Research Chemist Quotes

Your dad was in a street gang?" My adopted dad was an accountant for a big Fortune 500 corporation. Him, me, and my adopted mom lived in the suburbs in an English Tudor house with a gigantic basement where he fiddled with model trains. The other dads were lawyers and research chemists, but they all ran model trains. Every weekend they could, they'd load into a family van and cruise into the city for research. Snapping pictures of gang members. Gang graffiti. Sex workers walking their tracks. Litter and pollution and homeless heroin addicts. All this, they'd study and bicker about, trying to outdo each other with the most realistic, the grittiest scenes of urban decay they could create in HO train scale in a subdivision basement

Once a research chemist, Elizabeth Zott was a woman with flawless skin and an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and never would be. She was, as all good stars are, discovered. Although in Elizabeth’s case,

The daughter of Lithuanian immigrants, born with a precocious scientific intellect and a thirst for chemical knowledge, Elion had completed a master's degree in chemistry from New York University in 1941 while teaching high school science during the day and preforming her research for her thesis at night and on the weekends. Although highly qualified, talented, and driven, she had been unable to find a job in an academic laboratory. Frustrated by repeated rejections, she had found a position as a supermarket product supervisor. When Hitchings found Trudy Elion, who would soon become on of the most innovative synthetic chemists of her generation (and a future Nobel laureate), she was working for a food lab in New York, testing the acidity of pickles and the color of egg yolk going into mayonnaise. Rescued from a life of pickles and mayonnaise…

And while Elizabeth wasn’t entirely keen on the idea—she was a research chemist—she took the job for the usual reasons: it paid more and she had a child to support.

There is in the chemist a form of thought by which all ideas become visible in the mind as strains of an imagined piece of music. This form of thought is developed in Faraday in the highest degree, whence it arises that to one who is not acquainted with this method of thinking, his scientific works seem barren and dry, and merely a series of researches strung together, while his oral discourse when he teaches or explains is intellectual, elegant, and of wonderful clearness.

Then he made a bold declaration. “World War I was a chemists’ war,” Scales said. “World War II was a physicists’ war,” and the war on terror was “the social scientists’ war.

Will fluorine ever have practical applications? It is very difficult to answer this question. I may, however, say in all sincerity that I gave this subject little thought when I undertook my researches, and I believe that all the chemists whose attempts preceded mine gave it no more consideration. A scientific research is a search after truth, and it is only after discovery that the question of applicability can be usefully considered.

In the scientific world, the syndrome known as 'great man's disease' happens when a famous researcher in one field develops strong opinions about another field that he or she does not understand, such as a chemist who decides that he is an expert in medicine or a physicist who decides that he is an expert in cognitive science. They have trouble accepting that they must go back to school before they can make pronouncements in a new field.

Whatever the evolutionary precursors of drug use are, a permanently “drug-free” human culture has yet to be discovered. Like music, language, art, and tool use, the pursuit of altered states of consciousness is a human universal. With access to few alternatives, Siberian shamans imbibe reindeer and human urine to maximize the psychedelic yield of Amanita muscaria mushrooms (the metabolite that is excreted may be stronger than the substance initially ingested); on nearly the opposite side of the world, New Zealanders party with untested “research chemicals” synthesized by Chinese chemists. Drug use spans time and culture. It is a rare human who has never taken a drug to alter her mood; statistically, it is non-users who are abnormal. Indeed, today, around two thirds of Americans over 12 have had at least one drink in the last year, and 1 in 5 are current smokers. (In the 1940s and ’50s, a whopping 67% of men smoked.) Among people ages 21 to 25, 60% have taken an illegal drug at least once—overwhelmingly marijuana—and 20% have taken one in the past month. Moreover, around half of us could suffer from physical withdrawal symptoms if denied our daily coffee. While Americans are relatively prodigious drug users—topping the charts in the use of many substances—we are far from alone in our psychoactive predilections.

Any chemist reading this book can see, in some detail, how I have spent most of my mature life. They can become familiar with the quality of my mind and imagination. They can make judgements about my research abilities. They can tell how well I have documented my claims of experimental results. Any scientist can redo my experiments to see if they still work—and this has happened! I know of no other field in which contributions to world culture are so clearly on exhibit, so cumulative, and so subject to verification.

It has been estimated that there are between 1 billion and 30 billion planets in our galaxy, and about 100 billion galaxies in the universe. Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA, really was a quite staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets. A grant-giving body would laugh at any chemist who admitted that the chance of his proposed research succeeding was only one in a hundred. But here we are talking about odds of one in a billion. And yet . . . even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets—of which Earth, of course, is one.

Wherever forest can develop in a species-appropriate manner, they offer particularly beneficial functions that are legally placed above lumber production in many forest laws. I am talking about respite and recovery. Current discussions between environmental groups and forest users, together with the first encouraging results-such as the forest in Konigsdorf-give hope that in the future forests will continue to live out their hidden lives, and our descendants will still have the opportunity to walk through the trees in wonder. This what this ecosystem achieves: the fullness of life with tens of thousands of species interwoven and interdependent. And just how important this interconnected global network of forests is to other areas of Nature is made clear by this little story from Japan. Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at the Hokkaido University, discovered that leaves falling into streams and rivers leach acids into the ocean that stimulate growth of plankton, the first and most important building block in the food chain. More fish because of the forest? The researcher encouraged the planting of more trees in coastal areas, which did, in fact, lead to higher yields for fisheries and oyster growers.

For every impulse is imperious, and as SUCH, attempts to philosophize. To be sure, in the case of scholars, in the case of really scientific men, it may be otherwise—"better," if you will; there there may really be such a thing as an "impulse to knowledge," some kind of small, independent clock-work, which, when well wound up, works away industriously to that end, without the rest of the scholarly impulses taking any material part therein. The actual "interests" of the scholar, therefore, are generally in quite another direction—in the family, perhaps, or in money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact, almost indifferent at what point of research his little machine is placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist; he is not characterised by becoming this or that. In the philosopher, on the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as to who he is,—that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses of his nature stand to each other. 7.

Here I should issue a caveat. In origins-of-life research (and probably in most other disciplines as well), scientists gravitate to models that highlight their personal scientific specialty. Organic chemist Stanley Miller and his cohorts saw life’s origins as essentially a problem in organic chemistry. Geochemists, by contrast, have tended to focus on more intricate origins scenarios involving such variables as temperature and pressure and chemically complex rocks. Experts in membrane-forming lipid molecules promote the “lipid world,” while molecular biologists who study DNA and RNA view the “RNA world” as the model to beat. Specialists who study viruses, or metabolism, or clays, or the deep biosphere have their idiosyncratic prejudices as well. We all do it; we all focus

Our bodies aren't adapted to absorb big loads of nutrients all at once (many supplements surpass RDA values by 200 percent or more), but tiny quantities of them in combinations--exactly as they occur in plants. Eating a wide variety of different plant chemicals is a very good idea, according to research from the American Society for Nutritional Sciences. You don't have to be a chemist, but color vision helps. By eating plant foods in all different colors you'll get carotenoids to protect body tissues from cancer (yellow, orange, and red veggies); phytosterols to block cholesterol absorption and inhibit tumor growth (green and yellow plants and seeds); and phenols for age-defying antioxidants (blue and purple fruits). [from an entry by Barbara Kingsolver's daughter Camille]

DuPont, for 130 years, had confined itself to making munitions and explosives. In the mid-1920s it then organized its first research efforts in other areas, one of them the brand-new field of polymer chemistry, which the Germans had pioneered during World War I. For several years there were no results at all. Then, in 1928, an assistant left a burner on over the weekend. On Monday morning, Wallace H. Carothers, the chemist in charge, found that the stuff in the kettle had congealed into fibers. It took another ten years before DuPont found out how to make Nylon intentionally. The point of the story is, however, that the same accident had occurred several times in the laboratories of the big German chemical companies with the same results, and much earlier. The Germans were, of course, looking for a polymerized fiber—and they could have had it, along with world leadership in the chemical industry, ten years before DuPont had Nylon. But because they had not planned the experiment, they dismissed its results, poured out the accidentally produced fibers, and started all over again.

James Tour is a leading origin-of-life researcher with over 630 research publications and over 120 patents. He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015, listed in “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters in 2014, and named “Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine. Here is how he recently described the state of the field: We have no idea how the molecules that compose living systems could have been devised such that they would work in concert to fulfill biology’s functions. We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins were made and how they could have coupled in proper sequences, and then transformed into the ordered assemblies until there was the construction of a complex biological system, and eventually to that first cell. Nobody has any idea on how this was done when using our commonly understood mechanisms of chemical science. Those that say that they understand are generally wholly uninformed regarding chemical synthesis. Those that say, “Oh this is well worked out,” they know nothing—nothing—about chemical synthesis—nothing. … From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks, let alone assembly into a complex system. That’s how clueless we are. I have asked all of my colleagues—National Academy members, Nobel Prize winners—I sit with them in offices. Nobody understands this. So if your professors say it’s all worked out, if your teachers say it’s all worked out, they don’t know what they’re talking about.23

The first event, which looked back but also forward like a kind of historical hinge, was the centennial of the birth of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered (five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as LSD. This was an unusual centennial in that the man being feted was very much in attendance. Entering his second century, Hofmann appeared in remarkably good shape, physically spry and mentally sharp, and he was able to take an active part in the festivities, which included a birthday ceremony followed by a three-day symposium. The symposium’s opening ceremony was on January 13, two days after Hofmann’s 100th birthday (he would live to be 102). Two thousand people packed the hall at the Basel Congress Center, rising to applaud as a stooped stick of a man in a dark suit and a necktie, barely five feet tall, slowly crossed the stage and took his seat. Two hundred journalists from around the world were in attendance, along with more than a thousand healers, seekers, mystics, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, consciousness researchers, and neuroscientists, most of them people whose lives had been profoundly altered by the remarkable molecule that this man had derived from a fungus half a century before. They had come to celebrate him and what his friend the Swiss poet and physician Walter Vogt called “the only joyous invention of the twentieth century.

The argument is that we are influenced by historical research.” Michael Simpson glanced over at Sophie before continuing. “When one commences an education, to become say a physicist or a chemist in today’s society, one is automatically loaded up with all the accumulated knowledge of what is wrong and what is right. Many of the scientists thus have a very similar line of attack for new problems. And this colours our scientific progress. We advance, but only in small steps. True progress most often is made when some individual looks at a problem from a totally new angle, and that is hard when everybody has been through the same basic foundations. Take Albert Einstein. The revolutionary ideas he came up with weren’t the result of discussions with equal minded academics in the university hall. They were a result of Albert Einstein’s relentless pondering and single minded focus on theoretical abstractions, alone in a small crummy patent office in Switzerland, back in 1905. If Einstein at an early stage had discussed his ideas with colleagues at a university, there is a real danger he would have been set forth on a different line of thinking, and quite possibly we wouldn’t have the theory of relativity in the form we have it today.

But as it happened, a team of chemists in Germany had recently managed to refine morphine into a new drug, heroin, which the German pharmaceutical company Bayer began to mass market as a wonder drug—a safer alternative to morphine. Heroin was created by the same research team that invented aspirin.

Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons

One brief illustration of specialization’s effect may give this whole series of points additional force. An investigator who hoped to learn something about what scientists took the atomic theory to be asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum.7 Presumably both men were talking of the same particle, but they were viewing it through their own research training and practice.

An investigator who hoped to learn something about what scientists took the atomic theory to be asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum. Presumably both men were talking of the same particle, but they were viewing it through their own research training and practice. Their experience in problem-solving told them what a molecule must be. Undoubtedly their experiences had had much in common, but they did not, int his case, tell the two specialists the same thing. As we proceed we shall discover how consequential paradigm differences of this sort can occasionally be.

The food industry treats food more like a chemistry experiment than a form of nutrition. With the profit motive in mind, it manipulates us to eat (and buy) foods that aren’t even good for us. For example, chemists and food researchers have found what they termed our “bliss point,” which is the optimal balance of salt, sugar, and fat that flips our brains into a frenzy of desire.

Although I am all about clean, you will notice that I don’t recommend antibacterial products that claim to obliterate germs on contact. In my research, I have consulted epidemiologists at the CDC, chemists, doctors, and other cleaning professionals, and I have discovered that none recommend the goal of trying to kill germs on every surface all the time.

The coast of Austria-Hungary yielded what people called cappuzzo, a leafy cabbage. It was a two-thousand-year-old grandparent of modern broccoli and cauliflower, that was neither charismatic nor particularly delicious. But something about it called to Fairchild. The people of Austria-Hungary ate it with enthusiasm, and not because it was good, but because it was there. While the villagers called it cappuzzo, the rest of the world would call it kale. And among its greatest attributes would be how simple it is to grow, sprouting in just its second season of life, and with such dense and bulky leaves that in the biggest challenge of farming it seemed to be how to make it stop growing. "The ease with which it is grown and its apparent favor among the common people this plant is worthy a trial in the Southern States," Fairchild jotted. It was prophetic, perhaps, considering his suggestion became reality. Kale's first stint of popularity came around the turn of the century, thanks to its horticultural hack: it drew salt into its body, preventing the mineralization of soil. Its next break came from its ornamental elegance---bunches of white, purple, or pink leaves that would enliven a drab garden. And then for decades, kale kept a low profile, its biggest consumers restaurants and caterers who used the cheap, bushy leaves to decorate their salad bars. Kale's final stroke of luck came sometime in the 1990s when chemists discovered it had more iron than beef, and more calcium, iron, and vitamin K than almost anything else that sprouts from soil. That was enough for it to enter the big leagues of nutrition, which invited public relations campaigns, celebrity endorsements, and morning-show cooking segments. American chefs experimented with the leaves in stews and soups, and when baked, as a substitute for potato chips. Eventually, medical researchers began to use it to counter words like "obesity," "diabetes," and "cancer." One imagines kale, a lifetime spent unnoticed, waking up one day to find itself captain of the football team.

In August 2018 a drug I’d never heard of was discovered, having killed a person who overdosed near Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The drug was called isotonitazene—an opioid first synthesized in the 1950s that hits the same brain receptors as fentanyl. Iso—as it’s now known on the streets—then was found in dozens of corpses in Chicago and Milwaukee, and from there it spread to Michigan, Indiana, Tennessee, killing at least 230 people in all. Researchers believe it may be marketed by Chinese chemical labs as a replacement for fentanyl, which the Chinese government banned in 2019. In April 2020 isotonitazene seemed to fade, only to be replaced by another synthetic opioid, brorphine. Brorphine showed up in the corpses of 130 people in many of the same states. At least seventeen new synthetic drugs were identified in 2020 alone. The day I turned in my manuscript, another opioid was found on the rise, metonitazene. “It’s almost as though they’re market testing,” said Barry Logan, chief forensic scientist at NMS Labs, which does bodily fluid tests for coroners nationwide. Underground chemists seemed to be searching the chemistry literature for drugs that might be molecularly modified to be more potent. Then, like Paul Janssen did when he invented fentanyl, “they’re experimenting,” Logan said. “They’re changing the molecule’s [structure], which changes how rapidly it’s taken up into the brain. Then they put it out there on the market.

I love A C Doyle's works, some of these sort stories would have been perfect for something like "The Twilight Zone", this tale is one of those. There is one great paragraph in this book, quote : "The charlatan is always the pioneer. From the astrologer came the astronomer, from the alchemist the chemist, from the mesmerist the experimental psychologist. The quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow. Even such subtle and elusive things as dreams will in time be reduced to system and order. When that time comes the researches of our friends on the bookshelf yonder will no longer be the amusement of the mystic, but the foundations of a science." This is used (in an altered form) in the movie "Murder Rooms: Mysteries of the Real Sherlock Holmes".

Roosevelt authorized creation of the first U.S. agency dedicated to studying biological warfare. From its anodyne name—War Research Service—no one could deduce its mission. Anyone curious, though, could have made an educated guess by noting that its director was the renowned chemist George Merck, president of the pharmaceutical company that bears his family name.

The Project constituted a precedent in which, like those Russian wooden dolls-within-dolls, sat other precedents, and primarily this: that never before had physicists, engineers, chemists, nucleonicists, biologists, or information theorists held in their hands an object of research that represented not only a certain material—hence natural—puzzle, but which had been intentionally made by Someone and transmitted, and where the intent must have taken into account the potential addressee. Because scientists learn to conduct so-called games with nature, with a nature that is not—from any permissible point of view—a personal antagonist, they are unable to countenance the possibility that behind the object of investigation there indeed stands a Someone, and that to become familiar with that object will be possible only insofar as one draws near, through reasoning, to its completely anonymous creator. Therefore, though they supposedly knew and freely admitted that the Sender was a reality, their whole life’s training, the whole acquired expertise of their respective fields, worked against that knowledge.

Arthur Robinson, who lived on a sheep ranch deep in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon, decided to challenge the longtime Democratic congressman, Peter DeFazio. Calling Robinson a “research chemist,” while technically accurate

The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. In so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with extraordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.

was in 1869 by Swiss physiological chemist Friedrich Miescher. Since that time, our understanding of DNA continues to grow through a wellspring of new research and discoveries. The amount of information that can be stored in our DNA is mind-boggling. Susan

Frito-Lay had a formidable research complex near Dallas where nearly five hundred chemists, psychologists, and technicians conducted research that cost up to $30 million a year. Their tools included a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips, discovering things like the perfect break point: People like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch, no more or less.

investigators had identified Baxter’s heparin as the source of the contamination, and the Changzhou plant as deficient, neither the FDA nor Baxter could find any contaminant in the heparin. Urgently needing help to figure out what was wrong with its own product, Baxter reached out to Dr. Robert Linhardt, a chemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, who had been studying heparin for years. He promptly sidelined his other work to dig into the mystery, and his laboratory joined several others working on the crisis. Stumped, the research teams finally turned to sophisticated nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy machines, which revealed evidence of a contaminant: a synthetic substance called oversulfated chondroitin sulfate (OSCS). The ingredient mimicked heparin, was almost impossible to detect, and produced life-threatening reactions. The FDA formally named OSCS as a likely contaminant in March 2008 and concluded that it had been added, somewhere along the supply chain, to increase the yield, and profitability, of the drug. The contamination exposed perilous gaps in the FDA’s oversight and intensified the long-simmering conflict between Congress and the agency.