Letters from Chemistry World readers – Page 10
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Opinion
Letters: November 2010
Clifford Jones proposes that the world’s trees, taken collectively, absorb large amounts of atmospheric CO2 (Chemistry World, October 2010, p34). How can this be true? Any climax ecology, whether forest, peatbog, savannah, or ocean will, if it is dimensionally constant, contain the same amount of ageing, dead and decaying organic ...
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Opinion
Letters: October 2010
Caroline Toland’s reply to the career-change question posed by an academic (Chemistry World, September 2010, p72) is perfectly sound advice but there are some issues that need addressing. The first question an employer will ask is why it has taken 10 years to discover he/she doesn’t enjoy academic life? He ...
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Opinion
Letters: September 2010
It was interesting to read Matt Brown's article on the liaison between Tamil Nadu Agricultural University and Cornell
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Opinion
Letters: August 2010
I was interested to read Philip Ball’s piece on the automated future of chemical crystallography, based on work at St Andrew’s University, Scotland, UK, to develop an entirely automatic diffractometer capable of ’flexible thinking’ designed to mimic the thought process of a crystallographer (Chemistry World, June 2010, p34). While this ...
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Opinion
Letters: July 2010
Like Pickard (Chemistry World, May 2010, p40), I am disappointed that the BBC did not find a chemist to present Chemistry: a volatile history, but I am not amazed that a physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, ’made an excellent job of it’. After all, chemistry is a physical science. The Royal Society ...
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Opinion
Letters: June 2010
German Chancellor Angela Merkel received the Royal Society's King Charles II medal
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Opinion
Letters: April 2010
I was quite outraged to see the article about the ’golden age of trickery’ surrounding alchemy (Chemistry World, February 2010, p80). David Jones perhaps does not know, or has failed to research, the fundamentals of the sulfur, mercury and salt that are the core of alchemy. He does not appear ...
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Opinion
Letters: March 2010
The headline Nuclear waste research resurface s (Chemistry World, January 2010, p12) better profiles my concerns than I could have imagined. In my opinion, and subject to an understanding of tolerability of risk, no toxic material should ever be left to the vagaries of uncertain isolation and abandonment. The public ...
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Opinion
Letters: February 2010
Source: © BETTMANN/CORBIS C P Snow - author, physicist, diplomat C P Snow, the subject of Mathew Waugh’s ’Last retort’ (Chemistry World, December 2009, p88), knew and greatly admired J Desmond Bernal. Snow’s first novel The Search (1934) included a character modelled on Bernal and tells the ...
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Opinion
Letters: January 2010
I do not recognise the picture of dug discovery at the ’coal-face’ painted by Clare Sansom and her sources in the article Molecules made to measure (Chemistry World, November 2009, p50) I worked at Roche UK (Roche Research Centre, Welwyn Garden City, Herts) as a young medicinal chemist in the ...
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Opinion
Letters: December 2009
So now (post 30 September 2009) you can’t buy sodium chlorate weedkiller, ostensibly as the result of a Brussels directive. Apparently it is too toxic. Or is it that it can be used as an oxidant in terrorism? (But I understand the commercial product contains fire suppressants, and in any ...
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Opinion
Letters: November 2009
I read Microwaving myth s (Chemistry World, October 2008, p40) and subsequent letter by Frank Smith, a pioneer in microwave-assisted reactions (Chemistry World, July 2009, p39). It appears that 1985 was the beginning of microwave-assisted chemical reactions based on Smith’s as well as our published work. Our group ...
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Opinion
Letters: October 2009
We feel obliged to respond to Prof Morel-Desrosiers’ criticisms (Chemistry World, August 2009, p36) of an earlier article highlighting a paper of ours (Chemistry World, May 2009, p5). This paper (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2009, 48, 3129) describes the formation, in an aqueous mixture, of unusual clam-like species in ...
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Opinion
Letters: September 2009
Derek Bailey raises his concerns over the amount of carbon sequestration that can occur before oxygen depletion becomes a significant issue (Chemistry World, August 2009, p36) and asks if the relevant calculations have been done. Although the Earth System is complex and exhibits tightly coupled feedback loops, indicative upper limits ...
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Opinion
Letters: August 2009
My colleagues and I on the committee of the South Africa North local section of the RSC enjoyed the excellent article highlighting some of the challenges facing us in South Africa, particularly when it comes to developing the chemical sciences (Chemistry World, June 2009, p46). We were, however, extremely ...
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Opinion
Letters: June 2009
I read with great interest the article by Hayley Birch entitled The artificial leaf (Chemistry World, May 2009, p42). It was pleasing to see that the x-ray structure of Photosystem II (PSII) was shown as a key figure in the article. This structure was determined by myself and colleagues ...
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Opinion
Letters: May 2009
Reading The changing shape of chemistry, 1998 to 2008, I am reminded of what never changes (Chemistry World, April 2009, p39). Nowhere is there any apparent attempt to define the purpose, or purposes, of a chemistry BSc. This is not a demonstration of ’academic freedom’, but, rather, of academic licence. ...
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Opinion
Letters: April 2009
As Matt Brown is a ’freelance science writer based in London,’ it is perhaps not surprising that he missed out on reporting the first new pharmacy degree in the UK for around 30 years - that of the School of Chemical Sciences and Pharmacy at the University of East Anglia ...
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Opinion
Letters: March 2009
I recently delivered an address at a presentation evening at a local school where I was introduced to the audience as an organic chemist. At the reception which followed, I was approached by a parent who congratulated me heartily on my lifestyle choice of being ’organic’ and I was asked ...