the “central science”
Feb 19th 2005Wallabynerd alert
My advisor dropped by my desk for a nice little chat today. One thing that came up was how he wasn’t sure if I was interested in an industrial job or an academic one — I’ve only told him a dozen times, and none *very* recently — but that if it was the latter, I should keep in mind that practically every school these days expects faculty candidates to have done a postdoc. Well, duh.
The interesting part was the question of whether I should look for a future in a chemistry department or not. There’s been a good bit of speculation lately (in ACS and elsewhere) to the effect that, while chemists are doing fine, “chemistry” as a discipline is shrinking… more and more chemists are working in other departments or disciplines. This is one side effect of chemistry having been so useful to other fields; now people are making and studying all kinds of molecules, but they’re calling it “materials science” or “medicinal chemistry” or “systems biology”. And, as he said, our lab could very easily be moved (lock, stock, and lasers) over to the biomedical engineering department and nobody, including us, would blink.
So, he “encouraged” me to consider looking for postdocs in those other fields, since that’s what’s growing. In a way this is good, since there’s actually a couple labs I’ve thought about which aren’t in chemistry…. but I *like* being a chemist, and I like being in a chemistry department. And I think I’ve pinned down the reasons for my negative reaction: I’ll get to do more different things this way.
There’s been a big campaign in ACS to celebrate chemistry as “the central science”, because of its connections to (and impact on) other fields. (There’s also the argument that all chemistry is really physics, but, eh.) And that’s sort of the nice thing about it… Analytical chemistry is a way of applying a wide variety of tools, mostly chemical in some form or other, to a broad range of problems in chemistry and out of it.
That variety is something I’ve always liked about chemistry, and analytical most of all… synthetic chemists might get to make a lot of different molecules, but they’re still only making molecules, and their “variety” is just mixing together different things. Collect product, rinse, repeat a thousand times until you graduate, and then another thousand times a year at Pfizer. Analytical chemistry gets a greater variety of problems… environmental issues, detecting molecules in space or deep in the ocean, clinical information for doctors to rely on, biology (from large critters down to the contents of single cells), complex materials, archaeological remains. We get more instruments — toys! — to play with.
Other fields, like biomechanics, seem a lot more specialized; they’re a good source of problems for analytical chemists to look at, but it’s sort of an uphill battle to go from biomechanical studies of bone to detecting forged signatures or traces of dioxin. Except for analytical chemists, who might get to tackle all three of those problems in the same week.
And, of course, there’s the consideration that I’d prefer to teach at a four year undergraduate institution, rather than a research university. My chances of finding one of those with an extensive program of research in biomedical engineering (or even a department of it) seem pretty slim. And I imagine it’ll be a lot easier to get a job in a chemistry department with a postdoc in a chemistry department. (Not that I’m hostile to collaborations. Far from it.)
So, I think I’ll cheerfully ignore my advisor’s advice and keep looking in chemistry. He doesn’t know everything, after all; he’s convinced we’d be swimming in grant money if only That Man weren’t occupying the White House. (Of course, since we don’t clone things or look for signs of global warming, I rather doubt we’d be any higher on the NIH hog anyway.)