Chemistry News

Prof. Jeffrey Kovac ’70 (Chemistry, U. Tennessee) is an internationally recognized scholar of ethics in chemistry. Earlier this fall the Swiss Academy of Sciences invited him to give the inaugural SCNAT Ethics Lecture on “What is an Ethical Chemist?” at 6 Swiss universities. A high-quality video was made of the lecture (45 min) and the discussion (45 min) that followed at ETH-Zurich, and the video can be viewed here (Creative Commons copyright). The text of the lecture will appear in the journal Chimia in January (see update below). Here is the abstract:

Almost all decisions made by chemists, and all other scientists, in their professional lives have an ethical dimension. In both the practice of chemistry and the education of students it is essential that chemists understand the moral complexity of real-world situations, apply the relevant moral standards, and have the moral courage to make difficult choices, or the foundation of trust essential to the scientific enterprise will erode. In this presentation I will develop the fundamental concepts of scientific ethics and show how they apply to both the practice of chemistry and the relationship between chemistry and society.  I will consider both day-to-day ethical problems such as authorship and the treatment of data and larger questions such as the choice of research problems and the social responsibility of scientists.

March 7, 2017 update: “What is an Ethical Chemist?” J. Kovac, Chimia, 71(1/2), 38-43 (2017), DOI 10.2533/chimia.2017.38

It is always a treat to have our graduates return and tell us about the work they do. Alumni reports (and reports from current students about summer research projects) seem to have grown even more frequent over the last few years. Two cases in point: Dr. Lyndsey Earl ’07 (“Mining Uranium from the Sea: Polymer Sorbent Design and Synthesis,” Sept 15) and Dr. Daniel Gamelin ’09 (“Doped Semiconduct Quantum Dots: Experiments at a Frontier of Inorganic, Physical, and Materials Chemistries,” Sept 22) were the speakers at our last two weekly department seminars. Seminars are generally held in the biology lecture hall, Room 19 (downstairs), and start at 4:15.

This is also a chance for me to plug some of the new ways you can keep in touch with what is going on at Reed. Continue reading →

Wikipedia: The protein product of the KRas gene performs an essential function in normal tissue signaling: it acts as a molecular on/off switch. In the ‘on’ position, KRas recruits and activates proteins necessary for the propagation of growth factor and other signaling pathways, however, the mutation of a KRas gene also happens to be an essential step in the development of many cancers.

C&EN (6 June 2016, cover story): “KRas, part of a family of proteins commonly mutated in cancer, is one of the most desirable drug targets in the pharmaceutical industry. It is also one of the most maddeningly difficult targets; after a long period of failures, many scientists simply stopped trying to develop drugs that block KRas.”

The C&EN cover story also describes how the first real break in the KRas story came in December 2011, when Dr. Ulf Peters, a postdoc in the Shokat lab at UC San Francisco, was able to determine an x-ray structure of a KRas-small molecule complex. Peters sent the coordinates to Shokat by email, but what he didn’t know was this: Shokat had been caught in an early winter Lake Tahoe snowstorm, and was stuck in his car at the bottom of a slick, steep hill. Continue reading →