There have been constantly something I feel strange but couldn’t identified what when reading everyday’s title feeds in Google Reader. The overall feeling can be called as ‘a wrong direction, opposite to science, that today’s chemistry research is on’.

We seems to prefer unpredictable things to predictable ones. Now, we don’t like things to be predictable or expectable. By making our system more complex, adding more building blocks, messing around, and seeing what will happen, we are more likely to publish papers on JACS and Angew. Chem., whereas these research efforts can hardly raise the interests of physicists, who have been providing theories for us chemists, who now consider the works of nowadays chemists as ‘dirty’ and meaningless.

We seems to give up the intention to understand the world in a precisely predictable way after complexity spread across all angles of observation. We are now complacent with messing around among this complexity in search for random, casual ’gotcha’s’.

Unpredictability has high impact. Understandable unpredictability has even higher impact, by understandable I mean the case that the authors succeeded in giving a plausible explanation for their unpredictable results; these deserve being on Nature, Science or PNAS. If the explanation is lousy, explain less, and you can still hit JACS at least. Take some photographs, take a movie if possible.

No, we are not going to response to prediction of any theory. Because if we confirm a theory, we help the authors of that theory, not us, in citing rate; the theory is more likely to be accepted thanks to our experimental confirmation. And if we disagree that theory, we contribute nothing; after all that is only a theory, how strange is it that it fails in one particular dirty experiment, with this or that factor not consistent with the theoretical presumption? And in such a complexity of Nature, how can an experiment be conducted in a ‘tidy’ enough way, so that it really fits a theory’s presumption perfectly well and capable to (dis)approve it? The hypothesis-experiment game is difficult, time-consuming, and therefore boring.

So now we turn our interest to publishing experiments without any hypothesis, experiments that are really hard to hypothesize anything from, experiments that, after reading it, people would say nothing other than ‘well, ya, you guys are really lucky’. Everyone is seeking for crazier ideas, and the ability to realize your idea, to show that it works (better by such visual impact as movies) is enough for you to be on Angew. Chem., etc. You don’t have to pretend that you knew in advance what you would get based on some theory. You are neither answering a question nor asking one.

So, why not ABCDE five-block copolymer? It must self-assembly. Take photos, explain a bit based on the patterns, then I assure you Macromolecules. After all, it has five blocks! Besides this, stimuli-responsive ‘smart’ things still rocks, more so if it changes color, or moves. Combination of click chemistry with ring-opening polymerization or RAFT, better on a surface, even better on the surface of nanoparticles, even much better luminescent, also rocks. Believe me, you can do this. Don’t fear the complexibility. With the old-schooled NMR, MS, light scattering, TEM, AFM, etc. techniques you can always meet the standard of supporting evidence, by putting all these boring things in the supporting information section, leaving colorful photos in the graphical abstract. Putting a .mpg movie in the supporting information section to distract people from the NMR and MS containing boring PDF is just sweet. Who cares why and what causes it to work? Watch that—it just works!

I regret the above cynicism without a single piece of example. Any example is offending actually. And I apologize if I disturbed someone. What I am sharing is just my feeling. I feel that my interest in chemistry is somewhat different from what’s heated today, or what I’m interested in is actually physics, not chemistry.

One

There were many ‘swimming’ events studied in the latest issue of J. Phys. Condens. Matter. See the preface by the guest editors.

Two

I have been mute here for long. So, I have devoted most of my time in experiment, haven’t I? No, I haven’t. Do you have some ‘graduate criteria’ in your countries? Here, one criterion is that the journals of your published papers should have a total IF greater than 2. What’s the IF’s of Rheol. Acta, J. Rheol. and J. Non-Newt. Fluid Mech., respectively? These are the major journals in my field — polymer rheology. I remember none of them has IF>2. My supervisor therefore needs me to publish a piece of crap on Progress in Chemistry (Prog. Chem.), an English review journal based in China, so that I can earn some additional IF. So I’m busy preparing a ‘review’ on large amplitude oscillatory shear (LAOS) for Prog. Chem.

Prog. Chem. is a good place for Chinese grads to earn IF points. It is indexed by SCI, having an IF of around 0.5, and generous in acceptance. Therefore it is a common practice that reviews are written and published by graduate students just like class assignments.

I wish my ‘class assignment’ on LAOS can look more like a review, by trying to answer such questions as ’what’s the core issues of this field?‘, ’how did people solved them previously?’, ‘were they successful?’, ’what’s new?‘, etc. Of course my answers are never important because as a humble student I’m not engaged enough in this field. But who care, after all? It is just Prog. Chem.!

Preparing this review is meaningful for me, at least. It provides me an opportunity to have a complete bird-eye view on the playground I’m in. So it’s not so time-wasting.

And I’m also starting some experiments now. They haven’t provided me any suggestive results yet. But the other day my boss murmured ‘it would be nice if we can have a PRL (Phys. Rev. Lett.) from it’. I believe he totally overestimated my luck. And, if he believed I could have at least one paper on PRL (whose IF (6.9) is enough for me to graduate three point five times), why did he ask me to write one more for Prog. Chem. (which only enable me to graduate four times)?

Anyway, ‘the more the better’ rocks, if not ‘publish or perish’.

In China, I always presume the social problems I encounter everyday are only the results of the ‘developing’ nature of my country. I comment on these essentially in Chinese (in another blog). This column on NewScientist made me believe that the problem of media distortion of research report is also prevailing in western society, and my point previously proposed in Chinese also applies here.

The problem is rooted in the audience/readers. They are not really interested in science as we scientists define. They are only interested in the ethical, emotional, political, or fictional by-product of science, instead, which are products of various interest groups other than scientists. That’s why impartial, plain and trustworthy interpretation of a research result is always far from enough to put on the news page. Readers of The Guardian, not JACS, are simply not finding science. How would you expect The Guardian interpret science like C&EN? How would you expect its headline writer to tolerate a plain, modestly-put title and subtitle?

Scientists deal with only hypothesis, by means of experiments. We live with hypothesis, with uncertainty, with the unknown. The public do exactly the opposite. How would you expect the readers be pleased with a science news that fails to confirm or ensure anything for them?

No one is really interested in science except scientists. Modern society is only trying to eliminate this hopeless situation by creating additional interesting by-products of science. But improvement from this situation should not start from trying to present in any way the ongoing frontier research. Steps should be followed instead. A systematic, long-run agenda is needed. Unfortunately, no media dedicates itself in this career. They sell themselves to the readers, not just us. Why should they listen to only us instead of the majority of the readers? The majority of taxpayers, not the professional minority, lead the society, especially in the more democratic western world. That’s why scientists have no reason to blame others. Instead, they should stand outside their comfortable, automatic justice of peer-reviewed community and face the vast majority of public by themselves. Otherwise more shits happen.

“I didn’t know”, said the author after being revealed of self-plagiarism by Science magazine, “that this is improper. I thought it might help informing the Chinese audience of the latest findings of the world.”

How sorry she was, afterward!

But, do we also do nothing before guilt is finally committed in other ethical aspect, except asking people “Please! Please be good!”—?

Science today has outgrown the age when scientists were only wealthy nobles with amateur interest in it. We are not dealing with a spoonful of Cavendish’s or Faraday’s, but unmanageably huge piles of papers and proposals by employees who only work for their salaries and seek promotions. Punishments upon disclosure case by case only teach a lesson that somebody is simply unlucky. And who listens to the preaching, any way?

Saints who are immune to fame and fortune are rare, as well as wisemen who always foresee the long-term consequence of an act. That’s why the most part of our society is managed in the current way, except in science community where we seem to rely too much on self-discipline solely.

A Thesis published on Nature Nanotechnology¹ shown that public acceptance of nanotechnology, and also generally any new technologies, depend not on the knowledgeablility of those technologies but former religious status of the public.

Strength of religious beliefs is negatively related to support for funding of nanotechnology. Religious apprehensions that developed earlier, in response to biotechnology, served as a template for reactions to nanotechnology. People for whom religion was not very important were more supportive of funding for nanotechnology. Once more, knowledge of nanotechnology had little influence.

Originally, science and religion work separately on human’s spiritual world and do not conflict. The reason why they conflict in the real world seems to be that scientists need to get funding from the public, where science and religion must interact. So scientific research is not a purely personal hobby today, it depends on the taxpayers and therefore is part of the governmental motivation. So why does a government need science? Because nations in the modern time have realized the importance of science and technology to the economical, military and political power, right? That’s why science exist.

But I never hear that religion, or the religious loyalty of its people, plays a role in a nation’s power. Religion still exists only because we humans are born to be religious. Religion exists as long as human beings exist.

So how about science?

Einstein had the following paragraph in his letters:

The development of Western science has been based on two great achievements，the invention of the formal logical system (in Euclidean geometry) by the Greek philosophers，and the discovery of the possibility of finding out causal relationships by systematic experiment (at the Renaissance). In my opinion one need not be astonished that the Chinese sages did not make these steps. The astonishing thing is that these discoveries were made at all.

So, as I agree with, at least Chinese sages did not make these steps. So we are not born to have these two capabilities science bases on. So science does not exists as long as human beings exist.

What do you think?

¹ Chris Toumey (2009). Hearts and minds and nanotechnology Nature Nanotechnology, 4 (3), 136-137 DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2009.16

Researchers has found that low dose of H₂S gas has an effect of relaxing blood vessels. Since the inflation of the NO research, nowadays whenever a gas is found relaxing blood vessels, people simply think of Viagra.

And whenever an public understandable research comes out, amusing titles appears too. For instance,

Fart molecule could be next Viagra (To avoid being called advertisement I’m not linking the news here. You can Google with it.)

So what (a standard question to answer or at least provoke for a good science news, I heard)?

Men with erotic disorder can still successfully have sex if they beforehand eat enough sweet potatoes?

Prof. Yu-Chi Ho pointed out (in English, you may want to read it first), with good will, a seemingly prevailing problem among Chinese students regarding to the respect of intellectual properties. The following is my comment.

I confess. I have a collection of books in PDF format. All were obtained by piracy routes. But I never think this is right. When present explicitly online (e.g. blogging) or in the real world (e.g. at a conference) I pay critical attention to copyrights issue. I paste every figure with clear awareness of its copyrights. I never photograph the slides of the speakers. I never obtained a book, or even a paper from the author. Still I confess for that I can still have the resources anyway. I confess for my hypocrisy when writing this comment.

But still my point is, Chinese people should learn the essential reasons, ethics and philosophy behind intellectual properties. They have no sense of it historically. In Chinese culture we have been taught that taking something without permission equals to stealing (不问自取是为贼也）, but the ‘things’ concerned here never include intellectual properties. Intellectual products become properties only after capitalism prevailed a society, where people can make money by knowledge and thoughts. China did not go through any serious capitalization in its history. Agricultural ethics still exists and conquers us, which does not dictates anything about intellectual products being properties of the author. Communism dream further allows Chinese people to neglect the respect of private properties in any form. Once people feel something is much more expensive than what they think should be, it is regarded ethically correct for them to change it by the most direct mean. Now that imported books in China are indeed expensive, they won’t have the least ethical burden to ask one from you. Similarly, if they think scientific founding should be shared, they photograph the slides of the speaker and even let their flashes on because they think they are doing the right and normal thing.

First things first, I believe that it’s normal and should be highly appreciated that criticism becomes the major voices from the west as China starts to get into their eyes. This will not last long, and this is why the nation should appreciate them more. But it seems quite not the case, critiques are much less than what I have expected, and China still have been incapable to pay enough attention and consideration to the critiques that have come out. For individuals like me, they have freedom to form their own points, based on “facts” they can collect from news. Sometimes however, it is the lack of factual information that set us into confusion.

In the Feb. 19 issue of Nature is this editorial titled Collective responsibilities¹, which provided invaluable opinions that can surely help China overcome its hurdle toward scientific independence. But it mentioned something I failed to find more information of:

The spread in China of unproven stem-cell therapies for conditions such as epilepsy and spinal cord injuries has left the nation’s health authorities concerned.

and,

The Chinese authorities, however, tend to have an aversion to congregations— especially those such as the Falun Gong, which they believe pose a threat to the country’s stability. So the Ministry of Civil Affairs keeps a tight hold on who is allowed to organize in any formal sense. As a result, China’s stem-cell hopefuls must go through the slow process of planning and applying to become a ‘level 2’ society.

According to my knowledge of English, the as a result implies a causal relationship.

So are there some scandals about the Chinese authority’s misconducts on the stem cell research community? Is there a Chinese stem cell organization once being pressed down by the Ministry of Civil Affairs? This is ironical that I who live in China have to ask people who are not about whether something did happened in China. But I assume you understand this. I have already tried Google.com, but with no success. So I am asking you to provide me more information about this issue. If you ever heard of such kind of news, please tell me. You can just tell me “yes there seem to be once when I heard that … but I forget the detail”…

Or, this is a piece of news that first comes out from an Editorial article, which I believe is not appropriate. Editorial should not serve for news breaking itself.

¹ Nature (2009). Collective responsibilities Nature, 457 (7232), 935-935 DOI: 10.1038/457935a

A dung beetle’s never too dirty. From Wikipedia.org

The biological concept of adaptation has sneaked into synthetic materials research. I was informed of this by a report on Adv. Mater.¹ describing an adaptive non-adhesive surface. The report cited further for us a review on Prog. Polym. Sci.² summing up the advances in fabricating smart surfaces by designing and synthesizing polymer brushes.

Yes. We have got encouraging advances in synthetic and fabricating skills, as evidenced by numerous reports on delicate yet strange structures on every issues of high impact chemistry journals, without, however, knowing the practical uses of them.

And ‘chemistry that really works’ cannot be easily achieved by conceiving such exciting concepts as ‘an adapting non-living thing’, ‘a smart nonintellectual being’, etc. In the particular case of non-adhesive surface, which we wish can be equally non-adhesive both in air and in water solutions, as the report on Adv. Mater. has excellently reviewed, even the smartest, most adaptive design by human failed. Adaptive surfaces for this purpose has been tried to achieved by grating amphiphilic polymers so that, the hydrophobic segments swell when placed in air, while the hydrophilic segments swell when place in aqueous solution, both cases being unfavorable for adhesion. However, the real products are not smart enough, they adapt too slow due to the slow motion of polymer chains. Softening the polymer surface make the surface sticky too due to increased contact area, which is favorable to adhesion.

When confronting such difficulties, we often turn to biomimetics too late. Soil animals which survive in varying humidity in soils have their solution to prevent soil adhesion on their skins, which are commonly a triple combination of cuticles with different smooth appearances, liquid secretion, and electrical charges. Although like in most cases, the structure-function relationship here is complex, we can well be satisfied by merely clumsy mimicking of its mechanism. Close-packed monodispersed silica nanpoarticles as the artistic ‘cuticles’ on dung beetles, or responsive stretching polymer chains as the ‘secretion’ behavior may be, perhaps, clumsy, but it seemed to work perfectly microscopically — the report¹ only test the adhesiveness of the so-synthesized surface by atomic forced microscopy, that is at an atomic scale.

But we have a positive experience in the relation between atomic and macroscopic effects in terms of adhesive properties. The well known gecko foot mimic was also first tested by atomic forced microscopy in the Nature article by H. Lee et al.³, and lately demonstrated by Zhonglin Wang macroscopically⁴ with similar molecular design. I look forward to a macroscopic test for this non-adhesive counterpart.

¹ Roman Sheparovych, Mikhail Motornov, Sergiy Minko (2009). Low Adhesive Surfaces that Adapt to Changing Environments Advanced Materials DOI: 10.1002/adma.200802449

² I LUZINOV, S MINKO, V TSUKRUK (2004). Adaptive and responsive surfaces through controlled reorganization of interfacial polymer layers Progress in Polymer Science, 29 (7), 635-698 DOI: 10.1016/j.progpolymsci.2004.03.001

³ Haeshin Lee, Bruce P. Lee, Phillip B. Messersmith (2007). A reversible wet/dry adhesive inspired by mussels and geckos Nature, 448 (7151), 338-341 DOI: 10.1038/nature05968

⁴ L. Qu, L. Dai, M. Stone, Z. Xia, Z. L. Wang (2008). Carbon Nanotube Arrays with Strong Shear Binding-On and Easy Normal Lifting-Off Science, 322 (5899), 238-242 DOI: 10.1126/science.1159503

According to Wikipedia.org which though is not often desirable, the meaning of the word biomimetics does not include the direct utilization of the functional part of living structures. We have found lotus leaves superhydrophobic. But biomimetically we didn’t directly grow lotus crops for water-repelling coatings, nor did we try to culture similar layer from lotus tissue. Rather, we got ‘inspired’ and started ‘mimicking’ the structure by purely artificial technologies we are familiar with. Similar situation is in computer science—obviously we didn’t try to clone some people exclusively for intellectual production, leaving us a comfortable yet improving future without necessity to think over anything complex. Rather, we turn to silicon-based computers and only wish these computers can become smarter by mimicking the logical structure of brain—what the cyberneticists are doing. There seems to be a far future perspective of biomimetics where we will have learned how all the living things work in the planet. At that time we will be alright living without any other living things because they are no longer mysterious or fascinating. Or in other words, at that time we will never fear of the extinction of living things because they are no longer Nature’s monopoly; we can create all living things from bottom up.

However, today’s reality does not seem to allow such an biomimetic optimism. Although some structural tricks have been played by scientists, we are still generally helpless in front of the core mechanism of life. Currently we have learned very little from Nature as we estimate, and our biomimetic products are essentially nonliving. While the genius of Natural gifts are extincting at a much faster way than human can catch up, we now still need to rely on living things in many crucial aspects of life besides foods.

Energy source of the matrix in the movie Matrix. From Jason Kurtz’s website.

Whereas biomimetics wishes us to rely less on ecology, with little real success, another idea wishes us to rely more, by exploring the nature and finding new living species that may potentially work for human. The logic is somewhat similar to ‘to grow crops of lotus for water-repelling coating’, but practically this kind of research focus primarily on biofuels, agricultural technology (e.g. mix planting), etc. Although this kind of idea can still be ethically scary if pushed to some extreme (remember the energy producing units in the movie Matrix), it still sounds better than a biomimetic claim that we will kill all fauna and flora when we have known them all (at least in Matrix we still have human).

Shewanella. From http://www.ornl.gov.

And sometimes this kind of research is also seen in materials science. A group of Japanese scientists recently published a paper¹ on Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. describing a electrically conductive bacterial network under some artificial manipulation—a man-made material that functions only when it’s living. The featured bacterium is called Shewanella, which is known capable to recognize and transfer electrons to Fe(III) oxide surfaces². The researchers found that, although individual cells are electrically
insulated from the others, addition of semiconducting Fe₂O₃ colloidal particles to the bacterial culture resulted in a continuous film that is found electrically conductive, provided the food for the bacteria, lactate, is sufficient. It is proved that the conductivity of the film is the result of bacteria, not the added Fe₂O₃ colloids, because pure this colloids were found electrically isolate. The authors said in the paper that this finding is relevant to “designing and fabricating bioanode materials for microbial fuel cells”.

This paper reminded me another earlier one³ published on Adv. Mater., where cells were added to a solution of polymer which is modified with cell recepters, resulting a bio-crosslinked hydrogel. The sol-to-gel transition was characterized by rheological method implying some mechanical properties of the so-formed hydrogel. This cell-croslinking hydrogel was further found reversible—it flows when sheared, and gels again when allowed to stand for a while. This property is important for injectable gel drugs that allow the drug can pass through the syringe while can stay at one place after injection, curing specifically the lesion site. What if we can inject some living cell amendment instead?! And, considering also the former electrical bacteria, what if we can inject some living electronic devices into our bodies where they keep functioning so long as our bodies provide them nutrients for living?

That may be a totally different scene from what biomimetics provides.

¹ Ryuhei Nakamura, Fumiyoshi Kai, Akihiro Okamoto, Greg J. Newton, Kazuhito Hashimoto (2009). Self-Constructed Electrically Conductive Bacterial Networks Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 48 (3), 508-511 DOI: 10.1002/anie.200804750

² Gemma Reguera, Kevin D. McCarthy, Teena Mehta, Julie S. Nicoll, Mark T. Tuominen, Derek R. Lovley (2005). Extracellular electron transfer via microbial nanowires Nature, 435 (7045), 1098-1101 DOI: 10.1038/nature03661

³ K.Y. Lee, H.J. Kong, R.G. Larson, D.J. Mooney (2003). Hydrogel Formation via Cell Crosslinking Advanced Materials, 15 (21), 1828-1832 DOI: 10.1002/adma.200305406