Chem Coach: Instrumentician Style

Blog Carnivals are pretty cool and I've been wanting to participate in one since the "Favorite Reactions" carnival. SeeArrOh started this one, calling it the Chem Coach Carnival. The idea is to answer a series of questions about the daily ins and outs of being a professional chemist or student of chemistry in order to lend a hand to those considering getting into the field, or just to encourage those of us who are already here in some capacity. I think it's a great idea and I'll start right here.

Your current job: I'm an analytical chemist at a research institute. I use complex instrumentation to tease out qualitative and quantitative information about particular components in various types of samples. It's a large institute, and we're not all scientists. Even among the scientists there's a lot of diversity, so I get to run things from environmental guys, material scientists, medicinal chemists, all the way down to commercially developed materials and pharmaceuticals. My focus is mass spectrometry for its use in the analysis of tobacco constituents and designer drugs.

What do you do in a standard work day? Really, it could be anything. The particular group that I work in doesn't have just one contract or project that it works with full-time. Recently, my weeks consisted of a day or two of producing tobacco smoke condensate samples and standards, and then popping them into gas chromatography systems to determine how much of what was in them. I've also been using various mass spectral analysis techniques to identify designer drug components on a pretty regular basis. All of this work includes using balances, vials, solvents, and neat chemicals for putting together sample assays, and then time in front of computers telling instrumentation what to look for in them. I do the mechanical work on the instruments as well, so at any given time I may have to replace a gas tank, a copper line, a filter, a capillary column, or even a mass spec source before getting the show on the road. This is all before I come to the crucial data analysis step.

What kind of schooling/training/experience helped you get there? My training started with a great chemistry teacher in high school. Mrs. Swann taught us how to balance equations, what Boyle's law was, and what shapes orbitals had, but more importantly, she got excited about chemistry. After that, a really good undergraduate degree in chemistry (B.S. so I couldn't skimp on the math...even if I still feel like I did) is the only diploma that I've earned so far past high school. I got to take some graduate level courses from older guys that had strong research interests and expressed them well. While in college I worked for 4 years in a biophysics lab learning how to manipulate the surface chemistry of nano- and microparticles. I also interned at a biotherapeutics company for a summer where I learned a little GxP.

How does chemistry inform your work? Methods guys are constantly going to the literature to see if someone's analysed a molecule or substance before them. Sometimes we're looking for a specific method that will separate known compounds. Other times we're searching to see what unknowns should be in our matrix and at what concentrations. There are some chemistry rules that chromatographers and mass spec chemists use right off the top of their heads, like isotope distributions and atomic masses, but often you can find us going to reference books and literature to try and establish what behavior we can expect for a given chemical in a column with some mobile phase.

Finally, a unique, interesting, or funny anecdote about your career: So there's this mass spec thing that Waters developed and they call it an Atmospheric Solids Analysis Probe. It's really cool, because it works a little bit like DART, you can just dip or rub the capillary probe into your substance and stick it into a mass spec source and see what volatilizes off of it. Someone I worked with at the time got a hold of a "lazy cake" one day and we went looking for the melatonin mass in it. I'm not sure if anyone eventually found it, but it was hysterical to let everyone know that we were "mass spec-ing" a brownie. 

Happy Mole Day!

Not a full post, I just didn't want Mole Day to pass and not give it some notice. 10-23 is a nice day this year, positioned right in the National Week of Chemistry and SeeArrOh's ChemCoach blog carnival. While we admire our favorite number on this special day, let's not forget about Amadeo Avogadro. His exploration into Avogadro's law got us well on the way to the ideal gas law, the first law that you really got the hang of in chemistry classes, and then learned was all screwed up and needed a lot more work to really use. This one's for you, Amedeo:

Upcoming SERMACS 2012 Conference

I wasn't able to make it to the recent ACS national meeting, but I hope you were. A few states south of that meeting, Raleigh, North Carolina will be hosting the Southeastern Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society this November 14-17. The headline for this year's event is Catalyzing Sustainable Innovation. This regional meeting will give southern chemists a great opportunity to become acquainted with chemistry in the surrounding area, make connections with nearby professionals, and get a foot in with potential employers.

I attended the 2011 meeting in Richmond and had a great time. I met several researchers and graduate students in the area and learned about their research interests. The host city was also a nice plus. You can't beat walking down the street for local Chesapeake Bay oysters during lunch. Raleigh, while not on a bay, will be a fun venue for the conference as well. The restaurant and bar scene in the downtown area is both accessible and nuanced. You're bound to find something you like and probably some live music as well.

The schedule will include an extensive program for undergraduates, poster sessions, symposia for several sub-disciplines, as well as two special conferences: The 41st Southeastern Magnetic Resonance Conference (SEMRC) and The Center for Solar Fuels (UNC EFRC) Conference. With such a diverse schedule, it's nearly certain that any chemist with an interest in coming to the area would find something to perk their interest. Notice, fellow mass spectrometrists, that two invited symposia will be presented on mass spectrometry alone.

The deadline for advance registration is nearly upon us (Oct. 31, 2012), so I'd suggest jumping over to the registration page to get your plans finalized for attending this year's SERMACS conference. Hope to see you there.

Nobel Biochemistry - Something I Can Be Happy About

Congratulations to both Dr. Lefkowitz (who works just down the street from me!) and Dr. Kobilka for winning this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work in G-protein-coupled-receptors. Isolating that the receptors themselves were discreet components in cells was important work that Lefkowitz had to undertake. On top of this, Kobilka's group ended up taking crystallographic data of the receptor as it mediates signal. This work has been outstanding both in terms of biochemical analysis and for the insight that it gives into G-protein-coupled-receptor mechanics. Really, the research sheds light on all sorts of receptor interactions. Pretty much everyone is agreeing that this work deserves a Nobel Prize, but, not unsurprisingly, there has been a loud outcry from many chemists that this biology research shouldn't be taking a prize away from hard-line chemists. Both scientists are M.D.s and the research itself is biochemical in nature, so it's not hard to see why the electron-pushers and p-chemists, mass spectrometrists and polymer synthesizers could feel pushed aside.

Avid readers of the chemistry blogosphere should be familiar with Derek Lowe and Ash Jogalekar who blog, respectively, at In the Pipeline and The Curious Wavefunction. Linked above are their positive responses explaining why they're happy with crystollographers in biochemistry receiving this year's Nobel. It happens that I agree with their opinions more than those chemists who are more "grumpy" about this year's prize. Protein interactions are definitely chemical interactions. Not only is this the case, but the impact for the discovery has been felt largely in the chemistry community. Chemists, along with the pharmacologists and doctors, are putting the work in to target these G-protein-coupled-receptors. I think that it's important to keep in our sights that the community who feels the impact of a discovery is more important than the field of those making the discovery.

In our line of work, it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish exactly which scientist is doing what. It's always clear who the synthesis guys are, but in the analytical labs (just as an example) you can't just assume that everyone is a chemist. Around the mass spectrometers I'm secure of my place as a chemist, but many of us have formal training in biology or even pharmacology. When you get right down to it, chromatography can be thought of as method engineering and the same can be said for mass spectrometry. When you really start slicing and dicing labels, lots of scientists might or might not be chemists based on how much of a purist the guy with the label tape is.

Now that I'm done saying how much I'm okay with the ambiguity that sometimes flows into the ranks of "chemists" worldwide, I can still see why many are still upset about the chemistry prizes going to biologists. More specifically, this research is chemistry with relevance in medicine and physiology. There is a separate prize for that. While I'm fine with the recipient choices, I do wonder what exactly distinguishes medical research and medicinal chemistry research.