My semiregular rant about the American Chemical Society and awards. I am an 8 years’ retired industrial chemist. I still do some consulting. I am an ACS member because of C&EN, SciFinder, and the occasional journal article. No other offerings from ACS are useful to me.For students, here is what ACS is telling you: If you choose a career in industry, good luck. We really do not value the contribution of industrial chemists. Why do I say this? Look at the list of ACS awards. Virtually all of them go to academics or pseudo-academics, if you count national labs or places like Scripps Research. For years I have been complaining about the favoritism and bias toward academic chemists in the ACS awards program. Nothing has changed because ACS is still an old people’s (used to be boys’) network of academics.Larry LewisScotia, New York
Can't say I disagree, although I genuinely can't get very excited about this topic. Perhaps I just don't have a taste for Lucite...
Most industrial research (in my experience) is quite secretive so it's kind of hard to reward people based on work no one can read/review/consider worthy of an award, besides what am I gonna do with an award anyway? Probably stick it in the box with my degrees and other awards.
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