The Chemist Who Quit Publishing
Mel Modelmaker was a chemist and by far the most respected faculty member on the Cool-Tech campus. Unfortunately, both Me1 and the Institute had come upon hard times. Cuo-Tech, long forgotten by alumni and too often neglected by legislators, granting agencies, and government contractors had been driven to the brink of insolvency by diminished enrollments and a meager and poorly invested endowment. In addition, it was all hut fatally afflicted by the tri-maladies lems wire pe&onal and psychological. He was so possessed by recurring and soul-wrenching nightmares that he had become miserable and morose. More than this, these nocturnal episodes had so diminished his self confidence and so altered his professional perspective that he had taken an oath never to publish again. In the dreams that cause his difficulties, Mel is directing the research of a group of the best students he ever had, in facilities more modern and complete than any he had ever known. His ideas are the most exciting and imaginative of his career, and he feels that the eyes of the entire scientific world are glued to his laboratory, wildly anticipating the breakthrough of the century. The laboratory abounds with enthusiasm and harmony. Students and technicians are pursuing their work with a frenzy and effectiveness unprecedented in his experience. Results are flowing in like water; no instrument or experiment fails; no aspect of the work is delayed for lack of hardware, software, able hands or fertile ideas. It is a spectacle ol'unbelievable magnitude and dimension. No scientist ever had more. Yet, Mel's brain is literally swimming with confusion, his entire consciousness swirling helplessly in a flood of contradiction and disbelief. The problem is that all the data, all the results and all the conclusions are totally, irreconcilably and ridiculously false. There is absolutely no conceivable way that these substances. these reactions and these instruments could consistently and systematically yield the masses of completely wrong information that are being accumulated and processed. And there is positively no rational explanation for the fact that not one worker in the laboratory sees anything a t all wrong with the data, results or methods. Not a single worker, for example, will even consider running a reaction involving ether or benzene as a solvent in a glass container-everyone is convinced that ether or benzene will dissolve the glass in seconds. To a person, the laboratory staff is proud of their library of visible-region electronic spectra of the oxides, halides, nitrates, sulfates and phosphates of the representative metals that is used on a regular basis for identifying these suhstances. Negative activation energies, reactions proceeding spontaneously with a net decrease in entroov. ... and electrochemical cells -generating- more enerev . . on discharge than is required for charging are commonplace. Comoounds containing a single chiral carbon atom and no othw d~ssymmetryexist in four isonwric forms. Boron and lithium alkvlsare insensitirt: tooxygen and moisture. Hromin~ is a colorle& transparent solid; iceis purple; sodium chloride is a greenish-yellow gas! If the data and results are a cataclysm, group seminars are an even greater disaster-but only for Mel; everyone else thinks they should he pot on prime time national televisian. "Eat your hearts out Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford, Dallas
Cowboys, George Allen, Cincinnati Reds and Joe Garagiola, 'Monday Niaht in Me1 Modelmaker's Lab' is the greatest spectacle since the Crusades." Meanwhile, Me1 is struggling manically to remain rational, and to expose the absurdities in seminars having titles such as "Mass Spectrometric Determination of the Crystal Structure of the Hydrogen-Molecule-Ion," "Relaxation Times in the Pericyclic Reactions of Crown Ethers with Hindered Bicvclobutanes." or "Michaelis Constants for I n Viuo Reactions 02 Chymotrypin with Glycogen in Human Blood a t pH 8." Nothine he tries makes even the slightest impression. One night, in complete frustration, he shocks the entire seminar and sets even his most empathetic post-docs to shaking their heads and mumbling to themselves when he shouts. "But I tell vou there is iron in hemoglobin and calcium in milk, despite ;hat your nmr spectra show. Furthermore, phenylalanine does not undergo the Favorskii rearrangement." As he stumbles toward the door a t the end of the seminar, Me1 hears one student say to another, "The old man must have been really stoned tonight." Perhaps the most devastating of all his nightmares is that in which he is invited to nresent his latest work a t an international congress. Mel is given a prominent spot on the proeram. His lecture is scheduled in an auditorium that acwmkodates 2,000 persons. When he arrives to speak, the auditorium is nearly full, but each spectator, on entering the room, is given a bottle of whisky and an aspirator-operated bicycle horn. The noise from these horns is deafening. The first rows of the auditorium are reserve2 for ebitors of scientific journals, and all seats are occupied. Me1 recognizes many of these editors from earlier publishing ventures. At the opening of the session, the chairman introduces Professor Modelmaker with characteristic courtesy and fl~~urish, but he asks the listeners to express appreciation with clapping or foot stomping, mild dissatisfaction by drinking from their bottles of spirits, and extreme dissatisfaction by sounding their bicycle horns. As expected, this request is greeted with a reverberating blast from the horns. When Me1 rises to speak. all of the editors in the first rows raise their bottles to tdeir lips in a single concerted action and each takes an intimidatine swallow. This action is repeated as each new slide appearsUon the screen. ~ e a n w h i l e ;Mel's everv sentence is answered with a response of some kind. usually a mixture of all options. Each time he says something he feels is valuable and imoortant, the horns drown out the last words. Each time he says something about which he has misgivings, applause and stomping predominate. Long before the scheduled end of the talk, complete bedlam has set in. The audience is roaring drunk, sounding their horns, throwing empty whisky bottles a t the podium, fighting with one another in the aisles, clapping, stomping, even singing. Me1 always wakes up just as the rows of editors are filing out, two abreast and in perfect order, with each editor holding an empty, inverted whiskv bottle high above his head. As he drives to the campus on mornings following this dream. Me1 invariahlv s solemn oath never to pub.r e.~ e a t his lish again. Usually he finds a measure of.comfort and peace in the isolation, neglect and the more manageable maladies that plague Cool-Tech. Sometimes he even wonders what it might he like to be Dean. WTL
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Volume 54, Number 8, August 1977 1 461
