Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
ing the standard source for such information (ACS 1995). I picked at
random the letter G. These then were my findings.
Faculty members born after 1955 - my arbitrarily chosen cutoff date
- numbered 44; only five were women. By far, the dominant research
area was biochemistry and molecular biology - even though the names
were selected from the chemistry section of the directory that excluded
departments of biochemistry. Ten of the junior faculty members were
engaged in such bio-work. Half-a-dozen other areas, more or less equally
populated, accounted for most of the remainder of this sample: or-
ganometallics (6), organic synthesis (5), surfaces (5), NMR (4), spectros-
copy other than NMR (4), and catalysis (3). To my surprise, traditional
topics going back to the 1960s continued to be popular with some of
these budding academics. Stereochemistry and conformational analysis
was one of them.
Indeed these young faculty members, the vast majority of which were
still assistant professors, were playing a safe game. They obviously
picked areas of work that were both funded more easily and promised to
provide publishable results in short time. I failed to identify highly ad-
venturesome profiles. To the contrary, quite a few among those individu-
als posted a number of different research orientations: 'something will
have to work out', seemed to be the guiding motive. One of these young
investigators for instance - he was quite representative in such an across-
the-board sweep - announced he was working on “organic and polymer
self-assembly; electronically conductive polymers; liquid crystals; self-
assembled monolayers; host-guest interactions; organic electrochemis-
try.”
The background for such a behavior - and the US were representative
of an almost worldwide trend - was an erosion in public support of
chemical science. To give a simple figure, between the 1960s and 1990s,
there was a ca. 60% drop in funded research proposals submitted to the
National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. From
1983 to 2002, funding of chemistry and physics by the US Departments
of Energy and Defense, had plummeted. Correspondingly, there were 9%
fewer graduate students in chemistry in the US in 2000 than in 1993
(Eiseman
et al.
2002).
