What does the Obama Administration think about academic chemistry?

See Arr Oh, in winning his second typospotting award, asked for me to talk about politics on the blog. Specifically, he wondered what the Obama Administration's approach to #chemjobs has been. There are some easy answers: #chemjobs villain Andrew Liveris is a frequent White House guest and co-chair of the President's Advanced Manufacturing panel and the President was surprised to be confronted by the spouse of an unemployed engineer.

However, thanks to a tweet by former ACS president Catherine Hunt, I ran across a NSF workshop summary on graduate school in chemistry that was very clear about White House priorities towards our favorite issues. From the director of the Division of Chemistry at NSF, Matthew Platz:

The Obama Administration has been very interested in science, Platz observed, and has clear ideas about what it wants to support. As a result, presidential priorities have been increasing as a proportion of the budget (Figure 2-4). Chemistry has not played a large role in these presidential priorities, though NSF’s Division of Chemistry has been able to keep its core funding relatively stable, largely by reducing instrumentation costs. 

However, if the chemical sciences community wants federal funding for chemistry to increase, it must demonstrate how its proposals contribute to the administration’s priorities. How can it help to create a workforce that is equipped to take on the challenges of the new century? How can it help create the skills in U.S. workers that will lead companies to locate their jobs here rather than in another country? 

The most important goal of the workshop, Platz said, must be how the chemical sciences can preserve and enhance quality with less money. “If we can come up with some strategies to do that, this workshop, in my opinion, will be a great success.” He challenged the workshop participants to devise experiments in chemistry graduate education that can inspire the field and attract support. In particular, the goal should not be to play a zero-sum game but to find new money to fund experiments at five to ten universities in addition to the core funding for chemistry. 

“Change has already come,” Platz concluded. “We can view this as an opportunity for our community and for the United States, or we can passively react to change and have it imposed on us.”

From a political science perspective, what do I see in that verbiage? I see that funding academic chemistry is not an especially high Obama Administration priority, and NSF is attempting to triage the process and not allow chemistry to be affected significantly by spreading some of the pain around. I see that the President is working with the constraints that Congress has imposed through its budgetary process; I cannot imagine that the Republican-controlled House or the Democratic-controlled Senate have academic chemistry as a priority either.

I wonder if academic chemistry sees itself as part of creating an educated workforce and contributing "on-shoring" jobs. I hope so, but I am somewhat skeptical of the academic chemistry community's ability to accomplish that goal. 

Isn't it time for a really good chemical video game?

Come to think of it, Plantville Pete does sort of look like an engineer. 

See Arr Oh, in winning the typospotting contest a week ago, has requested that I write about chemical video games, which I am only too happy to do. I confess that I am not a huge gamer; I grew up without any consoles, but I recall many, many excited trips to my friends' homes to play on their Nintendo system. I spent the requisite time in college playing Tomb Raider, Madden 64, GoldenEye and MarioKart. (Much to my wife's dismay, I play Tetris incessantly on my cell phone these days.)

A good video game is a combination of good graphics, a little button-mashing, a little bit (or a lot) of thinking and lots of replay value. I haven't really heard of any good chemical video games, but I understand that SpaceChem is a really fun game. Sporcle chemistry quizzes can be fun, but only if you like to type really fast (who doesn't?) Plantville was set up by Siemens as a means of communicating life in the manufacturing world to the general public (depressing, isn't it?) I haven't had the opportunity to play it, but I can imagine it could be a really good time.

I could imagine a few good chemistry-oriented video games:

• Grad School Myst: Someone hands you a research paper and tells you to go into the lab. Solve the puzzle (what puzzle?), navigate the department and find your way out!
• Drug Discovery Dash: Crank out those compounds in the lab, meet those milestones and don't let your solvents be stolen by Custom Synthesis Sam! 
• Chemical Plantville: Get cooling on that jacket quick, before the reactor lets loose!

Does anyone have any good chemical video games? I'd love to hear people's thoughts on SpaceChem.

UPDATE: He who spots the typos calls the tune! I forget that See Arr Oh's comments were more creativity-oriented:

I would like to hear your opinions on something I've thought about for quite some time: chemical video games. We all know about the success of FoldIt and its application to enzyme structures and Diels-Alder-ases (seriously, they've now published a paper about it!). But why can't we have an actual video game, based on synthesis? Too close to the drug trade, perhaps? (I could imagine mislead parents believing that their children were learning how to make MDMA). It seems like a natural fit: lots of public domain data, catchy structures, old-fashioned, interesting names.  

Could it just be that there's not enough overlap between traditional EE / CompSci and physical science? Or IS there a game, and I've just somehow missed it?

I'd play that game, definitely. You could easily imagine a synthesis game where you came up with compounds in a virtual library and then you'd get points based on some sort of computational docking score, etc., etc. In a perfect world, pharma, biotech and CAS would be chomping at the bit to develop such a game. You could hook both experienced chemists and young gamers looking for a challenge into playing it (in a perfect world.)

Check out SeeArrOh's comments on this post, too.

Bounty winners

I think SeeArrOh beat out John of The Rheo Thing (our first point ever), BethE and boooooooya for typospotting last week. SAO, if you could send me a topic by this Friday, your requested post will be up by Wednesday next week.