Madeleine Jacobs to retire

More to come from this week's C&EN, but the big news is that ACS executive director Madeleine Jacobs is retiring. From the article by Maureen Rouhi:

American Chemical Society Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer Madeleine Jacobs will retire at the end of 2014 after 24½ years of service, including 8½ years as C&EN’s editor-in-chief. 

“The past 10 years have been very good for ACS through difficult times,” says ACS Board Chair William F. Carroll Jr. “Madeleine has been a great change manager, leader for staff, and face for the society, particularly in Washington, D.C. We’ll miss her. And I defy anyone to find someone more broadly knowledgeable and energetic. ACS, the board, and I personally, will miss her at the top but will benefit from her future engagement as a member.” 

As CEO, Jacobs led ACS staff to an impressive portfolio of substantive achievements. They include consistently returning a positive net contribution to the society for 10 consecutive years; expanding membership, education, and public affairs offerings; growing the ACS journals program; and posting record-breaking growth in the databases underpinning Chemical Abstracts Service’s SciFinder....

Gotta love Bill Carroll's "a great change manager" -- that's an impressive bit of code that I find somewhat impenetrable.

I wonder who will be the next $800,000 CEO of the American Chemical Society?

Are you in the energy industry?

From Susan Ainsworth and Linda Wang, reporters at C&EN who would like to make a video about chemists in the energy industry at the Dallas ACS meeting:

I am trying to locate several chemists, chemical engineers, or biochemists who have recently landed jobs in the energy industry, and will be attending the Dallas ACS meeting. We plan to ask each person to describe his or her job and how they found it.

I am also looking to videotape an “expert” at the meeting—someone who can speak in general terms about the hiring environment for chemists and chemical engineers in the energy field.

We plan to use the video to augment a print/online story about job opportunities in energy; this will likely run sometime in June or July.

Interested? Contact Susan at S_Ainsworth -at- acs/dot/org  

11 ways John Lechleiter and friends would approach America's clown shortage

If only people knew how fun it was to drive one of these.
Credit: bluecheddar.net

You may not know this, but apparently America has a clown shortage.* Here is how I imagine corporate CEOs and PR flacks might approach this crisis:

1. Clowns are vital to our national security.
2. There are 14,000,000 unfilled positions for clowns -- these are very mobile, high paying jobs!
3. Who will win the War for Clown Talent?
4. American youth is just not as zany as the youth of past generations of clowns -- it's all those iPads and iPhones.
5. By having insufficient clowns, we are depriving future generations of laughter and joy.
6. Do you know what the median starting salary for clowns is? I have a study that says that it's over $125,000. That, my friends, is a shortage.
7. America is being out-funnied by our international competitors.
8. Our education system just doesn't value clowning in K-12 -- it really needs to do better.
9. Congress needs to subsidize the production of clowns by founding the National Clown Centers of Excellence.
10. We need to make clowning more fun and more hands-on.
11. We should never, ever, ever raise wages for clowns.

Have a great weekend!

Total nonfarm payrolls increase by 175,000, unemployment up 0.1% to 6.7 for February

Fresh electrons from the Bureau of Labor Statistics: the unemployment rate for February was up 0.1% to 6.7% and 175,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created. The broader U6 measurement of unemployment was down 0.1% to 12.6%.

The chemical manufacturing sector saw an increase of 200 jobs to 796,200 positions.

The unemployment rate for college-educated workers was up 0.2% to 3.4% in February; the unemployment rate for non-high school graduates was up 0.2% to 9.8%.

I suspect that this will be graded by the economic media as a relatively good report, especially with the upward revisions to December and January payrolls (a total increase of 25,000.)

Age discrimination, and how to fight it

From the inbox, an interesting comment by PQ about being older, and how they're treated by management:

I work for a chemical company in a support function.  I was in graduate school in the 1980s, and so have been in the workforce for about 25 years.  I’ve been in my current position for some time, and it is one that has traditionally been filled by a mix of Ph.D. and M.S. chemists, usually mid-to-late career.  However, as budgets have gotten leaner over the years, the positions in our department have been filled more and more with B.S. chemists, and ones who are earlier in their careers.  I estimate that their salaries are about ½ to ¾ of mine.

Several years ago, I noticed a trend of the newer persons being given the better assignments, with more responsibilities and more visibility, compared to those of us with more years of service.  The net effect of this trend is that we older workers have become marginalized, along with ending up doing more routine work.

Now, our division managers justify all this by saying that the newer people need to have opportunities, so they can ‘shine’ and advance in their careers. Some of these individuals certainly do rise to the occasion, while others really stumble along.  Sometimes they will surreptitiously ask one of us more experienced individuals for help, and we give it, though we won’t get any credit for these contributions. 

Irony

From the pages of this week's C&EN, member of the ACS Board of Directors Pat Confalone on innovation and entrepreneurship:

...A key finding of the ACS Presidential Task Force report “Innovation, Chemistry, and Jobs” (www.acs.org/creatingjobs) was that start-ups and small to medium-sized companies create about 3 million jobs per year, in contrast to the 2.5 million that are lost in large companies. It’s clear that the role of the entrepreneur in job creation is not only essential but also has been the key to robust economic growth, even in times of recession. In the middle of the deep downturn of 1973–74, the following companies were start-ups: FedEx, Microsoft, Oracle, and Southwest Airlines....

Does anyone else find it ironic that an essay on the glory of startups and small companies was written by someone who's spent a 40+ year career in corporate America (Roche, DuPont, BMS, DuPont)? 

Process Wednesday: photooxidation to get industrial scale artemisinin

Credit: OPRD, Turconi et al.

From the pages of Organic Process Research and Development [1], a fascinating article by workers at Sanofi-Aventis talking about their industrial route to the anti-malarial artemisinin. They decided to use a photooxidation to perform the semi-synthesis of the material and here, they talk a little about the challenges:

The utility of the Aubry reaction allows the generation of singlet oxygen, and thus the Schenck ene reaction, while avoiding the need for photochemical equipment. While in principle highly attractive, photochemical reactions are rarely practiced in industry25 and there is even less precedence for the large-scale application of the Schenck ene reaction with photochemically generated singlet oxygen.  

This is easily understood, as the hurdles to the implementation of a large-scale Schenck ene reaction are significant. Apart from the lack of experience and equipment, the choice of permissible solvents is very limited, the resulting products are inherently unsafe hydroperoxides, and the chemical engineering aspects such as mixing, gas transfer, and light transmission are unusually complex on scale.

More on the chemical engineering challenges:

On the basis of these results, a dedicated pilot unit was set up at Sanofi facility, Neuville (France). We selected a semibatch mode concept with a recirculation loop, which is possible as artemisinin is very stable under the reaction conditions and it offers optimal conditions versus energy consumption and the transformation rate. 

In addition to the other chemical engineering challenges, critical parameters included construction materials that minimize the loss of light (optimizing the quantum photonic yield) and the choice of a lamp with the optimal spectral distribution of emitted spectrum (medium pressure mercury/gallium lamp). The unit must also ensure a good turbulence of the recirculating fluid and allow a good gas−liquid transfer, while maintaining the internal temperature at −10 °C.

The first batch was piloted at 50 kg scale and now they're expected to run 60 tons a year, at a 370 kg batch size. That's 162 batches (?), which indicates a pretty impressive cycle time, although these numbers tend to get fuzzy around the edges (i.e. assuming running the plant at 100% capacity, which may not happen, etc.)

Of course, you have to read the Experimental Section* to get the full flavor of this:

Step 3: Photooxidation of Mixed Anhydride (DHAEMC) to Artemisinin. To the solution of DHAEMC (CJ's note: they started with 600 kg of artemisinic acid, 2 steps previous) were added 2570 kg dichloromethane and 300 g tetraphenylporphyrin (TPP) before the solution was exposed to light irradiation using photoreactors containing mercury vapour lamps and ambient air bubbling at about −10 to −15 °C. In the beginning of the irradiation 132 kg trifluoroacetic acid was added to the reaction mixture. The reaction was monitored by HPLC. As soon as the reaction was completed, the solution was treated twice with 720 L aqueous solution of sodium bicarbonate and was subsequently washed with 1440 kg water. The washed organic phase was treated with 30 kg activated charcoal and filtered. Before the crystallisation step,
the ADT_24h of the reaction mixture was checked.

I don't have the professional capacity to comment on this intelligently, other than to say that it's a really impressive feat, in my opinion. I think it's apparent that the Sanofi coworkers not only had to design (and did!) robust enough chemistry to get it done, they had to design reactors to make this happen. Finally, it should be noted that Sanofi-Aventis was working with the Gates Foundation under a "no profit, no loss" model for anti-malarials. This seems like a pretty clear example of the good that industrial chemistry can do.

1. Turconi, J.; Griolet, F.; Guevel, R.; Oddon, G.; Villa, R.; Geatti, A.; Hvala, M.; Rossen, K.; Göller, R.; Burgard, A. "Semisynthetic Artemisinin, the Chemical Path to Industrial Production." Org. Process. Res. Dev. ASAP DOI: 10.1021/op4003196

*OPRD's experimental sections are the best, because it's always "To the reactor was added 14 quintillion liters of solvent..." 

I did not know that: the CEO of Gilead has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry

From friend of the blog The Aqueous Layer, an article noting that Gilead CEO John C. Martin has now become a billionaire off the success of HCV drug Sovaldi: an nice tidbit (emphasis mine):

The number of options and shares are in part attributable to Martin’s long tenure at the company, most of it as CEO, said Cara Miller, a spokeswoman for Gilead, in an e-mail. The cost of a 12-week regimen of Sovaldi along with interferon and another drug “is consistent with and in many cases actually less” than older treatments that require longer duration of therapy, she said. 

Gilead closed down 1.6 percent to $81.45 in New York. 

The billionaire, who has a doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of Chicago and an MBA from Golden Gate University, has spent most of his career working on antiviral drugs, and has been an active dealmaker, willing to pay a premium for companies with drugs that show promise. 

After one of its hepatitis C compounds had setbacks in early testing, Gilead acquired Sovaldi by buying Pharmasset Inc. for almost $11 billion in 2012, at a price that represented an 89 percent premium to Pharmasset’s price before the deal was announced in November 2011. Gilead stock has more than quadrupled since then.

I've long held that chemists don't necessarily make better CEOs than MBAs, with Thomas D'Ambra of AMRI and John Lechleiter of Lilly as the prime examples. Dr. Martin just might be the exception that proves the rule?

Via Google, it appears that Dr. Martin was a steroid chemist in graduate school -- who would have been his advisor? Here's a short biography about his MBA from Golden Gate University and his early years in San Francisco. 

A nice thing to see from employers: encouraging applications from the long-term unemployed

Spotted by Reverend J, in an ad for assay development chemists (emphasis mine): 

Company Description 

Siemens’ Healthcare Sector is one of the world's largest suppliers to the healthcare industry and a leader in medical imaging, laboratory diagnostics, medical information technology and hearing aids. Siemens Healthcare offers its customers products and solutions for the entire lifecycle of patient care – from prevention and early detection, to diagnosis, treatment and aftercare. By optimizing clinical workflows for the most common diseases, Siemens also makes healthcare faster, better and more cost-effective. Siemens Healthcare employs over 50,000 employees worldwide. In fiscal year 2011, the Healthcare Sector posted revenue of 12.5 billion Euros. For more information on the Healthcare sector, visit: www.siemens.com/healthcare.  

Siemens encourages qualified long-term unemployed individuals to apply for open positions.

I hope that's not just lip service.  

Proposed $4 increase in ACS dues to $158 for 2015

From the "Council News" article by Susan Ainsworth, this little tidbit:

Other business before the council includes approval of a $4.00 increase in ACS dues to $158 for 2015.

I am going to guess that this increase is in line with inflation (a 2.5% increase). But still....

This week's C&EN

A variety of interesting tidbits:

• More stories from Charleston, West Virginia ACS members, regarding their experiences with the MCHM spill. 
• An editorial on the recent dustup at the ICQC conference and related petition regarding the number of women speakers. (by Maureen Rouhi)
• An invitation for applications to a workshop for postdoc-to-faculty in August. (by Linda Wang)
• Boy, ACC sounds bullish on jobs from shale gas -- 600,000 jobs in the next ten years? Count me skeptical. (by Michael McCoy)

I really enjoyed this series on lab-to-commercial scale work by Rick Mullin, Ann Thayer and Michael McCoy. I found Rick Mullin's story about a University of Kentucky professor's work on better mercury chelators to be fascinating (great molecule -- what to do with it?). Their work with PCI Synthesis for scale-up is highlighted, including this mysterious little comment (emphasis mine): 

In the face of these challenges, PCI’s analytical group took the catbird seat. 

“Analytical and synthesis have to work hand in hand,” Price says. “You don’t know if your synthesis guys are doing a good job if you can’t see what they’re doing.” PCI has significantly boosted its analytical chemistry staff over the past four years, Price says, and the firm now has nearly as many analytical chemists—about 20—as process chemists. 

Mehdi Yazdi, director of analytical chemistry at PCI, who joined the company in 2011, says the firm’s work for small clients such as CTI is picking up. “Since I have been here, we’ve revamped the whole analytical department,” Yazdi says. PCI has replaced nuclear magnetic resonance testing with high-performance liquid chromatography, he notes, a shift that proved crucial in developing NBMI to FDA standards.   

 While I certainly agree, I am wondering what PCI was doing without HPLC? That is oddly worded to me.