three broad Summers cites is by no means universal.