Polyketides

I believe my previous post made some claim about marking calendars or some such thing that is now, in retrospect, quite ridiculous. Too bad. I thought it made more sense to extend my hiatus than to come back for another single post and vanish yet again. My vacation has been over for a while, but I've actually had a lot going on. Most importantly, I will be going to a new school in January (the University of Washington) and studying (among other things) inorganic chemistry. It's exciting. But because of this, I've considered shutting down operations here. I've been practically nonexistent on this blog recently, and if I'm too busy with school to ever post again, what's the point of trying to maintain this blog? Well, I'm recommitting myself to this endeavor. I know it seemed like I was doing that in my previous post. Fine. You've got me. I messed up. Just give me one more chance. Maybe. I have plans for this blog and I am almost sure that I know how I want to proceed, but I'll save it for the next post. If my plan works out, next year, despite me going back to school, will be this blog's busiest year so far by, well, a lot. There will be many posts. How many? At least fifty-two. No really, that's my plan.

But we'll save that for my next post, which will not be next year, but sometime soon. I'll try to have at least two more posts this year after the one you're reading now. So bear with me—until my next post, at least. I'm not quite ready for it. But it will be soon. Later this week, even. For now, I'd like to talk about a different subject entirely.

I did get to do some cool, science-related things on my vacation. You know, the one that ended in October that I was supposedly going to come back from and write a bunch of posts here right after that. Yeah, that one. The museums alone gave me a ton of material I could use here (but won't, for now anyway). There was also one, completely unexpected moment that is the inspiration for this post. After a bunch of crap we're not going to talk about right now, I arrived in the city of Bonn on, let's see, the October 3rd. The hostel I had booked was a weird one that didn't have its reception open until 5:00 PM. So I found it from the train station and walked down the street to get some lunch. I had a döner for lunch. I want a döner for lunch every day. They are so good. Almost too good. It's uncanny. Anyway, I was really thirsty, so I hunted down a store where I bought some ice cream and what I thought was orange juice but turned out to be more like orange soda. That sucked, because I hate carbonated beverages, but I was so thirsty that I drank it anyway. When I walked down to the hostel, there were some people talking. One of them was an American who mentioned doing biological research. I asked her about it. We ended up talking for a while, a lot of it about science.

It just so happened that a German biochemist who was there for some reason overheard our conversation. He talked a little about his own research on polyketides. I'd heard of them before, but that was about it. For the past two months, I've occasionally been amused at the realization that I "went all the way to Europe" to learn something. Of course, I knew I would learn things there and actively attempted to do so. But somehow, the realization that I learned some individual thing I could, hypothetically, have learned just as well here, but didn't learn it until I was there is amusing. I was recently made the comment that I had to go all the way to Austria to learn that grated horseradish is awesome. Anyway, I suppose that's how learning things always is. Even when we set out to learn things, we don't know what exactly it is we are going to learn.

From what I recall, he described work on a polyketide produced by bacteria or a series of homologous polyketides produced by bacteria, but the bacteria lived in completely different hosts: one in a beetle, one in a sponge, and one in some other thing I forget. Horizontal gene transfer for the win. Anyway, one thing he emphasized was that polyketides display tremendous variability. I'll spare you pictures because I was recently lambasting my organic chemistry textbook (the one I've been using a lot for this blog) for trying to scare students away with a picture of a big biological molecule. The important thing is that this variability, the incomprehensible number of forms molecules can potentially take is, well, the whole story of biochemistry. Structure determines properties. And those properties, if they're some of the right ones anyway, are what make life possible in the first place. Almost makes me want to switch to majoring in biochemistry...

Ribosome Rant

I realize this is a departure from the content I normally post here, but I just started writing a rant on a different site and I think it really belongs here. The Nobel Prizes are being announced this week. The prize in chemistry went to Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A. Steitz, and Ada Yonath for their work on the the structure of ribosomes. There's a sentiment that I've been seeing somewhat and it got me annoyed enough to actually write this. Here are some examples of the sentiment I am talking about...

I don’t care. For some reason, this year I’m not getting into Wednesday Madness nearly as much as I have in previous years. I’ll be happy if they give it to, uh, a chemist.

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Oh well. Here’s an idea. In lieu of giving out Nobel Prizes in Chemistry to achievements in chemistry (since they only seem to give it to actual chemists every other year anyway, it won’t be much of a stretch), let’s start handing them out to the authors with the best paper titles ever.

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As already announced biologists walked away with this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry once again, this time for work in determining the structure of Ribosomes.

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As chemists we would like to see the Nobel chemistry prize go to a chemist. Our Nobel hopefuls may be a measurable magnitude more chemically interesting, as measured by ChemFeeds, but there is more work for them to do until these topics become world renowned (which seems to be the dominant prerequisite these days).

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And again the Nobel for Chemistry goes to "bio-chemists"....
Congratulations...but as a strictly synthetic organic chemist...I am a bit ticked off.
With all the biology and the nanoscience development in recent years, it'll be eons before an organic chemist wins the prize again.

Alright guys, the applicant to get into school to work on an undergraduate degree (I do already have my A.S. at least) has some news for you: biochemistry is chemistry. I find this reaction deplorable. Chemistry is all about atoms and the bonds between them, what things are made of and how they interact with each other. That is exactly what this prize was awarded for. Perhaps word has not yet reached the innermost confines of your biology-free ivory towers, but ribosomes are made out of atoms and ribosomes have bonds—lots of them. Ribosomes participate in chemical reactions. This really should go without saying.

I could be way off here, but I don't think I would see this in other branches of science. If an annual physics prize went to scientists who did work in astrophysics, would physicists complain that the astronomers are taking physics prizes? I think not, but maybe some of them would. Maybe some of them sequester themselves in ivory towers devoid of any science that is not their own particular specialization, just as apparently some chemists do. My impression is that many, if not most, physicists have a passion for the universe and its fascinating nature. They want to see the physics in everything. I want to see the chemistry in everything. And I'd like to think I'm in good company, but the reactions I've seen to this Nobel Prize have cast some doubts on that.

How arrogant must one be to think, "Only research in the area of chemistry that I focus on should win prizes"? Some might protest that this is an unfair characterization, but if one is willing to dismiss the entirety of biochemistry, I am more than willing to err on the side of assuming that one would go on to dismiss other purportedly unworthy subjects in a similar manner. This exclusive approach is the exact opposite of what I want to stand for. I want chemistry to be inclusive. If we excise some of it because it deals with biological molecules and can therefore be considered biology, we might as well excise the parts that deal with minerals and make that geology and so on until we have divided everything up and there are no more chemists, just former chemists working in other fields of science.

The ribosome people did not win because the biologists are taking over and they did not win because ribosomes are famous and other work was too obscure. They won because they did good chemistry that is of abundant benefit to humanity.