This is a sort of paper that you don’t see too much if you most read chemistry and biology journals. It’s not presenting lab results in either of those fields per se, but asking what it means to be a chemist at all. It’s quite interesting, but I do have to raise an immediate point before discussing the rest of the work: it’s based on an in-depth survey of ideas and attitudes among chemists in both academia and industry, early- and late-stage careers both represented, but the total number of participants is in the end just 43 people, ranging from undergrads to people with years in industry.
Now, I’ve watched social-science survey work from the inside and I know what a pain it is to gather data. So this really does represent a lot of work. On the other hand, the questions asked in the interviews cover a lot of ground (see below), and you’d really want more people with an even wider range of backgrounds to draw big conclusions from the responses. That said, I think that even as it is, the results this team got are very much worth thinking about.
Here are the questions. They asked the student participants the following:
1. Do you consider yourself a chemistry person? Why or why not? (I believe that this is the first time I have encountered the phrase “chemistry person” - DL)
2. What do you think are the characteristics of a chemistry person?
3. What factors do you think make somebody more like a chemistry person or less like a chemistry person?
4. Are there any characteristics of a chemistry person that don’t apply to you? Some more than others?
And they asked the professional participants these questions:
1. Do you consider the colleagues that you work with as chemists? Do you think of them as chemists? (I have to say, I don’t see the distinction between these two phrasings - DL)
2. What do you think are the characteristics of chemists?
2a: Do you think those characteristics apply to all chemists (physical, analytical, inorganic, biochemist, organic, theoretical, chemistry education, etc.)?
2b: Do you think these characteristics would all apply to chemists regardless of the sector they’re in (e.g. academia/industry/government/non-profit)?
2c: Would you say you share those characteristics with other chemists>
2d: Are there any characteristics of a chemist that don’t apply to you? Some more than others?
How would I have answered these questions? I would say that some of my colleagues are most certainly chemists, but others are equally certainly one kind of biologist or another, just for starters I think that the characteristics of chemists are that they work at the molecular level and treat things as molecules. If your work exclusively deals with single atoms and their behavior, I think that is where things shade over into physics, and if you work on whole organisms without having to think much about the molecular sizes and shapes and interactions involved, you have shaded over into biology. And yes, I think that molecular biologists, over the years, have become more and more “chemist-like”. I think these apply pretty generally across the different sorts of chemistry - for example, inorganic chemists can be the folks who are in between physicists and (say) geologists or mineralogists. And I think that these do apply across different sectors - I define chemists by what they do and how they think about it, not by what sort of organization they work in. I do indeed think that I share these characteristics with other chemists, and I can’t think of anything in particular that doesn’t apply to me.
So what did the interviewees agree defines a “real chemist”? These turn out to be scientists who have a chemistry degree, who work at an atomic/molecular scale, who work in a lab (or use software for computation and modeling), among other traits. Biochemists and chemical engineers get the short end of these exclusionary definitions, and one that I found particularly interesting was that for many of the participants, being a “real chemist” means being in academia.
That one goes back a long ways. It’s been fading out a bit, but there are still a lot of folks in academia - many of whom are training and influencing students - who hold this opinion at some level. If you went into industry, then you must not have had what it takes to be a professor, right? It’s for sure that there have traditionally been many graduate school PIs who have tried to steer their “best” students towards academic careers, feeling that a robust academic family tree brings some glory along with it.
Of course, as the authors note, groups define themselves both by emphasizing their own common characteristics and by excluding those who don’t share them. “Well, I’ll tell you what we’re not. . .” And they wonder if chemistry’s “central science” position doesn’t exacerbate this sort of territory-marking. I’m reminded of Ben Franklin’s crack about colonial New Jersey, facing a drain of its population towards New York in the north and Philadelphia to the south: it was, he said, like a keg that had been tapped at both ends. Perhaps chemistry has been tapped at its biology end and at its physics end?
But trying to enforce boundaries like this can lead to lessening the impact of the field. I make this point in presentations to academic audiences, that being concerned with what’s “real chemistry” ends up cutting off its opportunities for intellectual expansion. Don’t write off “hypenated” fields because of some weird concern about purity - claim them for the good ol’ central science and make it more central than ever. Some take this advice and some don’t.
On top of all this is of course the traditional mental picture of the “real” chemist as a white male. As one of those myself, who wears glasses and has a beard yet, I am in fact Living the Stereotype. But the biology-has-more-women and physics-has-more-men situation puts chemistry as a field in an unwelcome position, and that goes both for academia and for industry (and probably even more for the latter). Non-white scientists of course get their own pressures from several directions. As the paper notes, the problem with this sort of thing isn’t so much that it correlates with the demographics of the field as it exists today, but that it helps maintain them. Any members of less-represented groups that speak up about these issues run the risk of being seen as even less like members of the crowd than they were before.
All in all, the exclusionary mode is not doing chemistry any favors. People who are interested in this science and who are good at it should be able to pursue it no matter what they look like or what their backgrounds are. And intellectually they should be able to push the boundaries of it into different areas of research without being labeled as “not real chemists” for doing so. Do you want to spend more time feeling like real inside members of a pure and defined club, or do you want to discover things?