Chemical SciencesSubstack

Corin Wagen

Corin Wagen
My personal blog, focusing on issues of chemistry and metascience, unified by trying to answer the question "how can we make science better"?
Home PageRSS Feed
language
Published

TW: stereotypes about molecular dynamics. In his fantastic essay “The Two Cultures,” C. P. Snow observed that there was (in 1950s England) a growing divide between the academic cultures of science and the humanities: He reflects on the origins of this phenomenon, which he contends is new to the 20th century, and argues that it ought to be opposed: Snow’s essay is wonderful: his portrait of a vanishing cultural intellectual unity

Published

An important problem with simulating chemical reactions is that reactions generally take place in solvent, but most simulations are run without solvent molecules. This is a big deal, since much of the inaccuracy associated with simulation actually stems from poor treatment of solvation: when gas phase experimental data is compared to computations, the results are often quite good.

Published

TW: sarcasm. Today, most research is done by academic labs funded mainly by the government. Many articles have been written on the shortcomings with academic research: Sam Rodriques recently had a nice post about how academia is ultimately an educational institution, and how this limits the quality of academic research. (It’s worth a read;

Published

The concept of p K a is introduced so early in the organic chemistry curriculum that it’s easy to overlook what a remarkable idea it is. Briefly, for the non-chemists reading this: p K* a is defined as the negative base-10 logarithm of the acidity constant of a given acid H–A:* p K a := -log 10 ([HA]/[A-][H+]) Unlike pH, which describes the acidity of a bulk solution,

Published

You are a scientist, not a lab monkey. You ought not to view your degree as “six years of hard labor in the chemistry mines.” Always make time to go to interesting seminars, talk with other people about their research, and read the literature. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a scientist? Only one person is really looking out for your best interests: you.

Published

I’ve been pretty critical of peer review in the past, arguing that it doesn’t accomplish much, contributes to status quo bias, etc. But a few recent experiences remind me of the value that peer review provides: in today’s scientific culture, peer review is essentially the only time that scientists get honest and unbiased feedback on their work. How can this be true?

Published

I first encountered organic chemistry on Wikipedia, my freshman year of high school. The complexity and arcanity of the field instantly attracted me: here was something interesting that I didn’t know about and which didn’t require years of mathematical training to approach (unlike most of physics). I soon started reading about organic chemistry more and more, albeit with no rhyme or reason to my study.

Published

(with apologies to Maimonides and Nozick) Screening on only one substrate before assessing the substrate scope. This is the “ordinary means” in methods development. Screening on one substrate, but choosing a substrate that worked poorly in a previous study (e.g.). This can be thought of as serial multi-substrate screening, where each substrate is a separate project, but the body of work achieves greater generality over time.