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Environment

Letters

November 22, 2004 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 82, Issue 47

Increasing women faculty

We are writing to correct an unfortunate error in your article "No Change in Numbers of Women Faculty" (C&EN, Sept. 27, page 32). In the article, the number of faculty in the Penn State department of chemistry was copied from the entry above us in the table. The correct numbers for Penn State are that two out of 19 full professors, one out of six associate professors, and four out of five assistant professors are women. With seven tenured or tenure-track women out of 30 total faculty members (or 23%), Penn State leads the top 50 chemistry departments (with separate biochemistry or chemical biology departments) in the nation, and has done so for the past several years.

This error in our discipline's most broadly circulated and read publication is particularly unfortunate and potentially harmful to our department's reputation. As a department, we are vigilant in our efforts to encourage outstanding scientists, regardless of gender, race, or creed, to join our faculty, and we are particularly proud of the great strides of the department head, dean, and faculty search committees who successfully identified and hired our current cohort of female faculty. Therefore, immediate clarification of the numbers of female faculty at Penn State is essential to ensure that potential graduate students, postdoctoral appointees, and faculty members realize that Penn State is committed to providing an environment supportive and attractive to top scientists of both genders.

Barbara J. Garrison, on behalf of Sharon Hammes-Schiffer, Juliette T. J. Lecomte, Christine D. Keating, Erin D. Sheets, Anne M. Andrews, and Mary Beth Williams
University Park, Pa.

It was with great interest that I read the article "No Change in Numbers of Women Faculty," which reports on the dearth of women at all ranks of the faculties at the top 50 chemistry departments at research institutions, based on National Science Foundation spending in chemical research.

While I did not find this at all surprising, I made note of the large number of faculty positions advertised in the same edition. Nine of the top 50 schools in the list advertised and are hiring for at least 10 positions this year. While I did not go back to other recent advertisements for faculty positions, I suspect that there are more schools in this group that are or will be seeking to hire faculty this year.

What an opportunity for these institutions to become proactive in seeking out and inviting highly qualified women to join their faculty. The next headline for this survey should be "Significant Changes in the Number of Women Faculty." I suggest the way to make that happen is to create a climate for success of young women at these and at all Carnegie Research Extensive institutions to attract and retain the highly qualified female Ph.D. chemists graduating this year. Other recent articles have noted the large increases in the number of women graduating with chemistry degrees at every level. The long-standing argument that highly qualified women are not out there is no longer tenable with these recent reports. It will not happen by chance, but it can happen by design.

Deborah A. McCarthy
Notre Dame, Ind.

An ethical decision

As one of the councilors who supported returning the recent ethics committee proposal back to the Committee on Committees (ConC) (C&EN, Sept. 27, page 41), I felt a need to respond to George M. Wyman's letter, "A question of ethics" (C&EN, Oct. 11, page 6).

I am sorry he felt the proposal was returned to committee without a meaningful discussion. The ACS Council has a large agenda and limited time. Consequently, most of the discussions regarding items that come to it are discussed in prior communications and at the district meetings, where they can be given greater attention. Be assured that while the discussion during the council meeting was relatively minimal, there was a significant discussion in many of the district meetings.

I, for one, was surprised that the ConC had not withdrawn the proposal. Following the discussion in our district meeting, I believe that I heard the attending ConC representative say that there are enough unanswered questions that the proposal will probably be withdrawn and possibly be reintroduced when they have been addressed.

Few would be willing to vote against anything reasonable that they believe is likely to provide a higher standard of ethics. I voted to return the proposal to committee because I believed this proposal did not indicate how it would. I do not believe we need committees that serve no real purpose, just because they have a nice-sounding name. Committees cost the society real money. The estimates that I heard for this type of committee were in the $50,000 range when direct, indirect, and staff costs are considered. This is not huge in terms of the total society budget, but is large enough to justify careful consideration and require good justification.

Council committees require meeting rooms at national meetings and all of the support required to conduct those meetings. A committee on ethics may also require legal support.

To me, the proposed ethics committee "charge" sounded like a general statement of motherhood and apple pie (something no one should be against, but vague). When questions were asked about what it would actually do, statements like coordinating the already existing ethics subcommittees, communicating ethics issues to the society, and increasing the standards of ethical conduct within our profession were given. All of this sounds great in concept, but we were not given an answer when we asked detailed questions: What is it actually going to do to improve ethical standards in our profession? What is it going to actually do and what will it be responsible for to council? What types of ethics issues will it address that the existing ethics subcommittees don't already adequately address?

In view of this, the best solution appeared to be to return this to committee for a rethink (not necessarily to reject it). The next decision might be to resubmit the proposal to council in a clearer and improved form or that the existing ethics-related subcommittees are adequately addressing the current ethics issues of our profession and ACS.

I, for one, would be happy to see a more complete ethics committee proposal submitted. I did not vote against it, only to return it to committee. In addition to a general vision/mission/charge statement, I would like to see the proposal include items such as a sense of direction (goals and objectives), expectations, responsibility, authority, and accountability for the proposed committee. These would make it a lot easier for me to understand what I was being asked to support and to decide if support was justified.

James F. Tatera
Madison, Ind.

 

Stemming the tide

Your article on ocean energy states that "ocean energy advocates have been claiming that technology is improving and they are onto something big," then asserts that advances are similar to those in wind and solar (C&EN, Oct. 4, page 23). In fact, the article does not give a single example of any technology or cost breakthroughs, and is mostly a plea for more federally funded R&D. There is a good reason why no new technology is cited in the piece, and that is because there really is none.

Sure, there have been some incremental advances in engineering devices to capture wave and tidal energy, as well as ocean thermal, but these still leave costs well above what is required for a competitive technology.

In my view, it is very unlikely that this situation will change. Wind energy is already cost competitive in many places today. Solar has the great advantage of being able to be installed at small scale and off-grid, providing reliable electricity in a wide variety of circumstances. By contrast, wave and tidal energy requires massive installations with grid connection at high cost. For many (but not all) of the approaches to capturing this energy, large amounts of concrete are required, leading to a long payback time for the embedded energy in construction.

Perhaps most important to understanding which renewable technologies will be most important for the future is a look at where today's scientific activity might make a difference. It is generally accepted that the action in science is in materials science (including nanotechnology), biotechnology, and information technology. Solar photovoltaics are an important application of materials science, and we should expect an order-of-magnitude reduction in cost to come from advances now in the laboratory. Biomass utilization will benefit by several orders of magnitude from advances in biotechnology being pursued by academic and industrial laboratories. But there is no such prospect for wave and tidal energy. The costs and efficiencies today are likely to be very similar in a decade.

The government is right not to invest in subsidizing R&D in this area.

Bernard J. Bulkin
London

 

More PFOA mysteries

The recent article about perfluorooctanoic acid by Cheryl Hogue awakened memories of work in which I participated in a small way some time ago (C&EN, Aug. 30, page 17). The report of this early research appeared, appropriately enough, in the ACS-published Symposium Series 28, which included papers presented at a 1975 Chicago session titled "Biochemistry Involving Carbon-Fluorine Bonds."

About 30 years ago, there appeared at the door of my nuclear magnetic resonance laboratory in the chemistry department of the University of Florida a young man with a vial that contained, as well as I can remember, a few drops of solution. His name was W. S. Guy, and he told me that he had just recently joined the faculty of the dental school at the university and that the solution was the result of work he had done with D. R. Taves at the University of Rochester. He asked whether I could obtain a fluorine NMR spectrum that might indicate the nature of an organic fluorine compound that he suspected might be present in the solution. I replied with my standard answer to such a question: "We'll give it a try and see what results from the experiment."

The research project at the University of Rochester had started out as an effort to determine the effect of fluoridation of water supplies on the fluoride concentration in human blood. Samples of expired plasma from blood banks in several cities that had varying concentrations of fluoride in the water supply were analyzed for fluorine by several procedures, but the surprising result was that the total fluorine content seemed always to be greater than could be accounted for by the amount of fluoride ion present, and the difference appeared to be the result of the presence of some organic fluorine compound. Guy's small liquid sample was the result of many hours of work in extracting material from 20 L of pooled plasma samples and concentrating the resulting solution.

A lengthy period of time involving some 15,000 acquisitions on our Varian XL100 spectrometer, equipped with a Nicolet Fourier transform accessory, produced a fluorine spectrum that gave clues as to the nature of the organic material. I was able to tell Guy that indeed there was an organic fluorine component and that it appeared to contain a seven-carbon perfluorinated chain with an electronegative group at the end, probably a carboxyl or carboxyl ester group, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), or more likely its methyl ester, since methanol was used in the isolation procedure. The spectrum also indicated a substantial fraction of branched-chain molecules, which 3M chemists say is characteristic of perfluorinated long-chain products from the Simons electrochemical process that 3M has employed. "It's a small world" seems to apply here, since Joe Simons joined the faculty of the College of Engineering of the University of Florida in 1950, and the needs of his workers, who were supported in part by the proceeds of the electrochemical fluorination process, were instrumental in the acquisition of our department's first NMR instrument in 1958.

One important conclusion of the work of Guy and Taves was that determination of the fluoride content of the blood by a procedure involving ashing, used by many other workers who were interested in effects of fluoridation, was likely to give erroneous results because this procedure converted the "organic fluorine" into fluoride. But what was the source of the PFOA in the blood plasma? The theory developed by Guy and Taves in consultation with 3M was that, during the period when the blood donations containing it were collected, paper bread wrappers were treated with a surface-active material that was the likely culprit.

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Perhaps these old results may have some bearing on the current concerns.

Wallace S. Brey
Gainesville, Fla.

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