Towards a data-informed prediction of Fall 2026 US chemistry PhD admissions | a warning to senior undergraduates

As faithful readers of this blog know, I found the statement that Harvard Chemistry and Chemical Biology was cutting its Fall 2026 entering class by ~80% to be quite notable. I think it is worth thinking about the possibility that this is more widespread than simply Harvard CCB: 

1. I believe that the Trump Administration's actions have resulted in significant financial pressure on R1 universities 
2. I believe that some of the largest chemistry PhD producing universities are responding by cutting available slots for Fall 2026 

For supposition 2, I think I have some speculative data that I am not yet willing to share. Nevertheless, I will ask the question this way: does anyone believe that class sizes for Fall 2026 will be higher than Fall 2025? I don’t. If so, what does that mean? 

I believe it means this - for students other than the very strongest senior undergraduates (strong letters of recommendations, significant research contributions*), I would think very seriously about a plan B, C or D regarding What To Do if you do not get into the graduate program of your choice. I don’t know what those potential plans might be, but they include going to a somewhat less desirable university, taking a position in a laboratory as a post-baccalaureate student** or going into industry. 

If this indeed is the beginning of a lengthy system-wide slowdown in the number of chemistry PhDs in the United States, while, yes, it will be theoretically good for incumbent PhDs, I believe this is very bad for the American chemical research enterprise, as fewer workers per year is going to ultimately result in less research production as opposed to more. But this is all very speculatory, and the known immediate impact will be much more keenly felt by the senior undergraduate (those graduating class of 2026.) 

Finally, a biology professor made an interesting counter-argument. If you believe (as I speculate) that there will be fewer entering international students into American science graduate schools in Fall 2026, is it possible that fewer international students mean that the classes will shrink but the number of domestic students will stay the same? I am skeptical about this, but I think it really depends on the individual dynamics within each chemistry department. 

I can’t see how this is good news for anyone, but I am particularly struck by the negative consequences for next year’s graduates. I wish this were not so, and I am not quite sure what to do about my knowledge, other than warn people. Sorry. 

UPDATE (11/10/25, 3 PM Eastern): added a second link to my previous predictions from April, which were incorrect about who was impacted the most. 

*I'm not a R1 professor of chemistry, just a random guy. Ask your professors if they agree with me. 

**Is this a thing in chemistry? I saw a professor suggesting this on social media, and I have to say I’m not quite sure of its value, i.e. it seems to me a very expensive (compared to an industry job) means of securing a position in a future entering class.

Repeated use of this NY Fed report really bothers me

 Among many offenders, this New York Times article about new college grad unemployment: 

Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That is more than double the unemployment rate among recent biology and art history graduates, which is just 3 percent.

It's really disappointing to me that no one clicks through the website and scrolls down to see this fine print:

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (IPUMS).

Notes: Figures are for 2023. Unemployment and underemployment rates are for recent college graduates (that is, those aged 22 to 27 with a bachelor's degree or higher), and median wages are for full-time workers with a bachelor's degree only. Early career graduates are those aged 22 to 27, and mid-career graduates are those aged 35 to 45. Graduate degree share is based on the adult working-age population (that is, those aged 25 to 65) with a bachelor's degree or higher. All figures exclude those currently enrolled in school. Data are updated annually at the beginning of each calendar year.

I think it's important to note that the numbers are from 2023, which means that the numbers are of somewhat less relevance (although probably still the best available numbers) compared to the spring grads of 2025. In addition, if you're a grad between ages of 22 and 27 in 2023, you have COVID (20-21) right in the middle there. In addition, for all of the people who are pointing out that history majors have better unemployment (4.6%) than computer science majors (6.1%), I'm going to point out that I'd take my chances to get a $80,000 median salary (CS) rather than a $45,000 one (history.) 

After watching the numbers for over 10 years, I think it is amazing that reporters and commentators still can't get this stuff down pat. A shame

(Let's also not forget that this is American Community Survey data, which is pretty darn good, but still, how many new history grads are in that pool of ~3 million Americans surveyed?) 

Thinking about a second Trump Administration

Donald Trump will be the 47th President of the United States. I’m not happy about that. 

But this is not a blog about my personal feelings about politics; it is a blog to help chemists find jobs, and to help understand how to measure the quality of the job market. 

We have a couple of months before he takes office. I plan to spend some time between now and then making predictions as to actual Trump Administration policy, and how it might impact the readers of this blog. 

Five topics I can think of immediately: 

• Immigration: What will immigration policy be under the second Trump Administration? 
• Tariffs: How will Trump’s threatened tariffs impact American chemists? 
• Regulation: How will the EPA and the FDA be impacted under their new leadership? 
• Academic science: How will US academic science be impacted, in terms of funding for NIH and other federal funding agencies? 
• Employment: How will this change the long-term trajectory of employment for American chemists? 

What topics do you suggest I tackle? Please respond in the comments with specific topics and NOT predictions. (Please avoid posting lengthy political opinions in this thread. If you must post your political opinion, I ask that each person limit themselves to the same number of words as me - 6 words.) E-mails welcome: chemjobber@gmail.com 

The vice president with the highest enlisted military rank: Dan Quayle

I'm writing this not really for this blog, but instead that Google's spiders may perhaps pick this up. 

With Tim Walz being selected to be the Democratic nominee for vice president, I was surprised to learn that he was a very senior enlisted soldier in the Minnesota National Guard (command sergeant major/master sergeant.) 

This brings to mind the question - who is the vice president who had the highest enlisted rank? After looking at the Wikipedia entry for each vice president, I learned that there have been only three vice presidents who have served who have had enlisted rank: 

• Walter Mondale, corporal, U.S. Army
• Dan Quayle, sergeant, Indiana Army National Guard 
• Al Gore, Specialist 4, U.S. Army 

Therefore, Dan Quayle is the vice president who held the highest enlisted rank in his military career. 

(As an aside, the president who had the highest enlisted military rank is James Buchanan, who was a private.)

I'm still skeptical about the 'hidden job market'

Very recently, I ran across another one of the repeated statistics that some majority of job openings are not actually posted. We've covered this before here (it's hard to believe it's almost been 10 years.) I'm rather fond of debunking these kinds of numbers, i.e. their baloney-ness stands out to me, and it is personally amazing to me that people choose to quote them.

I was really delighted to discover that I am not the only skeptic, and so today I point to Jesse Preston, a disability employment specialist who wrote up a very nice article on LinkedIn describing the origins of some of these numbers: 

The Ford Foundation-funded survey he is referring to is the pilot project conducted by the National Industrial Conference Board to gather labour market information from businesses which was done in Rochester NY. The results of which came out in the same year. 

We know this is the original survey of that statistic as this is the pilot project and literature from the "1965 Proceedings on Interstate Conference on Labour Statistics", which states that this survey is of great interest before launching a nationwide survey.  Up to this point, there has never been data collected directly from employers like this. 

In the report, they tested to see if job postings were a predictable metric for collecting labour market information. It was not. Their analysis shows that 25.1% of all the jobs hired by 27 companies surveyed appeared in the newspaper. Service jobs were the largest category within the 25.1% at 84.6% of the total service jobs hired were posted in the newspaper.

But if we consider that Mr. Haldane is only talking about career-type roles and not jobs in general, then we do not count the overall number of 25.1%. So, we must remove the service jobs and the unskilled labour roles.  Then you get 18.9% of jobs advertised in the newspaper. Therefore about 80% are not advertised in the Rochester Newspaper.

It is rather remarkable to me (and he is to be commended) that Mr. Preston actually tracked it down to a study from 1966 about the Rochester job market. I would have guessed it was manufactured out of whole cloth, but no, apparently not. 

Almost ten years later, I know that it's basically futile to either expurgate the internet (or people) of poorly sourced and dubious statistics or quantify the unquantifiable, but I am still very skeptical that we should refer to a "hidden" job market. I also am further skeptical that the 'hidden' market represents the majority of positions at any one time. 

I do find it reasonable that mid-career professionals are likelier to be able to access such "hidden" positions, i.e. if you have a unique skill set, it's likelier that organizations will make room for you in some fashion, but I think that talking about 'hidden job markets' for entry-level people is just more likely to give students and postdocs conspiratorial vibes more than anything else. 

The coolest interview you will read with a former spy today

Via Marginal Revolution, this really cool interview with a former CIA chief of base: 

Cultivating human intelligence, that tradecraft: how does that set of skills get passed down?

There are training courses specifically for people handling sources and tradecraft training and methodologies. Some are tried and true and meant to withstand the test of time. So to speak with whatever technology advances occur at the same time. 

CIA is facing a real reckoning. It's called “ubiquitous technical surveillance.” It's essentially that there's some digital record of everything you do nowadays. 

CIA is facing a huge challenge in how it operates because of technology. But there are ways to double down and use technology to advance operations as well. And obviously I'm not going to be able to get into that. This is a big ongoing test of the agency. 

The aspect of CIA that is most important (and most relevant to this blog) is the importance of the human element. CIA is in the business of cultivating the human element, getting people from other countries to tell the United States government information that their government would rather that the US government not know. 

This kind of influencing is a skill for job seekers as well. It is an important aspect of your job search to actually find a decision maker, and then get that hiring manager to choose you as a candidate.* That is an extraordinarily difficult task, and one that takes a lifetime to learn.  

*When I started this blog in December 2008, I might have said "get the hiring manager to recognize that you're the most qualified candidate." Now, I'm not so sure. 

To the immigrant misfits of science

Dr. Katalin Karikó
credit: Hannah Yoon, NYT

By the time you read this, there will be a chemistry Nobelist announced, and I will undoubtedly have something to say about them. 

Until then, I would like to really lift up Monday's Medicine co-Nobelist, Dr. Katalin Karikó. There is a bit of a cliche where Nobelists seem to be charmed people whose colleagues and friends have always known them to be stars. That's obviously not entirely true, but it feels that way, especially since they are often awarded the Nobel towards the end of their career as a bit of a capstone. 

But it is her struggle to get her science noticed that really endears her to me, especially the fact that she seems to have suffered a series of indignities during her career (via the New York Times): 

Dr. Karikó, the 13th woman to win the prize, languished for many long years without funding or a permanent academic position, keeping her research afloat only by latching on to more senior scientists at the University of Pennsylvania who let her work with them. Unable to get a grant, she said she was told she was “not faculty quality” and was forced to retire from the university a decade ago. She remains only an adjunct professor there while she pursues plans to start a company with her daughter, Susan Francia, who has an M.B.A. and was a two-time Olympic gold medalist in rowing.

The mRNA work was especially frustrating, she said, because it was met with indifference and a lack of funds. She said she was motivated by more than not being called a quitter; as the work progressed, she saw small signs that her project could lead to better vaccines. “You don’t persevere and repeat and repeat just to say, ‘I am not giving up,’” she said.

...At first, other scientists were largely uninterested in taking up that new approach to vaccination. Their paper, published in 2005, was rejected by the journals Nature and Science, Dr. Weissman said. 

Via this post on Twitter (I refuse to call it by its new name), this story from Gregory Zuckerman's "A Shot to Save the World": 

Karikó found a position working in the laboratory of Robert Suhadolnik, a professor in the biochemistry department at Temple University School of Medicine working on AIDS treatments. Money was tighter than she had expected. Karikó made seventeen thousand dollars a year, while Francia, who was unable to find an engineering position, made about the same as a facilities manager for a local apartment complex, where he fixed heating and water systems. Their own apartment didn't have a washing machine, so every few days Karikó lugged the family's laundry to the basement of a nearby building.

Karikó didn't mind the challenges, though, because she was expanding her mRNA expertise. With Suhadolnik as her guide, she was perfecting ways to modify mRNA molecules. By altering the building blocks of RNA, which are called nucleosides, new versions of the molecule can be created to produce proteins in the lab. Laboring day and night, she and Suhadolnik published papers in respected scientific journals. Karikó's career appeared not only to be back on track but on a fast track.

That's when she made her first mistake as an academic. Karikó accepted a better-paid position at Johns Hopkins University but didn't think to give Suhadolnik prior warning that she was seeking a new job. When he heard about the offer, he became furious, vowing to do whatever he could to stop his protégée from leaving. In a difficult meeting with Karikó, he made it clear she had two career choices.

"You can work in my lab or go home," he told her.

Suhadolnik followed through on his threat, telling a local immigration office that she was living in the country illegally and should be deported. Karikó and her husband had to hire an expensive lawyer to fight the extradition order. By then, Johns Hopkins had withdrawn its offer, wary of hiring a suspected fugitive. Suhadolnik continued bad-mouthing Karikó, making it impossible for her to get a new position. She tried not to become discouraged, reminding herself of Selye's lessons. Eventually, she met a scientist at a Bethesda Naval Hospital who had his own difficult history with Suhadolnik and was willing to hire her despite her scuffed reputation. 

This post is already too long, but struggles of immigrant scientists like Karikó's are nothing new to this blog's readership. So many people come to America to do science and struggle here. She had the brilliance, persistence and yes, the luck to be working on something so impactful so many years before it was needed. 

There are many more posts to be written about the things that are wrong about American scientific academia and the way that it evaluates both scientists and science. Nevertheless, I'm so glad we have a chance to celebrate her work. Congratulations to Drs. Weissman and Katalin Karikó. 

The impact of academic mentors, quantified

Via Marginal Revolution, this paper: 

Einstein believed that mentors are especially influential in a protégé’s intellectual development, yet the link between mentorship and protégé success remains a mystery. We marshaled genealogical data on nearly 40,000 scientists who published 1,167,518 papers in biomedicine, chemistry, math, or physics between 1960 and 2017 to investigate the relationship between mentorship and protégé achievement. In our data, we find groupings of mentors with similar records and reputations who attracted protégés of similar talents and expected levels of professional success. 

However, each grouping has an exception: One mentor has an additional hidden capability that can be mentored to their protégés. They display skill in creating and communicating prizewinning research. Because the mentor’s ability for creating and communicating celebrated research existed before the prize’s conferment, protégés of future prizewinning mentors can be uniquely exposed to mentorship for conducting celebrated research. 

Our models explain 34–44% of the variance in protégé success and reveals three main findings. First, mentorship strongly predicts protégé success across diverse disciplines. Mentorship is associated with a 2×-to-4× rise in a protégé’s likelihood of prizewinning, National Academy of Science (NAS) induction, or superstardom relative to matched protégés. Second, mentorship is significantly associated with an increase in the probability of protégés pioneering their own research topics and being midcareer late bloomers. Third, contrary to conventional thought, protégés do not succeed most by following their mentors’ research topics but by studying original topics and coauthoring no more than a small fraction of papers with their mentors.

I think the prizewinning you could probably pin on "who you know" but the original topics bit is very interesting. Cowen asks some interesting questions: "How much of that is mentor value-added, how much that good mentors are amazing talent scouts/magnets, and how much is it that scientists on the rise are very good at mobilizing the highest-value mentors to help them?" I suspect that the middle factor ('they're talent scouts/magnets') is probably the most important aspect.  

A brief set of musings, mostly for my benefit

I'm particularly rocked by the shooting at the University of North Carolins this week. In case you missed it, here's a brief summary from the Associated Press: 

Tailei Qi, 34, was charged Tuesday with first-degree murder and having a gun on educational property in Monday’s killing of Zijie Yan inside a science building at the state’s flagship public university.

Professor Yan was a professor in UNC's Department of Applied Physical Sciences. 

I've read enough tweets and comments from professors that they are now pretty concerned about gun violence in their departments, particularly from disgruntled students.* I think it would be worth hearing from professors about this - if you feel like emailing me a short comment, I would be willing to post them. I will grant anonymity, if desired. Email (as always) is chemjobber@gmail.com

I have more thoughts about Mr. Qi's act, but I'm not sure those thoughts are fully formed yet. I think I need to be better informed about why people do these acts before I write about it, and I'm not sure I really want to do the work to get there. 

*I don't think there is a clear motive for Mr. Qi's outburst of violence, but it's certainly clear that he perceived some kind of issue with his adviser. 

Oppenheimer

Saw the movie (finally.) I quite enjoyed it, but I agree with Jake Yeston on Twitter - there wasn't enough physics. For that matter, there wasn't enough chemistry in it either. But it did a wonderful job of letting us into the mind of Oppenheimer, and it allowed us a sense of the dynamic between the towering minds of the Manhattan Project, and how Oppie was the best one to navigate the decisions. I quite enjoyed Matt Damon's portrayal of Leslie Groves as well. Ran a bit long, I admit. All in all, I'm glad I saw it. 

How much pepperoni is sold in the United States?

Via the ever wonderful Matt Levine, this interesting Fermi question: 

A few weeks into his college summer internship at a consulting firm in 2015, a guy (let’s call him Calvin) got his big chance to make a good impression. He was assigned to help a private equity firm assess an acquisition target—in this case, a company that manufactured pepperoni. “I was 21 years old, researching questions I don’t know if anyone knows the answer to, like the market size for pepperoni in the US,” says Calvin, who asked that his name not be used to preserve his current professional reputation.

After two 80-hour weeks of research, Calvin’s peers in the sweaty intern bullpen in an office off New York’s Times Square were ready to present their findings. But he still lacked the crucial number. “I was the bottleneck, and I wasn’t doing a great job communicating to my boss,” he says. His solution? “I found a claim from some executive online that the market size for pepperoni is enough that you could blanket the entire USA with a thin layer,” says Calvin. 

He spent hours putting together and executing a plan. He calculated the area of the entire continental US (3,120,426 square miles). Then he came up with the area of a single pepperoni slice: If the diameter of a circular slice of pepperoni is half an inch, each pepperoni is 0.196 square inches. The area of the continental US, divided by the area of a single pepperoni slice, equals 15,920,541 slices, which he labeled the national pepperoni volume. Finally, he multiplied that volume by price (10¢ per slice, based on his market research) to come up with the country’s pepperoni market size at $1,592,054 per year.

I still love Fermi problems, so I'm stumped at this rather silly suggestion for the problem. Granted, he was 21 years old. (Note that Matt Levine notes that the math is also incorrect and quite a few orders of magnitude off.) 

It's remarkable to me that this person could not, I dunno, talk to some pepperoni or pizza executives, especially in 2015. Surely if you talk to enough of them and get some guesses, you could average them. Or, you could find out the actual revenue/volume of one of the (I'm guessing) 10 players in 'industrial volume pepperoni' and then make some guesses as to their market share. 

I've done a fair bit of "how many tons of this chemical exist in the United States?" this year, so I'm especially fired up to answer these questions. 

(That question about the iodine waste - surely someone has the answer to "how many kilograms of iodine does it take to make a cloud large enough to see for miles?") 

What has the AI impact been on translation?

Via Matt Yglesias' blog Slow Boring, this piece by Timothy B. Lee on the translation employment market: 

...“We’ve been ‘in danger’ of being taken over by AI for 10 years now and it still hasn’t happened,” Eybert-Guillon said. “But we keep getting told that it’s going to happen.”

There are two big reasons AI hasn’t put many human translators out of work. First, human translators still do a better job in specialized fields like law and medicine. Translation errors in these fields can be very expensive, so clients are willing to pay extra for a human-quality translation.

Second, there has been rapid growth in hybrid translation services where a computer produces a first draft and a human translator checks it for errors. These hybrid services tend to be about 40% cheaper than a conventional human translation, and customers have taken advantage of that discount to translate more documents. Translators get paid less per word, but they’re able to translate more words per hour.

But while AI software has not put human translators out of work the way pessimists might have predicted, this isn’t an entirely positive story for translators either.

“I think rates for translators have stayed largely the same for 10 or 12 years,” said Mark Hemming, a translator in the United Kingdom. “I think it is harder to get work now. I think it's harder to get well-paid work as well.”

...Barbara Leon is a freelance translator in Spain. She focuses on translating legal documents like contracts, trusts, immigration records, and divorce agreements between English and Spanish. There’s a robust market for human translation of documents like this because errors can be expensive. Moreover, some of the documents Leon produces are submitted to courts or government agencies that require sign-off by an expert human translator.

To translate a legal document accurately, Leon doesn’t just need to be an expert in the English and Spanish languages. She also needs a deep understanding of legal systems on both sides of the Atlantic. 

I think this is broadly good news for employees, but I note that a decade-long trend of wage stagnation isn't exactly good news either. (I have had some personal experience with this in translating a Chinese patent. While the Google translation will get you most of the way there, it was a character-by-character search that allowed me to get the key detail that I was interested in.)

I broadly think that "human/AI hybrid" (i.e. humans working with/through AI output) will be how quite a bit of this stuff gets handled in the future, but I'm broadly not too concerned that this will have a major impact on the American chemistry employment market for the next 10 to 20 years. Hard to say, though - my crystal ball doesn't work so great sometimes...  

300 seconds

Every July 2, I like to read this essay by Robert Bateman in Esquire about the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment at Gettysburg: 

...General Hancock sees a single American regiment available. But, though it is a "regiment," this is in name only at this point. A "regiment," at the beginning of the war, would be roughly 1,000 men. Before Hancock stand 262 men in American blue. Coming towards them, little more than 250 yards away now, are two entire brigades of rebels. Most directly, half of that force -- probably about some 1,500 men from a rebel brigade -- were coming dead at them. Perhaps a thousand more, at least two entire additional regiments, were on-line with that main attack, though probably unseen by Hancock. But what does that matter? The odds were, already, beyond comprehension.

"My God! All these all the men we have here...What regiment is this?" Hancock yelled.

"First Minnesota," responded the colonel, a fellow named Colvill.

The two men remember what was said next slightly differently. Colvill recalls Hancock then said, "Charge those lines." Hancock remembered his order as, "Colonel, do you see those colors? (Pointing towards the multiple flags of the southern regiments in the two Confederate brigades.) Then take them!" I do not suppose it matters now which one remembered more accurately. The effect was the same...

Read the whole thing. I hope you enjoy, and appreciate their sacrifice. 

Good luck, New York City AI regulators

Via the New York Times, this news: 

European lawmakers are finishing work on an A.I. act. The Biden administration and leaders in Congress have their plans for reining in artificial intelligence. Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, maker of the A.I. sensation ChatGPT, recommended the creation of a federal agency with oversight and licensing authority in Senate testimony last week. And the topic came up at the Group of 7 summit in Japan.

Amid the sweeping plans and pledges, New York City has emerged as a modest pioneer in A.I. regulation.

The city government passed a law in 2021 and adopted specific rules last month for one high-stakes application of the technology: hiring and promotion decisions. Enforcement begins in July.

The city’s law requires companies using A.I. software in hiring to notify candidates that an automated system is being used. It also requires companies to have independent auditors check the technology annually for bias. Candidates can request and be told what data is being collected and analyzed. Companies will be fined for violations.

I have no doubt that New York City government means well, and that I have no doubt that companies will attempt to apply AI to the task of searching through job applications and screening the candidates. I also have little doubt that this rule will be easily bypassed by both technology and clever lawyers (probably more the latter than the former, but we shall see.) 

I have little doubt if the Workdays of the world were informed by Silicon Valley that chicken entrails were the best means of screening job candidates, that soon Jimmy John's and (I dunno) Salesforce would be out there, slaughtering chickens by the thousands in order to find fresh meat for the grinder get the best entry-level candidates. Soon, academics would be calling for chicken entrail regulation, law firms would be out there racking up billable hours in the slaughterhouses of Enterprise Rent-a-Car performing audits, and New York City would be moving towards banning chicken entrails in the screening of hiring candidates. Then Silicon Valley would show that goat entrails actually have a better R-squared (of a whole 0.15) and the cycle would start again...

 

The stealing/borrowing of credit

Via Derek Lowe, this remarkable article about the modern ibuprofen process, and the chemistry behind it, and the people behind it. This description of the politics was rather revealing and unfortunate: 

Did learning about and employing a “Quality” approach solve all my problems, or bring a big personal reward at Celanese? The answer was clearly no, at least in my individual case. Some of the unfortunate facets of human behavior intervened.

The Exploratory Group Leader and his Research Manager from the Celanese exploratory fine chemicals group began to internally tell and very often repeat a narrative to upper Celanese management, to the effect that the ibuprofen success was “really” just an outgrowth of their own prior “discoveries” related to HF chemistry. Celanese upper management (based at other sites), and later many other people inside and outside Celanese didn’t know any better (up to and including the Presidential Green Chemistry evaluators, and most of the people who have subsequently read about the Presidential Green Chemistry Award for the BHC process). 

Most of them accepted local Celanese management’s narrative version of the ibuprofen story without question, and have often repeated it later, in print and elsewhere. . .Our names were listed on the ibuprofen patent because legally they had to be listed, but were almost never mentioned again with respect to the BHC Ibuprofen Process, inside or outside Celanese. Meanwhile, the Exploratory Group Leader and the Research Manager reaped great personal/career rewards, and multiple promotions, by telling and re-telling their ibuprofen narrative.

It is weird to me how people steal credit (or perhaps take more credit than they deserve); I don't get it.  Nevertheless, people do it, and it makes me wonder if organizations should do their part to squelch such behavior. It's a hard problem. 

Who does well at Zoom

Via Marginal Revolution, this Insider article about why Zoom is weird, and how people can get better at it: 

In a study last year, people who were face-to-face responded to yes/no questions in 297 milliseconds, on average, while those on Zoom chats took 976 milliseconds. Conversational turns — handing the mic back and forth between speakers, as it were — exhibited similar delays. The researchers hypothesized that something about the scant 30- to 70-millisecond delay in Zoom audio disrupts whatever neural mechanisms we meatbags use to get in sync with one another, that magic that creates true dialogue.

...Cooney and Reece's first pass at the data suggests that "good conversationalists" on Zoom are those who talk faster, louder, and more intensely. They're the Tom Cruises, as it were, of the interactive back-and-forth. People rated by their partners as better conversationalists spoke 3% faster than bad conversationalists — uttering about six more words a minute. And while the average loudness of speakers didn't change across bad or good conversations, the "good" talkers varied their decibel levels more than the "bad" talkers did. Cooney and Reece's team speculate that the good ones were better at reading the Zoom room, calibrating their volume to the curves of the conversation.

I genuinely do not enjoy video conversations, but they seem to be important, so it's worthwhile thinking about how to get better at them. 

(I do not enjoy talking fast, nor loud nor intensely, so that's probably something to work on... I guess.) 

Charles Lieber is sentenced; no more jail time

Via Chemical and Engineering News' Bethany Halford: 

Former Harvard University chemistry professor Charles M. Lieber was sentenced April 26, ending a legal process that took more than 3 years. Federal judge Rya W. Zobel sentenced Lieber to the time he served when he was arrested, on Jan. 28, 2020; 2 years of supervised release, the first 6 months of which Lieber will be confined to his home; and a $50,000 fine. The sentence included $33,600 in restitution to the US Internal Revenue Service that Lieber paid before last week’s sentencing hearing.

The sentencing follows Lieber’s conviction on Dec. 21, 2021, when a jury found him guilty of tax offenses and making false statements to investigators about his work with a university in China. He was prosecuted as part of the US Department of Justice’s China Initiative, a controversial program that ended last year. Lieber retired from Harvard on Feb. 1.

The sentence is more lenient than the US attorneys recommended. They asked for 90 days of incarceration and 1 year of supervised release, which would include 90 days of home confinement, as well as a $150,000 fine in addition to the restitution to the IRS.

I broadly can't get too excited by zero days of jail versus 90 days, but at the same time, I think this feels a touch lenient. I suppose that this is good evidence that the justice system isn't going to be very hard on professors who get caught lying to federal agents, even as I think we can pretty clearly say that part of the process of being charged with a federal crime is a punishment in itself. 

I genuinely think that the China Initiative was a 100% failure within the criminal justice system. Maybe the tours of academic science that the FBI did to talk about "research security" might have protected some American IP, but the clearly Chinese-targeted efforts by the DOJ and subsequent prosecutions have, in my opinion, harmed American science far more than the value of the hypothetically-protected IP. I'd like to think I could have designed a better program, but putting a bunch of stupid-not-evil Chinese engineering professors (and one truly moronic Harvard professor) through this wasn't what I would have done. 

What would I have done? I dunno, but here's my retrospective program: 

• Visits to all relevant Thousand Talents professors from federal prosecutors, saying to these professors "pretty sure you filled this declaration out wrong, how about you fix it?" 
• A thorough tour of academia by DOJ lawyers of top academia, focusing on the actual problem (potential IP theft), and what can/should be done
• A thorough hardening of American industrial, governmental and academic labs for both cybersecurity and external intelligence threats
• A diplomatic initiative to the Chinese government, going the opposite direction that the US government did - knock this "stealing IP" stuff off, or we're going to provide one-way tickets to all your top young people. They already come here to study - what if we made it easy for them to stay, and we started our own Million Talents program? 

Blue days

And now for something very different. I like reading about other people's jobs (no surprise), and this writeup of the life of a woman long-haul trucker by Meg Bernhard was very interesting: 

...When I returned from the walk, Jess drove us to the facility for her 6 PM appointment. The day before, she’d picked up a load of picture frames from a small warehouse in Elkton, Kentucky, a town whose roads were hardly wide enough for a big rig. “This will be interesting,” she’d said, turning her wheel to the right and careening the truck onto a narrow two-lane road lined with red-brick homes and trim lawns, her fifty-three-foot trailer veering precariously. 

At the warehouse, a stooping man with shocking blue eyes gave us a tour of the long, mostly empty garage, its walls lined with stacks of boxes and palettes. “I do Lowe’s,” he said. “Also Walmart.” He’d started out working as a janitor for the company, then purchased it himself. A few years ago, he sold it for $3.8 million so he could retire but swiftly bought it back to save twenty-five employees from termination. “It’s a parable,” Jess said when we returned to the Black Widow.

I found this bit particularly poignant: 

Trucking saved her, she said, but she still got lonely. Solitude became its own source of claustrophobia. “I have blue days,” Jess said. “If I slammed my truck into a mountain, would anyone notice? Does anyone know I’m out here?”

...On blue days, Jess went through her phone’s contact list and called and called. If no one answered, she screamed.

I had a cell phone in grad school, but I didn't really call very many people on it. Makes you wonder if I would have been more social or less social in grad school if I had one... 

Who is making 'generic' semaglutide?

Via the New York magazine publication "The Cut", this feature story on the diabetes drug Ozempic, and the folks who are getting non-Novo Nordisk API for weight loss usage(emphasis mine): 

...To get hers, Allison calls up a Los Angeles–based provider she has never seen or met, sends over $625, and is shipped a monthly supply. What she calls Ozempic is not the brand-name product pre-packaged in a sky-blue injector pen by Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical company that makes and markets the drug. 

She receives generic semaglutide, the active ingredient in the medication, and has to mix and prepare it for injection herself, which — since semaglutide is under patent by Novo Nordisk until 2032 in the U.S. — suggests her meds are likely coming from a compounding pharmacy or a vendor selling research-grade ingredients. The lower price is also a tell: Ozempic retails for about $900 a month if your insurance doesn’t cover it.

Here's a plastic surgery office talking about this material coming from a compounding pharmacy. It seems weird to me that someone is selling semaglutide API into the United States, and that Novo Nordisk lawyers haven't cottoned to this, but I imagine the demand for semaglutide is so high that this sort of off-label usage cannot be controlled.* It's a peptide drug, so that increases the synthetic challenge quite a bit. Is an API manufacturer really selling Novo API out the back door? I can't imagine that either - so who is doing this?

*I don't blame Novo Nordisk for being at wits' end with this, but with any lifestyle-type drug, it seems to me that a wise pharmaceutical company would figure out how exactly to prevent undesired usage in otder to protect their brand. It would be interesting to know what Pfizer did to attempt to prevent generic Vi/a/gra from entering the United States during their time of patent exclusivity.

I'm glad I don't work for Elon Musk

Via Platformer last week, this is quite the story about Elon Musk as a boss: 

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.  

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well. 

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer.

I've worked for lots of different people in my life, and some of them have been good bosses, and others less so. While some of these folks have had pretty inflated egos (none quite as large as his, I wager!), some of them have had a certain level of humility about them. It's pretty clear that Musk's ego has currently gotten the best of him; it would be interesting to know what would rein it back in.