Sabbatical Stories: Part 1

They say that I am going on sabbatical.

I have taught at this university for eleven years. In that time I have pretty much done what I could. There was teaching that had to be done. I did it as best I could. There were committees that needed participation. I did it as best as I could (indeed, for two years I functioned as Associate Dean just to attend meetings for the Dean). Then there was research. I came to this university at the point of a clean break from my research. At that time I had three research projects near completion and two papers submitted to journals. There just wasn't the time or opportunity to get the projects completed or the trivial experimental work done that would have gotten the papers published. I moved from a full functioning chemistry department with over 20 faculty members to a university where there were 17 faculty. I brought more equipment with me from my research than the university could afford to purchase. Each year I see more pieces of my research equipment break and wear out. Necessary losses all.

When I resigned from a tenured faculty position with a research group at Memorial University in 1996 I understood that I would be coming to an institution that did not have a Chemistry department, did not offer a Chemistry major or minor and in fact had no plans to do so. It is called sacrifice because it hurts.

In 1996 I was hired with TJ to start the Science department here with a degree in Biology. In 1998 we added AB to faculty to support the Biology degree. Under the leadership of TJ we initiated a Biopsychology degree in 1999. It was ironic (somewhat) that after fashioning a degree around our in-house expertise that the following year T left to go to Dordt College citing personal reasons and financial pressures. A subsequent attempt to create a Environmental Studies degree here was lost on the rocks of internal politics and the Science program started to drift. We then hired and lost a faculty member due to concerns over the completion of his doctorate and moving his family to Moncton. We hired ZY in 2001 to replace TJ and then we lost AB two years later (who returned to his deeper and truer love of international development with Food for the Hungry). Our subsequent hire of PH brought our complement of Biology faculty back to two but we continue to bow to the pressures of the moment as P. completes her doctorate.

What this has meant is that we have a regular Biology degree that is respected and accepted by our regional sister Universities. I would argue however that we have not made it uniquely ours or indeed uniquely Christian ... yet.

Going to chemistry conferences these days is kind of painful in an obscure way. It used to be that my friends would cheerfully greet me at the conference mixers, extract my complimentary beverage coupons (in exchange for a ginger ale ... my standard conversion). At some point someone would pointedly ask if I felt that I had made the right decision in 1996 and I would give my usual answer that this university was a better fit for me as a whole package (person, teacher and scientist) than anywhere else in Canada and my friends would all nod sagely. This year however I got the question "So how is it that you have been there for ten years and you haven't been able to get a chemistry degree started yet?" Wow, that was a hard punch right in my privately painful teacher/scientist region. I have been asking myself the same question ever since.

We have got to get a solid Biology degree that is uniquely Christian and uniquely ours before we can build towards me (if we ever do ... I may have to resign myself to academically living as a service lecturer until I retire). I am not a biologist but what would a uniquely Christian / Uniquely Biology degree look like? I can think of some unifying themes and in discussion with some of my colleagues came up with these possibilities:

A] Under the Christian concept of Stewardship Towards God's Creation: a biology degree with a strong emphasis on Ecology or Environmental Studies where Christian Stewardship is a theme in all the courses taught. We have this marvelous, forested property that is under utilized.

B] Under the Christian concept of Education: an intimate link between the Biology and Education degrees offered here with an intentional focus on education of the Community and post-graduate Science education of the teaching professional. We already have a vigorous education degree with a professor that has a Science degree.

C] Under the Christian concept of Healing : we craft a degree program and offer courses specifically designed to aid students in entry to the medical sciences (medicine, pharmacy, dentistry perhaps even veterinary schools). We could build on the recent successful admission of one of our graduates to medical school.

If there has been a lack of leadership ... it was my failure. If there has been a problem with retention ... it was my failure. If there was a lack of collegiality that would have kept faculty here ... that was my failure as well. I have never failed at anything that I truly cared about and I am not used to it now ... I am not accepting it now. Perhaps "success" or "failure" was never the point. Perhaps it was about obedience.

I offered what credit I had as a research professor and a colleague in the local universities to give the nascent Science program here some respect in the region. Was that enough? Was that all?

The fact that I even address these questions means that I need to make a change. No one is indispensable and when one gets to the point where they feel indispensable it is time to change or move on. I am 45 and can offer another university 20 years of service. I am now at the extreme outside edge of being able to move to another university, another couple of years and I could not expect any kind of horizontal move. Perhaps I am deluded in even thinking that it would be possible now.

They say that I am going on sabbatical.

I have stuff that I have to do.
I have stuff that I have to think about.
I have changes that I need to make.

In 20 days I teach my last class of the semester.
At the end of that lecture there will be 505 days before I teach here again.

When I pray, when I lift my eyes up, when I close my eyes and feel the air I feel the need ... the potential ... the necessity for change. It would appear that this university will offer me that most wonderful of opportunities to just allow myself to think.

I wonder what I will think about.

Research Ideas: Part 1

About 11 years ago the best research idea that I ever had came from a post-doc. We were discussing the best approach to a four membered ring and he suggested a room temperature route that flew in the face of the standard medieval "heat it until something reacts" route. There was some shouting and I will admit to some childish name-calling. We finally reached an agreement that he would first try the medieval route and if there was any remaining sample of a key intermediate he could give his route a shot. My way worked ... his way worked better.




It just so happened that later that year I organized a symposium in this area at a national chemistry conference where my big news would be this low temperature route. I took a couple of minutes to sketch out the full story and abjectly gave the post-doc all the credit for the break-through. The response was crazy. I had post-docs buying me drinks and faculty slapping me on the back and laughing about how it was the funniest research seminar they ever attended. My real benefit however was the response of the post-doc. The credit for the breakthrough was really trivial in terms of my academic career but that room was full of the post-doc's potential employers, paper referees and future colleagues. Since then he has shamed me by including me in his success (which has been considerable)and giving me credit for everything from the part in his hair to the colour of his Keck clips. It cost me nothing really but the benefit has been huge.

We say that chemistry is a meritocracy where the beauty of the idea supersedes all other aspects of our behaviour. That may be a limited truth. I have been to conferences where I was on the "inside" and valued by my colleagues. I have also been to conferences where I was a ghost. Polanyi says "we know more than we can tell" and research is like that. There is more to research than the idea and the glory ... there are the intangibles such as relationship and continuity of progress that just don't get measured. My post-doc taught me that lesson, I was fortunate to have been listening that day.

A Pale Blue Gas: Part 2

The product of the reaction was a radical, traditionally an unstable, reactive family of compounds with only a fleeting existence. In this case the heterocycle was stabilized by extensive pi delocalization and the carbon atoms were shielded and electronically changed by attachment to electronegative, kinetically stable CF3 groups. This also meant that the melting point of 12 degrees C resulted in a liquid with a significant vapour pressure at room temperature. This resulted in the blue gas.
I remember when I did the melting point. I had laboriously prepared the cation salt and reduced with huge excess of sodium dithionite and then fractionally distilled the volatile products three times to remove solvent and bi-products (which I would discover later to be the result of facile photolysis reactions). Then when I had grams of pure dark green black liquid I froze it and slowly warmed the solid in a Dewar until I reached the melting point. What i was not ready for was the high volatility of the solid near its melting point and soon I had huge shiny blue-black crystals growing perpendicular from the side of the flask. They were altogether some of the most beautiful things that I had ever seen. I would spend a whole year of my life preparing and characterizing this compound. The last problem to fall was the precipitation of the photolytic impurities using a method I had stumbled across in a 1908 JACS paper written by Speed Marvel in which he noted that he had precipitated polysulphide impurities with a catalytic addition of amine. I found a whisper of triethyl amine did the trick just fine.

I had pretty much photolysed the last best sample that I had in a heroic attempt to determine the vapour pressure of the liquid and solid when the word came down from Jack that a picture of the blue gas was needed the next day for an important conference in Europe. In one day I pushed a new preparation through and did the reduction and fractional distillation of the bits and scraps of material that I had available. In the meantime I took a virgin Pyrex flask and attached a new rotoflow tap and sealed off the neck to make a collection tube. I knew that the very process of placing the carefully prepared liquid in the flask and exposing it to light would destroy the compound but it needed to be done. The sample prepared the photographer was a somewhat eccentric natural light purist and he insisted that on a cold day we take the flask outside. I kept the flask warm inside my shirt with the sample tube exposed so that the liquid would remain in the tube and the flask would be filled with the blue gas. Then when the photographer said he was ready I whipped the flask out, clamped it and the picture was taken. If you look closely you can see two things. The neck connecting the valve to the flask got cold quickly and the liquid started to condense and there is a reflection of the UNB Biology Building on the surface of the flask. Thus the only picture of the blue gas was done. There would be no more.

Dealing With Unstable Compounds: Part 1

When I was a graduate student I was doing a demonstration of the generation of Cl2 from a reaction mixture containing potassium permanganate and HCl for an inorganic chemistry lab. I had set out the equipment and reagents beforehand and when it came time to do the demo I did not re-check. It would appear that someone had taken the concentrated HCl and replaced it with concentrated H2SO4 without mentioning it to me. What I remember is doing the demonstration and not getting any chlorine so I told the students to move on while I worked on the demonstration. This will now sound overly mystical but while I was holding the apparatus puzzling at the appearance a voice said “Put it away”. I was holding it at arms length, towards the back of a fumehood when it exploded, shredding the cuffs of my labcoat, spraying me with a mixture of concentrated acid and permanganate and (in a delightful escalation of events) breaking open several winchesters of waste organic solvent that a research group had decided to store in the teaching lab fumehood. The solvents caught fire. I was focussed on my face and immediately turned to a sink and began to hose my upper body with cold water. There was a point when I had two graduate students, Mike and Daniel at my back trying to put out the fire with fire extinguishers while I yelled that I needed to keep the cold water flowing on me. When they finally dragged me out of the lab the permanganate in my hair combined with the cold water to produce a ghastly effect for the assembled students and faculty as I was escorted past the evacuated building. I called my wife of six months from the hospital and for the first (but not the last) time started the conversation with "First of all I want you to know that I am alright". In the post accident analysis, the professor in charge of the course (who I privately suspect of accidently making the acid switch) just said “Well, it will make the students very safety conscious and the lab needed a good cleaning anyway”. All because I did not re-check the reagents before doing the demo. Remember, it was only stupid if you did not learn from it.



A selection on Mn chemistry from Cotton and Wilkinson, "Advanced Inorganic Chemistry, 5th Ed."

A Pale Blue Gas: Part 1

It was the summer of 1984. I was in the first year of my graduate work and I was cleaning up a project initiated by a previous graduate student. Greg was remarkable. He had a gift for being able to prepare and isolate important compounds by accident. Halogen facilitated oxidation of group IV and V compounds? He discovered it by realizing that he had incorrectly added elemental halogen to a reaction. The cycloaddition of SNS+ to pi bonds? Discovered while he was trying to find a good solvent for SNSAsF6 and he tried acetonitrile and was unable to recover his solute. I had come along at the end of his run and picked up the SNS+ reactions with pi bonds and had started with alkynes. I had prepared a variety of compounds using the SNS+ / alkyne reaction and they had worked well. My supervisor Jack decided that I should go to England to learn how to do cyclic voltametry in liquid sulphur dioxide. That brought me into the sphere of Arthur a fragile, dedicated chemist of the collegial old school. It was in Durham that I was trying to do anion exchange reactions to get rid of the AsF6- anions so that the cyclic voltametry would work better (in fact it never did "work"). One day, late in the afternoon, I would wash a solution of CAT into a solution of potassium iodide and to my wondering eyes the whole flask filled with a pale blue gas. I knew all that had come before me and I knew that I had discovered something new. I was seeing something important for the first time and it was important and new not only for me but for my whole discipline. My real research career had begun.