As local ACS chair in 1999, I got to host the banquet when Alex won the Cotton award. The night's highlight for me was talking with him about music, where his knowledge of course put mine to shame. Every time I tell undergraduates about Borodin and the aldol, I think of him.

but I interpret her early career moving from Illinois-UC to Madison to Jewish General Hospital and McGill as her pursuit of the best opportunity to do her science. This was not somebody who just wanted a job. Ultimately LBNL let her be an NIH PI and do her best work.

imagine how she managed it. Science is hard enough with every advantage. Gopalan was cranking out beautiful work with usually a single student coauthor. Gopalan got her Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1964, after moving from India and starting grad school at age 19! I don't know but

I am struck by a series of papers Gopalan wrote over a couple of years while she was at Jewish General Hospital, not her very best I think, but solid and prolific. The prior tweet links one. This was after the divorce and while there were still two kids at home. I just can't

I guess I understand why Kamala Harris only talks about her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, as a mother, but there is something missing, almost disrespectful. Because Shyamala Gopalan was an awesome scientist. And science was clearly a great passion to her. pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/…

No. No no no no no. Suspension from journal for five years, minimum, plus notification of institution. If funding sources are listed, notification of sponsors. Police science or lose it.

So I suppose y'all write 5 arrows to move the proton in MeC(=O)CH=C(OH)Me - a reaction that is nearly barrierless. I get it, but I write 3.

I want one too.

I write that with 4. And I describe that as an ‘exception that proves the rule.’ The proton transfer is very asynchronous, an afterthought versus the main bonding changes. JACS 1997 119 3385.

I have published on a 6+4, but that was also a 4+2 at the same time. Ah, another conspiracy theory that is correct, proving that they all are correct and that conspiracy theorists are not just nuts.

Five curved arrows at once is not a mechanism. It is a conspiracy theory.

Getting it out in 17 months was an absolute miracle. There is a long list of chemists in Pharma who in a fair world would be hailed as heroes. I salute them.

We all have big egos - how else do you tell a student about an exciting project that you know might not work? Luckily, most of us are ignored if we go off the rails.

By, uh, letting him blast nonsense about areas where he knows nothing?

A 2019 state law requiring schools to offer full-day pre-K is saving parents hundreds of millions of dollars. FIFY

I did once have an undergraduate think they could stop a homogeneous reaction by turning off the mixing. So hard not to lol. Time goes on anyway. But heterogeneous reactions may stop entirely without mixing. Lee’s mix then makes sense to me, but separate from time or add.

LOL

Oh, a related story that I tell: there is a graph in the Jurassic Park book that is completely LOL for anyone who has made a histogram from real data. Crichton liked to pretend he knew science, but actually doing it makes a difference.

for any interpretation of any kind. Small data sets provide ample opportunity for cherry picking (and cherry picking is a long-favorite way for people to lie with the 'truth'), but even if you are trying to be truthful, you probably need 100x as much data to say anything.