Courtesy of See Arr Oh (who has a very cogent (and funny) post on this), here's George Whitesides criticizing (again) the chemical industry:
This choice of direction has had several consequences: 1) it has ended (or constrained in scope and character) the unique and mutually beneficial intellectual partnership between industrial and academic chemistry that characterized the 1960s to 1980s (Figure 3). 2) It has increasingly limited the number of jobs for chemists in industry, and made a career in industrial chemistry less attractive for students choosing what to study. 3) It has limited the options for chemistry to explore new areas, since many of these areas (e.g., the materials science of porous media under hydrostatic pressure, or “fracking”; understanding if there is new chemistry—especially chemistry relevant to sequestration—that can be applied to carbon dioxide; the management of flows of material, energy, and information in cities; the development of new strategies for using solar energy) require the kinds of resources and skills in large-scale project management that only industry can provide.
Industry continues to place a few large-scale bets in research (for example, synthetic biology to make fuels and specialty chemicals), but the number and audacity of these bets have declined sharply. Even the pharmaceutical industry—a long-term contributor to, and user of, sophisticated synthetic organic chemistry—increasingly considers synthesis a valuable, but primarily technical skill, and has turned to organismic and disease biology as the source of new products and services.I couldn't agree more with Uncle George, but I would, wouldn't I?
In the first company I worked for, he was on advisory board, more than 2 decades ago. Needless to say, listening to poorly thought out and then poorly executed combichem projects elicited his extreme crankiness.
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