Editorial: 3 of this week’s features and the reporters who wrote them

One of the perks of my temporary gig as C&EN’s editor in chief is editing or reading most of the magazine before it hits our website or comes out in print on Monday. And when I did so for this issue, I was reminded of both the uniqueness of the articles in C&EN and the deep experience of the reporters who create them.

So if you will indulge me, here’s a short walk through this week’s three main features and the reporters behind them.

Alex Tullo is a senior correspondent in our business department. He joined C&EN in 1999 from the magazine Chemical Market Reporter, making a switch that I had made just a year earlier.

Late last year, I asked Tullo to write a news story about 3M’s plan to exit the business of making fluoropolymers and other per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) because of the growing health concerns with these chemicals. Some 20 years earlier, Tullo had written about 3M’s decision to stop making a particular PFAS chemical, perfluorooctanyl sulfonate. The decision to exit the business completely was even bigger and became the lead news story in our Jan. 2 issue.

But in reporting the story, Tullo learned that 3M is an outlier and that other fluoropolymer producers have no such intentions. We realized there was another story to write: about how companies like Arkema, Chemours, and Solvay are revamping their fluoropolymer production methods to stop using or emitting fluorosurfactant processing aids. Read it on page 20.

Bethany Halford is a senior correspondent in our life sciences reporting group. She joined C&EN in 2003 not long after earning a PhD in organic synthesis.

Anyone in the medicinal chemistry field has heard of Christopher A. Lipinski’s rule of 5, a set of guidelines for helping chemists design drugs that can be taken orally. But more than 25 years have passed since Lipinski, then a Pfizer chemist, published the guide, and many oral drugs that flout it have been approved.

Halford read a short Nature Reviews Chemistry perspective article looking back at the rule of 5 and decided to ask drug company scientists what they think about it today. She learned that while they acknowledge its impact on drug discovery, many feel it limits the creativity of medicinal chemists. Read Halford’s feature about the legacy of the rule of 5 on page 16.

Mitch Jacoby, the author of this week’s cover story, is a reporter in C&EN’s physical sciences group and the group’s interim leader. He joined the magazine more than 25 years ago after earning his PhD in physical chemistry and spending a few years running an analytical lab for a small environmental company.

His story is about efforts in academia and industry to use electrochemical reduction to turn carbon dioxide into useful chemicals. Jacoby wrote about the approach a decade ago and was prompted to take a fresh look after reading a paper in Nature Catalysis. His story, on page 24, lays out the challenges of the concept and explores some of the catalyst, electrochemical cell, and electrolyte science being pursued to make it work economically.

Anyone who reads the cover story will not be surprised to learn that, at the American Chemical Society meeting in Indianapolis later this month, Jacoby will receive the James T. Grady–James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public. To my knowledge, he is the first C&EN reporter to win the award.

These three features are the kinds of stories that can be found nowhere but in C&EN. The magazine has gone through some difficult times recently, and a number of writers and editors have left. But plenty remain. Thanks to the deep experience and talent of reporters like Tullo, Halford, and Jacoby, readers will continue to find unique, must-read chemistry journalism in the pages of C&EN.

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.