A few of the articles from this week's issue of Chemical and Engineering News:
- Cover: "Uncovering the hidden signs of organ transplant rejection" by Celia Henry Arnaud
- This Pfizer automated chemistry screening instrument is pretty darned impressive (article by Stu Borman)
- Shaking up gold and palladium with Oxone? Huh. (article by Mark Peplow)
- I dunno why I don't think of Singapore as a center of startups, but there are apparently quite a few. (article by Marc S. Reisch)
- An impassioned argument for more reproducibility in organic chemistry in the letters to the editor.
I don't work in synthetic chemistry, but I agree with both correspondent's points on the reproducibility problem.
ReplyDeleteThe only exposure to statistics that I had in my undergraduate chemistry curriculum was in quantitative analysis and p-chem (statistical mechanics), and none that I can think of in my graduate curriculum. The quantitative analysis statistics has proved more useful for me, but like the first correspondent, I have had to learn a lot on the job and it doesn't give me the warm and fuzzy feeling that I actually know what I am talking about.
What the second correspondent wrote is something I wonder about any time I read a experimental section of a paper. For myself, one reason I went into science is to "know" - and I do not feel like I "know" enough when I am confronted with these kind of factors described in this letter. I am continually searching for ways within my area to get a better handle on what is actually going on.