Tag Archives: chemistry

In the wake of the Harran plea deal, are universities embracing lab safety?

Posted on by

Earlier this month, prosecutors in Los Angeles reached a plea agreement with UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran in the criminal case against him in connection with the 2008 lab accident that resulted in the death of 23-year-old staff research assistant Sheharbano “Sheri” Sangji. Harran, who was facing more than 4 years of jail time if convicted, instead will perform 800 hours of community service and may find himself back in court in the event that his lab is found to have new safety violations in the next five years.

The Sangji family is not satisfied that the plea punishes Harran enough. My worry is whether the resolution of this case has a positive impact on safety in academic labs and research settings.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education,

Several [independent safety advocates] agreed that universities’ research laboratories still remain more dangerous than their corporate counterparts. Yet they also expressed confidence that the impetus for improvement brought by the first filing ever of criminal charges over a fatal university lab accident has not been diluted by the plea bargain. …

[T]he action by California prosecutors “has gotten the attention of virtually every research chemist out there,” even in states that may seem more reluctant to pursue such cases, [Neal R. Langerman, a former associate professor of chemistry at Utah State University who now heads Advanced Chemical Safety, a consulting firm] said. “This is precedent-setting, and now that the precedent is set, you really do not want to test the water, because the water is already boiling.”

As you might expect, the official statement from UCLA plays up the improvements in lab safety put into place in the wake of the accident and points to the creation of the UC Center for Laboratory Safety, which has been holding workshops and surveying lab workers on safety practices and attitudes.

I’m afraid, however, judging from the immediate reaction I’ve seen at my own institution, that we have a long way to go.

In particular, a number of science faculty (who are not chemists) seem to have been getting clear messages in the wake of “that UCLA prosecution” — they didn’t really know the details of the case, nor the names of the people involved — that our university would not be backing them up legally in the event of any safety mishap in the lab or the field. Basically, the rumblings from the higher administrative strata were: No matter how well you’ve prepared yourself, your students, your employees, no matter how many safety measures you’ve put into place, no matter what limitations you’re working with as far as equipment or facilities, if something goes wrong, it’s your ass on the line.

This does not strike me as a productive way to approach safe working conditions as a collective responsibility within an educational institution. I also suspect it’s not a stance that would hold up in court, but since it would probably take another lab tragedy and prosecution to undermine it, I’m hopeful that some sense of institutional ethics will well up and result in a more productive approach.

The most charitable explanation I can come up with is that the higher administrative strata intended to communicate that science faculty have a positive duty to ensure safe working conditions for their students and employees (and themselves). That means that science faculty need to be proactive in assessing their research settings (whether for laboratory or field research) for potential hazards, in educating themselves and those they work with about those hazards, in having workable plans to mitigate the hazards and to respond swiftly and effectively to mishaps. All of that is sensible enough.

However, none of that means that the institution is free of responsibility. Departments, colleges, and university administrators control resources that can make the difference between a pretty safe research environment and a terribly risky one. Institutions, not individual faculty, create and maintain occupational health programs. Institutions can marshal shared resources (including safety training programs and institutional safety officers) that individual faculty cannot.

Moreover, institutions set the institutional tone — the more or less official sense of what is prioritized, of what is valued. If the strongest message about safety that reaches faculty boils down to legal liability and who will ultimately be legally liable, I’m pretty sure the institution still has a great deal of work to do in establishing a real culture of safety.

_____

Related posts:

Suit against UCLA in fatal lab fire raises question of who is responsible for safety.

Crime, punishment, and the way forward: in the wake of Sheri Sangji’s death, what should happen to Patrick Harran?

Facing felony charges in lab death of Sheri Sangji, UCLA settles, Harran stretches credulity.

Why does lab safety look different to chemists in academia and chemists in industry?

Community responsibility for a safety culture in academic chemistry.

Are safe working conditions too expensive for knowledge-builders?

Scary subject matter.

Posted on by

This being Hallowe’en, I felt like I should serve you something scary.

But what?

Verily, we’ve talked about some scary things here:

More scary subjects have come up on my other blog, including:

Making this list, I’m very glad it’s still light out! Otherwise I might be quaking uncontrollably.

Truth be told, as someone who works with ethics for a living, I’m less afraid of monsters than I am of ordinary humans who lose sight of their duties to their fellow humans.

And frankly, when it comes to things that go bump in the night, I’m less terrified than curious …

especially since the things that go “bump” in my kitchen usually involve the intriguing trio of temperature-, pressure-, and phase-changes — which is to say, it’s nothing a little science couldn’t demystify.

Have a happy, safe, and ethical Hallowe’en!

Teaching chemistry while female: when my very existence was a problem.

Posted on by

Not quite 20 years ago, I was between graduate programs.

I had earned my Ph.D in chemistry and filed my applications to seven Ph.D. programs in philosophy. (There were some surreal moments on the way to this, including retaking the GRE two weekends after defending my chemistry dissertation — because, apparently, the GRE is a better predictor of success in graduate school than is success in graduate school.) In the interval between the graduate stipend from the chemistry program from which I was now a proud graduate and the (hypothetical) graduate stipend from the philosophy graduate program on the horizon, I needed to earn some money so I could continue to pay my rent.

I pieced together something approximating enough earnings. I spent a few hours a week as a research assistant to a visiting scholar studying scientific creativity. I spent many hours a week as an out-call SAT-prep tutor (which involved almost as many hours on San Francisco Bay Area freeways as it did working one-on-one with my pupils). I even landed a teaching gig at the local community college, although that wouldn’t start until the summer session. And, I taught the general chemistry segment of a Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) prep course.

Teaching the MCAT prep course involved four meetings (each four hours long, with three ten-minute breaks interspersed so people could stretch their legs, use the bathroom, find a vending machine, or what have you) with a large number of students planning to take the MCAT and apply to medical school. The time was divided between providing a refresher on general chemistry concepts and laying out problem-solving strategies for the “passage problems” to which the MCAT had recently shifted. I was working with old-school overhead transparencies (since this was 1994), with key points and the problems themselves in permanent ink and the working-out of the problems in transparency markers that erased with a damp cloth. The screen onto which the transparencies projected was very large, so I’d have to make use of the long rubber-tipped wooden pointer that was resting on the ledge of the chalkboard behind the screen.

During hour two of the very first meeting of the very first session I taught this MCAT prep course, as I retrieved the pointer from the chalk-ledge, I noticed that a single word had been written on the chalkboard:

Bitch

I was pretty sure it hadn’t been on the board at the beginning of the session. But I still had three hours worth of concepts to explain and problems to work before we could call it a day. So I ignored it and got down to business.

The second meeting with this group, I made a point of checking the chalkboard before I pulled down the projections screen, fired up the overhead projector, and commencing the preparation of the students for the MCAT.

Before the four hour session began, the chalkboard was blank. By the end of the four hours, again, there was a single word written on it:

Bitch

The same thing happened in our third session. By then it had started to really bug me, so, at the beginning of our fourth and final meeting together, I resolved at least to flush out whoever was doing the writing on the chalkboard. I collected all the chalk from the ledges and put it in the sink of the lab counter at the front of the room (for I was lecturing in a proper laboratory lecture hall, with sink, gas jets, and such). And, I brought a water bottle with me so I wouldn’t have to leave the lecture hall during the ten minute breaks to find a water fountain.

At the very first break, one of the young men in the prep course followed a path between the projection screen and the chalkboard, paused as if lost (or in search of chalk?), and then exited the room looking only a tiny bit sheepish.

On the board, appearing like a film negative against the light residue of chalk dust, he had written (I presume with a moistened finger):

Bitch

I still have no idea at all what provoked this hostility. The structure of the MCAT prep course was such that all I was doing was giving the students help in preparing for the MCAT. I was not grading them or otherwise evaluating them. Heck, I wasn’t even taking attendance!

What on earth about 25-year-old me, at the front of a lecture hall trying to make the essentials of general chemistry easy to remember and easy to apply to problem-solving — something these students presumably wanted, since they paid a significant amount of money to take the course — what made me a “bitch” to this young man? Why was it so important to him that not a single meeting we had passed without my knowing that someone in attendance (even if I didn’t know exactly who) thought I was a bitch?

When it happened, this incident was so minor, against the more overt hostility toward me as a woman in a male-dominated scientific field (soon to be followed, though I didn’t anticipate it at the time, by overt hostility toward me as a woman in male-dominated academic philosophy), that I almost didn’t remember it.

But then, upon reading this account of teaching while female, I did.

I remembered it so vividly that my cheeks were burning as they did the first time I saw that chalk-scrawled “bitch” and then had to immediately shake it off so that we could cover what needed to be covered in the time we had left for that meeting.

And I ask myself again, what was I doing, except a job that I was good at, a job that I did well, a job that I needed — what was I doing to that particular young man, paying for the service I was providing — that made me a bitch?

“There comes a time when you have to run out of patience.”

Posted on by

In this post, I’m sharing an excellent short film called “A Chemical Imbalance,” which includes a number of brief interviews with chemists (most of them women, most at the University of Edinburgh) about the current situation for women in chemistry (and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, or STEM, more generally) in the UK. Here’s the film:


A Chemical Imbalance
(I’m including my transcription of the film below.)

Some of the things I really appreciate about this film:

  • We get personal impressions, from women of different generations, about what it’s been like for them to be in chemistry in the UK.
  • We get numbers to quantify the gender disparity in academic chemistry in the UK, as well as to identify where in the career pipeline the disparity becomes worse. We also get numbers about how women chemists are paid relative to their male counterparts, and about relative rates of tenure that can’t be blamed on choices about childbearing and/or childrearing. There’s not just the perception of gender disparities in academic chemistry — the numbers demonstrate that the disparities are real.
  • Lurking beneath the surface is a conversation the interviewees might have had (but didn’t in the final cut) about what they count as compromises with respect to parenting and with respect to careers. My sense is that they would not all agree, and that they might not be as accepting of their colleagues’ alternative ways of striking a balance as we might hope.
  • Interviewees in the film also discuss research on unconscious gender bias, which provides a possible causal mechanism for the disparities other than people consciously discriminating against women. If people aren’t consciously discriminating, our intuition is that people aren’t culpable (because they can’t help what their unconscious is up to). However, whether due to conscious choices or unconscious bias, the effects are demonstrably real, which raises the question: what do we do about it?
  • The interviewees seem pretty hesitant about “positive discrimination” in favor of women as a good way to address the gender disparity — one said she wouldn’t want to think she got her career achievements because she’s a woman, rather than because she’s very good at what she does. And yet, they seem to realize that we may have to do something beyond hoping that people’s individual evaluations become less biased. The bias is there (to the extent that, unconsciously, males are being judged as better because they’re men). It’s a systemic problem. How can we put the burden on individuals to somehow magically overcome systemic problems?
  • We see a range of opinions from very smart women who have been describing inequalities and voicing the importance of making things in STEM more equitable about whether they’d describe themselves as feminists. (One of them says, near the end, that if people don’t like the word, we need to find another one so we don’t get sidetracked from actually pursuing equality.)
  • We see a sense of urgency. Despite how much has gotten better, there are plenty of elements that still need to improve. The interviewees give the impression that we ought to be able to find effective ways to address the systemic problems, if only we can find the will to do so within the scientific community.

How important is it to find more effective ways to address gender disparities in STEM? The statistic in the film that hit me hardest is that, at our present rate of progress, it will take another 70 years to achieve gender parity. I don’t have that kind of time, and I don’t think my daughters ought to wait that long, either. To quote Prof. Lesley Yellowlees,

I’ve often heard myself say we have to be patient, but there comes a time when you have to run out of patience, because if we don’t run out of patience and we don’t start demanding more from the system, demanding that culture change to happen faster than it’s happening at present, then I think we not only do ourselves a disservice, but we do the generations both past and the ones to come a huge disservice as well.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen 13 minutes packed so effectively with so much to think about.

* * * * *
Transcript of “A Chemical Imbalance”:

Dr. Perdita Barran, Reader in Biophysical Chemistry, University of Edinburgh: I’m not sure why it is Edinburgh has such a high number of female faculty, and indeed, female postdoctoral researchers and female research fellows. One of the greatest things about this department is, because they’re are such a high proportion of female faculty — it ranges between 20 and even up to 30 percent at a few times — it becomes less important and we are less prone to the gender bias, because you don’t need to do it. You just think of scientists as scientists, you don’t think of them in terms of their gender.

Prof. Eleanor Campbell FRSC FRS, Professor of Physical Chemistry, Head of School of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh: It’s very difficult to put your finger on it, but I do feel a different atmosphere in a place where you have a significant percentage of women. That’s not to say that women can’t be confrontational and egoistical, of course they can. But on the whole, there is a difference in atmosphere.

Text on screen: 1892 Women are finally allowed to attend The University of Edinburgh as undergraduates.

Text on screen: By 1914, over 1000 women hold degrees.

Prof. Steve Chapman FRSE FRSC, Principal & Vice Chancellor, Heriot-Watt University: There’s still not enough women representation in STEM at all levels, but it gets worse the higher you go up, and when you go to management levels, I think, there is a serious disparity.

Prof. Eleanor Campbell: Yeah, the leaky pipeline is a sort of worrying tendency to lose women at various stages on the career path. [Graph on the screen about “Women in STEM, UK average”.] Here we [discussing the chemistry line on the graph] have roughly 50-50 in terms of male/female numbers at the undergraduate level. It [the proportion of women] drops a little bit at postgraduate level, and then it dives going to postdocs and onward, and that is extremely worrying. We’re losing a lot of very, very talented people.

Text on screen: Women in STEM, UK average
Undergraduate 33%
Professor 9%
(2011 UKRC & HESA)

Dr. Elaine Murray MSP, Shadow Minister for Housing & Transport, Scottish Parliament: I feel that I did — 25 years ago I made the choice between remaining in science and my family. You know, 52% of women who’ve been trained in STEM come out of it. I’m one of them.

Prof. Anita Jones, Professor of Molecular Photophysics, University of Edinburgh: On the whole, women still do take more responsibility for the looking after children and so on. But again, I think there are things that can be put in place, improved child care facilities and so on, that can help with that, and can help to achieve an acceptable compromise between the two.

Dr. Marjorie Harding, Honorary Fellow, University of Edinburgh: The division of responsibilities between husband and wife has changed a lot over the years. When I first had children, it was quite clear that it was my responsibility to cope with the home, everything that was happening there, and the children’s things, and not to expect him to have time available for that sort of thing.

Dr. Carole Morrison, Senior Lecturer in Structural Chemistry, University of Edinburgh: When the children were small, because I was working part time, I felt that I was incredibly fortunate. I was able to witness all of their little milestones. But it’s meant that my career has progressed much slower than it would have done otherwise. But, you know, life is all about compromises. I wasn’t prepared to compromise on raising my children.

Dr. Alison Hulme, Senior Lecturer in Organic Chemistry, University of Edinburgh: I don’t go out of my way to let people know that I only work at 80%, for the very fact that I don’t want them to view me as any less serious about my intentions in research.

Dr. Perdita Barran: I really understood feminism when I had children and also wanted to work. Then it really hits you how hard it is actually to be a female in science.

Text on screen: 1928 Dr. Christina Miller produces the first ever sample of pure phosphorus trioxide.
In the same year British women achieve suffrage.

Text on screen: 1949 Dr. Miller becomes the first female chemist elected to The Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Prof. Steve Chapman: Do I consider myself to be a feminist?

Prof. Anita Jones: Well, that’s an interesting question.

Dr. Perdita Barran: Uh, yeah!

Dr. Marjorie Harding: No.

Dr. Carole Morrison: No, definitely not.

Prof. Eleanor Campbell: No, I’ve never thought of myself as a feminist.

Dr. Alison Hulme: I think that people don’t want to be labeled with the tag of being a feminist because it has certain connotations associated with it that are not necessarily very positive.

Dr. Elaine Murray: I’m of an age when women were considered to be feminists, you know, most of us in the 1970s. There are battles still to be fought, but I think we had a greater consciousness of the need to define ourselves as feminists, and I would still do so. But, there’s been progress, but I think the young women still need to be aware that there’s a lot to be done. All the battles weren’t won.

Text on screen: 1970 The UK Parliament passes The Equal Pay Act.
Over 40 years later, women still earn on average 14.9% less that their male counterparts, and they get promoted less.

Prof. Polly Arnold FRSE FRSC, Crum Brown Chair of Chemistry, University of Edinburgh: The Yale study on subconscious bias was a real shocker. I realized that it was an American study, so the subjects were all American, but I don’t feel that it’s necessarily any different in the UK.

Prof. Steve Chapman: It was a very simple study, but a very telling study. They sent out CVs to people in North American institutions and the only difference in the CV was the name at the top — a male name or a female name. The contents of the CVs were identical. And when the people were asked to comment on the CVs, there was something like a 40% preference for the CV if it had a male name associated with it. Now those people I don’t think were actively trying to discriminate against women, but they were, and they were doing it subconsciously. It scared me, because of course I would go around saying, ‘I’m not prejudiced at all,’ but I read that and I thought, if I saw those CVs, would I react differently?

Dr. Janet Lovett, Royal Society University Research Fellow, University of Edinburgh: You hear the kind of results from the Yale study and unfortunately you’re not that surprised by them. And I think … I think it’s hard to explain why you’re not that surprised by them. There is an endemic sexism to most high-powered careers, I would say.

Prof. Polly Arnold: When I was a junior academic in a previous job, I was given the opportunity to go on a course to help women get promoted. The senior management at the university had looked at the data, and they’d realized that the female academics were winning lots of international prizes, being very successful internationally, but they weren’t getting promoted internally, so what we needed was a course to help us do this. And to this day, I still don’t understand how they didn’t realize that it was them that needed the course.

Dr. Elaine Murray: I think a lot of it isn’t really about legislation or regulation, it’s actually cultural change, which is more difficult to affect. And, you know, the recognition that this is part of an equality agenda, really, that we need to have that conversation which is not just about individuals, its about the experience of women in general.

Text on screen: Women without children are still 23% less likely to achieve tenure than men with children.

Prof. Anita Jones: I’m not really in favor of positive discrimination. I don’t think, as a women, I would have wanted to feel that I got a job, or a fellowship, or a grant, or whatever, because I was a woman rather than because I was very good at what I do.

Prof. Steve Chapman: I think we have to be careful. I was looking at the ratio of women in some of the things that we’re doing in my own institution, and accidentally you can heavily dominate things with males without actually thinking about it. Does that mean we have to have quotas for women? No. But does it mean we have to be pro-active in making sure we’re bringing it to the attention of women that they should be involved, and that they add value? Yes.

Dr. Elaine Murray: I was always an advocator of positive discrimination in politics, in order to address the issue of the underrepresentation of women. Now, a lot of younger women now don’t see that as important, and yet if you present them some of the issues that women face to get on, they do realize things aren’t quite as easy.

Text on screen: 2012 The School of Chemistry receives the Athena Swan Gold Award, recognising a significant progression and achievement in promoting gender equality.

Prof. Steve Chapman: We shouldn’t underestimate the signal that Athena Gold sends out. It sends out the message that this school is committed to the Athena Agenda, which isn’t actually just about women. It’s about creating an environment in which all people can thrive.

Prof. Eleanor Campbell: I think it is extremely important that the men in the department have a similar view when it comes to supporting young academics, graduate students, postdocs, regardless of their gender. I think that’s extremely important. And, I mean, certainly here, our champion for our Athena Swan activities is a male, and I deliberately wanted to have a younger male doing that job, to make it clear that it wasn’t just about women, that it was about really improving conditions for everybody.

Dr. Elaine Murray: I know, for example, in the Scottish government, equalities is somehow lumped in with health, but it’s not. You know, health is such a big portfolio that equalities is going to get pretty much lost in the end, and I think probably there’s a need for equalities issues to take a higher profile at a governmental level. And I think also it’s still about challenging the media, about the sort of stereotypes which surround women more generally, and still in science.

Text on screen: 2012 Prof. Lesley Yellowlees becomes the first female President of The Royal Society of Chemistry.

Prof. Lesley Yellowlees MBE FRSE FRSC, Professor of Inorganic Electrochemistry, Vice Principal & Head of the College of Science & Engineering, University of Edinburgh, President of The Royal Society of Chemistry: I’ve often heard myself say we have to be patient, but there comes a time when you have to run out of patience, because if we don’t run out of patience and we don’t start demanding more from the system, demanding that culture change to happen faster than it’s happening at present, then I think we not only do ourselves a disservice, but we do the generations both past and the ones to come a huge disservice as well.

Text on screen: At our current rate of progress it will take 70 years before we achieve parity between the sexes.

Prof. Polly Arnold: If we’re unwilling to define ourselves as feminists, we need to replace the word with something more palatable. The concept of equality is no less relevant today.

When we target chemophobia, are we punching down?

Posted on by

Over at Pharyngula, Chris Clarke challenges those in the chemical know on their use of “dihydrogen monoxide” jokes. He writes:

Doing what I do for a living, I often find myself reading things on Facebook, Twitter, or those increasingly archaic sites called “blogs” in which the writer expresses concern about industrial effluent in our air, water, consumer products or food. Sometimes the concerns are well-founded, as in the example of pipeline breaks releasing volatile organic chemicals into your backyard. Sometimes, as in the case of concern over chemtrails or toxic vaccines, the concerns are ill-informed and spurious.

And often enough, the educational system in the United States being the way it’s been since the Reagan administration, those concerns are couched in terms that would not be used by a person with a solid grounding in science. People sometimes miss the point of dose-dependency, of acute versus chronic exposure, of the difference between parts per million and parts per trillion. Sometimes their unfamiliarity with the basic facts of chemistry causes them to make patently ridiculous alarmist statements and then double down on them when corrected.

And more times than I can count, if said statements are in a public venue like a comment thread, someone will pipe up by repeating a particular increasingly stale joke. Say it’s a discussion of contaminants in tap water allegedly stemming from hydraulic fracturing for natural gas extraction. Said wit will respond with something like:

“You know what else might be coming out of your tap? DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE!”

Two hydrogens, one oxygen … what’s coming out of your tap here is water. Hilarious! Or perhaps not.

Clarke argues that those in the chemical know whip out the dihydrogen monoxide joke to have a laugh at the expense of someone who doesn’t have enough chemical knowledge to understand whether conditions they find alarming really ought to alarm them. However, how it usually goes down is that other chemically literate people in earshot laugh while the target of the joke ends up with no better chemical understanding of things.

Really, all the target of the joke learns is that the teller of the joke has knowledge and is willing to use it to make someone else look dumb.

Clarke explains:

Ignorance of science is an evil that for the most part is foisted upon the ignorant. The dihydrogen monoxide joke depends for its humor on ridiculing the victims of that state of affairs, while offering no solution (pun sort of intended) to the ignorance it mocks. It’s like the phrase “chemophobia.” It’s a clan marker for the Smarter Than You tribe.

The dihydrogen monoxide joke punches down, in other words. It mocks people for not having had access to a good education. And the fact that many of its practitioners use it in order to belittle utterly valid environmental concerns, in the style of (for instance) Penn Jillette, makes it all the worse — even if those concerns aren’t always expressed in phraseology a chemist would find beyond reproach, or with math that necessarily works out on close examination.

There’s a weird way in which punching down with the dihydrogen monoxide joke is the evil twin of the “deficit model” in science communication.

The deficit model assumes that the focus in science communication to audiences of non-scientists should be squarely on filling in gaps in their scientific knowledge, teaching people facts and theories that they didn’t already know, as if that is the main thing they must want from science. (It’s worth noting that the deficit model seems to assume a pretty unidirectional flow of information, from the science communicator to the non-scientist.)

The dihydrogen monoxide joke, used the way Clarke describes, identifies a gap in understanding and then, instead of trying to fill it, points and laughs. If the deficit model naïvely assumes that filling gaps in knowledge will make the public cool with science, this kind of deployment of the dihydrogen monoxide joke seems unlikely to provoke any warm feelings towards science or scientists from the person with a gappy understanding.

What’s more, this kind of joking misses an opportunity to engage with what they’re really worried about and why. Are they scared of chemicals per se? Of being at the mercy of others who have information about which chemicals can hurt us (and in which amounts) and/or who have more knowledge about or control of where those chemicals are in our environment? Do they not trust scientists at all, or are they primarily concerned about whether they can trust scientists in the employ of multinational corporations?

Do their concerns have more to do with the information and understanding our policymakers have with regard to chemicals in our world — particularly about whether these policymakers have enough to keep us relatively safe, or about whether they have the political will to do so?

Actually having a conversation and listening to what people are worried about could help. It might turn out that people with the relevant scientific knowledge to laugh at the dihydrogen monoxide joke and those without share a lot of the same concerns.

Andrew Bissette notes that there are instances where the dihydrogen monoxide joke isn’t punching down but punching up, where educated people who should know better use large platforms to take advantage of the ignorant. So perhaps it’s not the case that we need a permanent moratorium on the joke so much as more careful thought about what we hope to accomplish with it.

Let’s return to Chris Clarke’s claim that the term “chemophobia” is “a clan marker for the Smarter Than You tribe.”

Lots of chemists in the blogosphere regularly blog and tweet about chemophobia. If they took to relentlessly tagging as “chemophobe!” people who are lacking access to the body of knowledge and patterns of reasoning that define chemistry, I’d agree that it was the same kind of punching down as the use of the dihydrogen monoxide joke Clarke describes. To the extent that chemists are actually doing this to assert membership in the Smarter Than You tribe, I think it’s counterproductive and mean to boot, and we should cut it out.

But, knowing the folks I do who blog and tweet about chemophobia, I’m pretty sure their goal is not to maintain clear boundaries between The Smart and The Dumb. When they fire off a #chemophobia tweet, it’s almost like they’re sending up the Batsignal, rallying their chemical community to fight some kind of crime.

So what is it these chemists — the people who have access to the body of knowledge and patterns of reasoning that define chemistry — find problematic about the “chemophobia” of others? What do they hope to accomplish by pointing it out?

Part of where they’re coming from is probably grounded in good old fashioned deficit-model reasoning, but with more emphasis on helping others learn a bit of chemistry because it’s cool. There’s usually a conviction that the basics of the chemistry that expose the coolness are not beyond the grasp of adults of normal intelligence — if only we explain in accessibly enough. Ash Jogalekar suggests more concerted efforts in this direction, proposing a lobby for chemistry (not the chemical industry) that takes account of how people feel about chemistry and what they want to know. However it’s done, the impulse to expose the cool workings of a bit of the world to those who want to understand them should be offered as a kindness. Otherwise, we’re doing it wrong.

Another part of what moves the chemists I know who are concerned with chemophobia is that they don’t want people who are not at home with chemistry to get played. They don’t want them to be vulnerable to quack doctors, nor to merchants of doubt trying to undermine sound science to advance a particular economic or political end, nor to people trying to make a buck with misleading claims, nor to legitimately confused people who think they know much more than they really do.

People with chemical know-how could help address this kind of vulnerability, being partners to help sort out the reliable information from the bogus, the overblown risks from risks that ought to be taken seriously or investigated further.

But short of teaching the folks without access to the body of knowledge and patterns of reasoning that define chemistry everything they know to be their own experts (which is the deficit model again), providing this kind of help requires cultivating trust. It requires taking the people to whom your offering the help seriously, recognizing that gaps in their chemical understanding don’t make them unintelligent or of less value as human beings.

And laughing at the expense of the people who could use your help — using your superior chemical knowledge to punch down — seems unlikely to foster that trust.

Are safe working conditions too expensive for knowledge-builders?

Posted on by

Last week’s deadly collapse of an eight-story garment factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh has prompted discussions about whether poor countries can afford safe working conditions for workers who make goods that consumers in countries like the U.S. prefer to buy for bargain prices.

Maybe the risk of being crushed to death (or burned to death, or what have you) is just a trade-off poor people are (or should be) willing to accept to draw a salary. At least, that seems to be the take-away message from the crowd arguing that it would cost too much to have safety regulation (and enforcement) with teeth.

It is hard not to consider how this kind of attitude might get extended to other kinds of workplaces — like, say, academic research labs — given that last week UCLA chemistry professor Patrick Harran was also scheduled to return to court for a preliminary hearing on the felony charges of labor code violations brought against him in response to the 2008 fire in his laboratory that killed his employee, Shari Sangji.

Jyllian Kemsley has a detailed look at how Harran’s defense team has responded to the charges of specific violations of the California Labor Code, charges involving failure to provide adequate training, failure to have adequate procedures in place to correct unsafe conditions or work practices, and failure to require workers wear appropriate clothing for the work being done. Since I’m not a lawyer, it’s hard for me to assess the likelihood that the defense responses to these charges would be persuasive to a judge, but ethically, they’re pretty weak tea.

Sadly, though, it’s weak tea of the exact sort that my scientific training has led me to expect from people directing scientific research labs in academic settings.

When safety training is confined to a single safety video that graduate students are shown when they enter a program, that tells graduate students that their safety is not a big deal in the research activities that are part of their training.

When there’s not enough space under the hood for all the workers in a lab to conduct all the activities that, for safety’s sake, ought to be conducted under the hood — and when the boss expects all those activities to happen without delay — that tells them that a sacrifice in safety to produce quick results is acceptable.

When a student-volunteer needs to receive required ionizing radiation safety training to get a film badge that will give her access to the facility where she can irradiate her cells for an experiment, and the PI, upon hearing that the next training session in three weeks away, says to the student-volunteer, “Don’t bother; use my film badge,” that tells people in the lab that the PI is unwilling to lose three weeks of unpaid labor on one aspect of a research project just to make the personnel involved a little bit safer.

When people running a lab take an attitude of “Eh, young people are going to dress how they’re going to dress” rather than imposing clear rules for their laboratories that people whose dress is unsafe for the activities they are to undertake don’t get to undertake them, that tells the personnel in the lab that whatever cost is involved in holding this line — losing a day’s worth of work, being viewed by one’s underlings as strict rather than cool — has been judged too high relative to the benefit of making personnel in the lab safer.

When university presidents or other administrators proclaim that knowledge-builders “must continue to recalibrate [their] risk tolerance” by examining their “own internal policies and ask[ing] the question—do they meet—or do they exceed—our legal or regulatory requirements,” that tells knowledge-builders at those universities that people with significantly more power than them judge efforts to make things safer for knowledge-builders (and for others, like the human subjects of their research) as an unnecessary burden. When institutions need to become leaner, or more agile, shouldn’t researchers (and human subjects) do their part by accepting more risk as the price of doing business?

To be sure, safety isn’t free. But there are also costs to being less safe in academic research settings.

For example, personnel develop lax attitudes toward risks and trainees take these attitudes with them when they go out in the world as grown-up scientists. Surrounding communities can get hurt by improper disposal of hazardous materials, or by inadequate safety measures taken by researchers working with infectious agents who then go home and cough on their families and friends. Sometimes, personnel are badly injured, or killed.

And, if academic scientists are dragging feet on making things safer for the researchers on their team because it takes time and effort to investigate risks and make sensible plans for managing them, to develop occupational health plans and to institute standard operating procedures that everyone on the research team knows and follows, I hope they’re noticing that facing felony charges stemming from safety problems in their labs can also take lots of time and effort.

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times reports that Patrick Harran will stand trial after an LA County Superior Court judge denied a defense motion to dismiss the case.

When #chemophobia isn’t irrational: listening to the public’s real worries.

Posted on by

This week, the Grand CENtral blog features a guest post by Andrew Bissette defending the public’s anxiety about chemicals. In lots of places (including here), this anxiety is labeled “chemophobia”; Bissette spells it “chemphobia”, but he’s talking about the same thing.

Bissette argues that the response those of us with chemistry backgrounds often take to the successful marketing of “chemical free” products, namely, pointing out that the world around us is made of chemicals, fails to engage with people’s real concerns. He writes:

Look at the history of our profession – from tetraethyl lead to thalidomide to Bhopal – and maintain with a straight face that chemphobia is entirely unwarranted and irrational. Much like mistrust of the medical profession, it is unfortunate and unproductive, but it is in part our own fault. Arrogance and paternalism are still all too common across the sciences, and it’s entirely understandable that sections of the public treat us as villains.

Of course it’s silly to tar every chemical and chemist with the same brush, but from the outside we must appear rather esoteric and monolithic. Chemphobia ought to provoke humility, not eye-rolling. If the public are ignorant of chemistry, it’s our job to engage with them – not to lecture or hand down the Truth, but simply to talk and educate. …

[A] common response to chemphobia is to define “chemicals” as something like “any tangible matter”. From the lab this seems natural, and perhaps it is; in daily life, however, I think it’s at best overstatement and at worst dishonest. Drawing a distinction between substances which we encounter daily and are not harmful under those conditions – obvious things like water and air, kitchen ingredients, or common metals – and the more exotic, concentrated, or synthetic compounds we often deal with is useful. The observation that both groups are made of the same stuff is metaphysically profound but practically trivial for most people. We treat them very differently, and the use of the word “chemical” to draw this distinction is common, useful, and not entirely ignorant. …

This definition is of course a little fuzzy at the edges. Not all “chemicals” are synthetic, and plenty of commonly-encountered materials are. Regardless, I think we can very broadly use ‘chemical’ to mean the kinds of matter you find in a lab but not in a kitchen, and I think this is how most people use it.

Crucially, this distinction tends to lead to the notion of chemicals as harmful: bleach is a chemical; it has warning stickers, you keep it under the sink, and you wear gloves when using it. Water isn’t! You drink it, you bathe in it, it falls from the sky. Rightly or wrongly, chemphobia emerges from the common usage of the word ‘chemical’.

There are some places here where I’m not in complete agreement with Bissette.

My kitchen includes a bunch of chemicals that aren’t kept under the sink or handled only with gloves, including sodium bicarbonate, acetic acid, potassium bitartrate, lecithin, pectin, and ascorbic acid. We use these chemicals in cooking because of the reactions they undergo (and the alternative reactions they prevent — those ascorbic acid crystals see a lot of use in our homemade white sangria preventing the fruit from discoloring when it comes in contact with oxygen). And, I reckon it’s not just people with PhDs in chemistry who recognize that chemical leaveners in their quickbreads and pancakes depend on some kind of chemical reaction to produce their desired effects. Notwithstanding that recognition of chemical reactivity, many of these same folks will happily mix sodium bicarbonate with water and gulp it down if that batch of biscuits isn’t sitting well in their tummies, with nary a worry that they are ingesting something that could require a call to poison control.

Which is to say, I think Bissette puts too much weight on the assumption that there is a clear “common usage” putting all chemicals on the “bad” side of the line, even if the edges of the line are fuzzy.

Indeed, it’s hard not to believe that people in countries like the U.S. are generally moving in the direction of greater comfort with the idea that important bits of their world — including their own bodies — are composed of chemicals. (Casual talk about moody teenagers being victims of their brain chemistry is just one example of this.) Aside from the most phobic of the chemophobic, people seem OK with the idea that their bodies use chemical (say, to digest their food) and even that our pharmacopeia relies on chemical (that can, for example, relieve our pain or reduce inflammation).

These quibbles aside, I think Bissette has identified the central concern at the center of much chemophobia: The public is bombarded with products and processes that may or may not contain various kinds of chemicals for which they have no clear information. They can’t tell from their names (if those names are even disclosed on labels) what those chemicals do. They don’t know what possible harms might come from exposure to these chemicals (or what amounts it might take for exposure to be risky). They don’t know why the chemicals are in their products — what goal they achieve, and whether that goal is one that primarily serves the consumers, the retailers, or the manufacturers. And they don’t trust the people with enough knowledge and information to answer these questions.

Maybe some of this is the public’s distrust for scientists. People imagine scientists off in their supervillain labs, making plans to conquer non-scientists, rather than recognizing that scientists walk among them (and maybe even coach their kids’ soccer teams). This kind of distrust can be addressed by scientists actually being visible as members of their communities — and listening to concerns voiced by people in those communities.

A large part of this distrust, though, is likely distrust of corporations, claiming chemistry will bring us better living but then prioritizing the better living of CEOs and shareholders while cutting corners on safety testing, informative labeling, and avoiding environmental harms in the manufacture and use of the goodies they offer. I’m not chemophobic, but I think there’s good reason for presumptive distrust of corporations that see consumers as walking wallets rather than as folks deserving information to make their own sensible choices.

Scientists need start addressing that element of chemophobia — and join in putting pressure on the private sector to do a better job earning the public’s trust.

Can we combat chemophobia … with home-baked bread?

Posted on by

This post was inspired by the session at the upcoming ScienceOnline 2013 entitled Chemophobia & Chemistry in The Modern World, to be moderated by Dr. Rubidium and Carmen Drahl

For some reason, a lot of people seem to have an unreasonable fear of chemistry. I’m not just talking about fear of chemistry instruction, but full-on fear of chemicals in their world. Because what people think they know about chemicals is that they go boom, or they’re artificial, or they’re drugs which are maybe useful but maybe just making big pharma CEOs rich, and maybe they’re addictive and subject to abuse. Or, they are seeping into our water, our air, our food, our bodies and maybe poisoning us.

At the extreme, it strikes me that chemophobia is really just a fear of recognizing that our world is made of chemicals. I can assure you, it is!

Your computer is made of chemicals, but so are paper and ink. Snails are made of chemicals, as are plants (which carry out chemical reactions right under our noses. Also carrying out chemical reactions right under our noses are yeasts, without which many of our potables would be less potent. Indeed, our kitchens and pantries, from which we draw our ingredients and prepare our meals, are full of many impressively reactive chemicals.

And here, it actually strikes me that we might be able to ratchet down the levels of chemophobia if people find ways to return to de novo syntheses of more of what they eat — which is to say, to making their food from scratch.

For the last several months, our kitchen has been a hotbed of homemade bread. Partly this is because we had a stretch of a couple years where our only functional oven was a toaster over, which means when we got a working full-sized oven again, we became very enthusiastic about using it.

As it turns out, when you’re baking two or three loaves of bread every week, you start looking at things like different kinds of flour on the market and figuring out how things like gluten content affect your dough — how dense of a bread it will make, how much “spring” it has in the oven, and so forth.

(Gluten is a chemical.)

Maybe you dabble with the occasional batch of biscuits of muffins or quick-bread that uses a leavening agent other than yeast — otherwise known as a chemical leavener.

(Chemical leaveners are chemicals.)

And, you might even start to pick up a feel for which chemical leaveners depend on there being an acidic ingredient (like vinegar or buttermilk) in your batter and which will do the job without an acidic ingredient in the batter.

(Those ingredients, whether acidic or not, are made of chemicals. Even the water.)

Indeed, many who find their inner baker will start playing around with recipes that call for more exotic ingredients like lecithin or ascorbic acid or caramel color (each one: a chemical).

It’s to the point that I have joked, while perusing the pages of “baking enhancers” in the fancy baking supply catalogs, “People start baking their own bread so they can avoid all the chemicals in the commercially baked bread, but then they get really good at baking and start improving their homemade bread with all these chemicals!”

And yes, there’s a bit of a disconnect in baking to avoid chemicals in your food and then discovering that there are certain chemicals that will make that food better. But, I’m hopeful that the process leads to a connection, wherein people who are getting back in touch with making one of the oldest kinds of foods we have can also make peace with the recognition that wholesome foods (and the people who eat them) are made of chemicals.

It’s something to chew on, anyway.

Book review: Cooking for Geeks.

Posted on by

Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food
by Jeff Potter
O’Reilly Media, 2010

We have entered the time of year during which finding The Perfect Gift for family members and friends can become something of an obsession. Therefore, in coming days, I’ll be sharing some recommendations.

If you have family members and friends on your gifting list who are interested in science or interested in food (or interested in both science and food), then Cooking for Geeks is a book to give them that will have an impact that lingers for much longer on the palate than your run-of-the-mill book.

Partly this is because Cooking for Geeks is organized more like a manual (with sections on equipment, “inputs”, relevant variables for different cooking methods, etc.) than a linear narrative. Indeed, the book is also an astounding collection of fun things to try, whether with ingredients, cooking methods, equipment, or your own taste buds. There are at least a hundred science fair project ideas lurking within these 432 pages — although good luck to the kid who tries to pry this book away from the grown-ups, who will want to try the potential experiments themselves. Jeff Potter’s clear and engaging descriptions of issues like the chemistry and mechanics of leavening, strategies for adapting the kitchen equipment you have to perform the tasks you want to perform, or ways to avoid foodborne illness are interspersed with his interviews with food geeks of various sorts sharing their expertise, their recipes, and their enthusiasm for digging deeper and learning why things work the way they do. Basically, it’s almost a transcript of what I imagine would be the geekiest dinner party ever, and an invitation to recreate a piece of it in your own kitchen with your own friends.

There is so much good stuff in here that it’s actually a bit overwhelming. Here’s a tasting-menu of some of my favorite features:

  • A hands-on way to compare the levels of gluten in different kinds of flour (page 220).
  • Discussions of different culinary solvents, including the use of alcohol and water to isolate different compounds from the same raw materials in a bitters recipe (page 296), and the use of “fat-washing” alcohols (page 292).
  • An algorithm to optimize your cutting of a cake into not-neccesarily-equal slices in such a way as to satisfy the desires of N people hoping to get a slice of that cake (page 257).
  • An examination of factors relevant to the multiplication of bacteria in our food, shedding some light on what makes the “shelf-stable” items in the pantry less deadly than they might otherwise be — plus an exhortation to remember basic physics when deciding how to safely store foods in the refrigerator (page 162).
  • A discussion of why marshmallows made with methylcellulose melt when they are cooled rather than when they are heated (pages 316-317), including a recipe so you can try this at home.
  • A graph (page 159) comparing cooking methods by rate of heat transfer (plotting minutes to raise the center of uniform pieces of tofu 54 oC versus the temperature of the cooking environment). There’s something about a good graph that is deeply satisfying.
  • An examination why it matters what the bowl is made of when you’re whisking egg whites in it (page 253), as well as recipes for French Meringue and Italian Meringue which discuss why a slight difference in method can lead to a pronounced difference in texture (page 255).
  • In the eternal batter between weight and volume, a persuasive empirical case for measuring ingredients by weight (page 62).
  • Lots of discussion of the five primary tastes (bitter, sour, umami, sweet, and salty), including charts with suggestions on what to add to a dish to increase each of them — and another chart with suggestions for how to counteract a primary taste with which you’ve gone too far (page 115).
  • A discussion of the basis vectors for wine-food pairings and how to isolate them empirically (using lemon juice, sugar water, tea, and vodka) to taste your dish and figure out what kind of wine will go well with it. (page 89)
  • The recipes for crepes (pages 68-69), pumpkin cake (page 249), and chocolate panna cotta that uses agar rather than gelatin (page 311).
  • Suggestions for compounds you can play with (including lactisole, miraculin, and the humble Peppermint Lifesaver) that will mess with your taste receptors in interesting ways (pages 109-110).

A lovely feature of this book is that it makes no assumptions about the reader’s level of comfort or competence in the kitchen. Rather, it presents food and cooking as a realm where the newbie can learn some important principles (that also happen to be cool) and where the experienced cook can learn even more. Maybe the experienced cook has a larger store of “common wisdom,” but Potter puts lots of that common wisdom to empirical test to see just how wise it is. Moreover, the newbie may be in a better position to violate recipes and use methods “the wrong way” to discover what happens when you do.

As well, Cooking for Geeks makes no assumptions about just what kind of geek the reader might be. There is certainly a lot of real chemistry, physics, and engineering in this book (not to mention a healthy dose of biology), but all of it is presented in an accessible way, inviting the reader who is not (for example) a chemistry geek to use food as a reason to start taking chemistry more seriously.

Cooking for Geeks would make a fabulous gift for a curious person who’s interested in food or cooking. It pairs nicely with Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater’s Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate and a quad-ruled notebook.

On the apparent horrors of requiring high school students to take chemistry.

Posted on by

There’s a guest post on the Washington Post “Answer Sheet” blog by David Bernstein entitled “Why are you forcing my son to take chemistry?” in which the author argues against his 15-year-old son’s school’s requirement that all its students take a year of chemistry.

Derek Lowe provides a concise summary of the gist:

My son will not be a chemist. He will not be a scientist. A year of chemistry class will do nothing for him but make him miserable. He could be taking something else that would be doing him more good.

Bernstein’s post is a slurry of claims about chemistry, secondary education, and the goals of education more generally with respect to human flourishing — in other words, the kind of thing I need to take apart for close examination before responding.

So, that’s what I’m going to do here.

Let’s start with Bernstein’s account of the dawning of the horror:

I discovered that my 15-year-old  son must suffer through a year of chemistry because a “Committee of Ten” academics was assembled in 1892 in order to standardize the curriculum (how’s that for a bad idea?) and recommended that chemistry, among other subjects, be taught to everyone everywhere.

Bernstein is right that tradition is not in itself a good reason to require that all high school students take a year-long chemistry course. On the other hand, tradition is not in itself a good reason to assert that a year-long chemistry course is a wrongheaded requirement.

The author proceeds to make noises acknowledging that he is glad that someone in our society is doing chemistry, what with all the goodies it delivers to enhance our modern lifestyles. He even writes:

[M]y very own mother, who if I am lucky will never lay eyes on this article, is a chemist, and believes that chemistry is the most noble of human pursuits and doesn’t understand how I, a former philosophy major, was able to eke out a living.

I have some thoughts here, as someone who has been both a chemistry major and a philosophy major. First, Bernstein does not exactly do philosophy majors proud in his post, given that he projects the (mistaken) view that the whole point of philosophy is to provoke. But, his revelation that he was philosophy-majoring chemist’s spawn seems to hint at … let’s call them generational differences of opinion. It strikes me that Bernstein might do well to attend to such generational differences of opinion — and to the possibility that they may also be present in his interactions with his own offspring. More about this anon.

Bernstein then goes through the reasons he has heard to justify the requirement that his 15-year-old must take a year of high school chemistry. First up is the problem of American competitiveness and the pressing shortage of science. To this, Bernstein replies:

[M]y son is not going to be a scientist. The very thought of it makes me laugh.

Don’t get me wrong — I think “American competitiveness” is a less-than-compelling reason to require high school students to take much of anything. But on what basis can Bernstein make this claim about his 15-year-old son? Most 15-year-olds of my acquaintance (and no small number of 25-year-olds, not to mention 35-year-olds) have very little solid idea what they want to be when they grow up. They are focused on the pressing problem of figuring out who they’re going to be, not on what they’re going to do for a living.

Parents may have hunches about their kids’ aptitudes and affinities, but we need to be honest that we can’t know for sure. Bernstein should at least entertain the possibility that an inspiring science teacher might make a career in science, or at least further study in chemistry, something his son wants.

Of course, it’s possible I’ve misread Bernstein as being descriptive here where he’s really being prescriptive: No child of mine is going to do something as disgraceful as becoming a scientist!

We turn to another possible reason for the chemistry requirement, and Bernstein’s response:

Chemistry will teach him analytical skills that he can apply to other fields.

Great. So will a hundred other possible subjects that will be less painful and potentially even more interesting to him. An experimental physicist recently told me that at this phase in chemistry instruction “it’s all about memorization anyway.”

To start, how exactly does Bernstein know ahead of time which subjects will be less painful and which will be potentially interesting? Hearsay and innuendo from a chemistry-hating parent may not be enough to make an accurate determination. On top of this, why think that high school chemistry should be essentially a matter of rote memorization and those other possible subjects are not?

On this point, See Arr Oh provides a particularly useful response:

Mr. Bernstein argues against mainstream chemistry education as “all memorization.” Well, I’ll agree – there’s a lot to take in that first go-around. But while elemental numbering, valence electrons, and balancing equations sound rote and boring up front, the trends are the critical information. What makes atoms bigger or smaller? Why are ionic (charged) and covalent (shared) bonds so different? What does acidic or basic really mean? Once mastered, these types of rational thinking – using data to read trends – show up in all sorts of other pursuits, from buying stocks to choosing a healthy diet.

I will add that high school chemistry, when taught well, has very little rote memorization of seemingly unconnected facts. I know this because my memory is not good (and is even worse in test conditions), and I came out of my high school chemistry class with a reasonably good feel for the kind of rational thinking See Arr Oh is talking about.

Derek Lowe also supports the view that what you want from a chemistry class is not perfect recall of a pile of facts:

I think, after a basic list of facts and concepts, that what I’d like for kids to get out of a science class is the broader idea of experimentation – that the world runs by physical laws which can be interrogated. Isolating variables, varying conditions, generating new hypotheses: these are habits of mind that actually do come in handy in the real world, whether you remember what an s orbital is or not. I’m not sure how well these concepts get across, though.

Habits of mind are the intended long-term take-away from a high school science class. High school science classes that are taught well actually deliver some familiarity with those habits of mind. Bernstein may have a legitimate concern that the quality of chemistry instruction in his son’s school is not sufficient to deliver the goods, but then might be better off arguing for better chemistry instruction, not against requiring chemistry in the first place.

Indeed, it doesn’t sound like Bernstein has much use for the habits of mind one might develop in a chemistry course in his own life. As Derek Lowe muses:

[A]lthough I’d like people to know some of these things, I wonder if not knowing them has harmed [Bernstein] too much. What might have harmed him, though, is a lack of knowledge of those broader points. Or a general attitude that science is That Stuff Those Other People Understand. You make yourself vulnerable to being taken in if you carry that worldview around with you, because claiming scientific backing is a well-used ploy. You should know enough to at least not be taken in easily.

It’s good to know enough about how the scientific knowledge gets built, in other words, not to end up unwittingly buying a monthly supply of snake oil.

Bernstein raises, and responds to, another justification for a chemistry requirement:

Kids must be exposed to different subjects in order to know what they’re good at and interested in.

Again, agreed. Maybe kids can survey several science classes over the course of a year or two, and explore various options. They can be given a taste of a veritable potpourri of subjects throughout their education. But my son is not being exposed to chemistry, he’s forced to spend a year of his life studying chemistry every day, which translates into a year of misery for him and our entire family, and paying for tutors who just get him through the course.

There’s quite a bit to unpack in this response.

One of the issues here is about the relative value of a science curriculum that takes a shallow look at a broad range of subjects compared to a science curriculum that goes deeper into a more narrowly focused piece of subject matter. Which approach does a better job helping students notice, and partake of, the applied rational thinking and habits of mind that See Arr Oh and Derek Lowe identify as the most useful bits of intro level chemistry? My own sense, from the perspective of someone who has taught intro chemistry and who felt pretty lost for the first quarter of my own high school chemistry course, is that it takes time, practice, and depth of engagement to do anything that resembles “thinking like a chemist”. It’s worth noting, though, that the unifying principles of chemistry (those things that kept it from becoming a long list of disjointed facts to memorize for the test) were a lot closer to the surface than they seemed to be in high school biology.

Another issue here relates to more than just one’s scientific education. What does it mean to be exposed to a topic in a useful way? How much exposure do you need (and how deep must the engagement be) before you have any good basis for judging your interest or potential, whether at the present moment or at some point in the future?

It strikes me that trying something can mean taking a chance on being over your head for a while — and that we often learn more in situations where we flounder than in situations where we skate by with little effort.

I have written before:

Doing science is something that is learned. It is not an intrinsic quality of a person. This means that you are not allowed to decide you are bad at it if you haven’t been immersed in learning it.

And here, we circle back to Berstein’s claim that a year of high school chemistry for his son will be a year of misery for the family. It almost sounds as if he thinks there is a sure-fire way to avoid any suffering connected to one’s offspring’s schooling. As the parent of a teenager, I doubt this is possible.

Parenting seems to necessitate helping your kid through all sorts of situations that involve some degree of suffering. Kids are being asked to develop new skills and habits of mind while they are simultaneously trying to figure out who the hell they want to be, establishing themselves as independent entities from their parents, and so forth. Kids are doing hard stuff, in school, and in life. We hope that they are gaining something from being brave enough and persistent enough to try hard things — even hard things they might not choose if left to their own devices. There may well be particular kinds of hard situations that challenge their brains with particular modes of thought that they’re not likely to encounter elsewhere until well into adulthood. Note that this might be a good argument for requiring that high school students study a foreign language or instrumental music, or that they participate in a team sport. I’m OK with that.

Finally, Bernstein addresses the “life is hard” rationale, namely, that the suffering generated by required courses is good preparation for the suffering of the workforce. Again, I think this is a weak rationale at best, but Bernstein’s response is even weaker:

I don’t know what you do for a living but I love what I do and rarely engage in work I don’t enjoy. If we’re going to pressure him, let’s do it in subjects where he can grow and put to use [sic] some day.

It is breathtaking that Bernstein seems not to recognize how privileged he is to have a paying job that he actually loves, given an economy in which plenty of people would willingly do work they can barely tolerate if it pays a decent wage and comes with benefits. And even then, it’s hard to imagine that anyone but the boss can really completely avoid all pieces of less-than-enjoyable work. There’s a reason why they call it “work” — and why people tend not to do it for free.

Moreover, there are some things that we do in our lives beyond our careers that might occasionally require work that is less than thoroughly enjoyable. For example, parenting a 15-year-old might not always be thoroughly enjoyable. Yet, it’s work that needs to be done.

Here, too, note that Bernstein seems to have complete confidence in his ability to discern which subjects will someday be of use to his son. The future, apparently, is crystal clear to him.

Moreover, Bernstein frames a year of required chemistry as claiming an unacceptably high opportunity cost:

When you force my son to take chemistry (and several other subjects, this is not only about chemistry), you are not allowing him that same time to take a public speaking course, which he could be really good at, or music, or political science, or creative writing, or HTML coding for websites.

Maybe he will learn something in chemistry somewhere along the way. But he will lose out on so many other more important opportunities, and so will our society, which will have deprived itself of his full contribution.

Set aside, for a moment, the fact that taking public speaking, or music, or political science, or so forth also comes with an opportunity cost (and that again, Bernstein seems to have reliable information from the future about which opportunity costs will lead to the best returns). I am deeply disturbed — and not a little freaked out — that a parent is commodifying his child’s school day, and choices in life more broadly, by framing them in terms of opportunity costs. Does Berstein see his son’s future as completely devoid of more opportunities? Is this kid’s full contribution to society contingent on being able to dodge redox reactions in high school? That strikes me as a pretty fragile trajectory for human flourishing.

A few years ago, I wrote about an element of what makes a college education valuable that is often overlooked and under-appreciated. I think it also applies to some degree to what our kids might get out of their high school educations:

You have your mind. You have the ability to think about things, to experience the world, to decide what matters to you and how you want to pursue it. You have your sense of curiousity and wonder when you encounter something new and unexpected, and your sense of satisfaction when you figure something out. You have the power to imagine ways the world could be different. You even have the ability (the responsibility?) to try to make the world different.

This is what I think a college education should give you: lots of hands-on experience using your mind so you know different ways you can think about things and you start to figure out what you care about.

Yes, you may encounter a lot of facts in your college education, but the real value of those facts is that they give you experience thinking about them in different ways. What you come away with is the ability to think about different facts out there in the “real world”. You get the ability to use the facts you encounter to draw your own conclusions rather than having to take someone else’s word for it. (The thing about those other people who will just tell you what you should think? Sometimes they lie.)

Thinking is hard. It requires a lot more effort than floating through the world on auto-pilot. But once you get started, it’s more addictive than potato chips. Thinking is fun. Even a little slice of a life of the mind (maybe reading a novel on the bus every morning) can counteract a fair bit of drudgery (like the job you’re riding that bus to get to). The joe-job is sometimes unavoidable; you’ve got to eat. But nourishing your mind gives you something better than just biological existence.

What, really, are we expecting kids to get out of school, and how are these things connected (or not) to the specifics of the curriculum? How much of what we’re hoping for is about to giving our kids particular job-ready skills? How much is about keeping future doors open for them (e.g., being able to major in chemistry without burning lots of time and money on remediation) should they choose, in the future, to go through them? How much has to do with a broader aim of human flourishing — and who gets to decide what that human flourishing should look like?

I worry what it says about us that parents (former philosophy majors, even!) are happy to parade their disdain for subjects they’ve decided, on the basis of who knows what, will be of absolutely no interest or use to their kids.

I also worry about what seems to be happening to childhood and adolescence in the U.S. if we cannot figure out how to help our kids meet the challenges of life — which sometimes include the challenges of the required curriculum — and if we cast the contexts in which kids are asked to try something they may not love, even something with which they may need to struggle, as essentially a (school) year of their lives that they are never getting back. Verily, this is the nature of time, flying like an arrow in one direction and so forth, but time that is not obviously productive is not thereby wasted. Kids need time to follow paths that may not lead to obvious destinations. They should have the chance to pursue lots of opportunities. For parents to cast them in terms of opportunity costs is not, in my view, the best way for them to cherish time with their kids.