Next Meeting:

Thursday, Sept 21, 1PM, WHITWORTH COLLEGE

Science Building (room 308)

Follow the entrance road to 1^st stop sign.

Science building is on the left.

Park wherever you can find a spot.

Note the change of the usual time and place!!!!

Title

Ethics in Science - The Myth of the Objective Scientist

Abstract

There are two ways of probing how individuals "learn" science: listening to students talk about the science they are learning and examining the process by which our scientific knowledge was first discovered. This talk focuses on some of the classic cases of activities that have been described by one or more authors as "unethical" to probe the notion of whether scientists can live up to the myth of the objective scientist.

George Bodner was born (3/8/46) and raised within a half-mile of Kodak Park in Rochester, New York. In spite of this, he entered the State University of New York at Buffalo as a history-philosophy major. At SUNY he found, much to his amazement, that chemistry was fun and he changed his major (under the mistaken impression that jobs were easier to find as a chemist).

After a mediocre career as an undergraduate (B.S., 1969) he entered graduate school at Indiana University (Ph.D., 1972), undoubtedly on the basis of letters of recommendation. He apparently did well enough in graduate school as a double major in inorganic and organic chemistry to gain an appointment as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Illinois (1972-75). His research interests at that time focused on the application of C-13 NMR spectroscopy to studies of the structure and bonding in organometallic complexes.

While at Illinois he made the mistake of professing total ignorance of biochemistry to one of his colleagues in that area. After a semester of intense study to relieve this obvious deficiency, he was asked to fill an appointment as a visiting professor in biochemistry for the summer of 1974. Having survived that, he was actually invited back for the summers of 1975 and 1976.

Two things became self-evident during his tenure at Illinois. He found that teaching was fun and he realized that his research could best be described as searching for definitive answers to questions that no one ever asked. When the time came to leave Illinois, he therefore took a job as two-thirds of the chemistry faculty at Stephens College - a women's college in Columbia, MO - where he lasted for two years (1975-1977), teaching general, organic, inorganic, and biochemistry.

In 1977, an opening in Chemical Education was advertised at Purdue University. He applied for the position and, much to their later chagrin, the faculty at that institution offered him the job. (They have since compounded their error by promoting him first to associate professor and then professor of chemistry and education.) He is the author of more than 80 papers and 30 books or laboratory manuals. He has been known to claim in public that his primary interest is in epistemology. His interests also include the development of materials to assist undergraduate instruction, research on how students learn, and the history and philosophy of science.

And now, for some other stuff.

Well brethren, it is time again for our quarterly sermon here on the Book of NORM. We have 21 months to get our act together before we host the 2002 Northwest Regional Meeting of the ACS. We have 21 months to prepare ourselves for, in essence, Judgement Day, yea verily. On that day, we are either going to be blessed as good and faithful servants of the NORM philosophy for putting on a wonderful, terrific, or at least adequate conference, or (some of us) will feel the eternal condemnation of all the chemists in four western states for completely fouling up their annual post graduation party.

I have learned that this (2002) will be our section's 50^th anniversary. Maybe we can somehow tie this into our conference. Have some birthday cake available, maybe. It certainly should be part of our logo. Oh yes, we need a logo. Does anybody know a (cheap) graphic artist?

There has been some progress on our path towards the salvation of our Section's good name, not to mention its pocketbook. Sister Joanne Smieja and Brother Jeff Rahn have agreed to be Program Co Chairs (no my son, there aint no such thing as a chairman any more), and I have been blessed with the job of General Chairpersibling.

The Program Chairs get to do the visible stuff - they find somebody who will find somebody to show up and give some papers, which after all, is the whole point of this entire gig. The double indirection was used purposely - the Program Chairs scour the earth looking to shanghai, excuse me, persuade other people to actually run the individual sessions, and along with that honor those people get to find people to give the papers.

The General Chair, at least in this section, does everything else. He makes sure that there is a place to meet, that the meeting gets advertized, keeps the budget, spends the money, arranges for hotel rooms, banquet rooms, and does whatever else is needed to get this thing off the ground. Well, that is what I have supposed to have been doing. So far, Dave Cleary has done all that, but he has officially turned over his clipboard to me, and I will be attempting to follow in his #11W's.

So, what have I been doing? So far, having fun. Dave has been doing all the real work up till now. He got us a block of hotel rooms (in what was the River Inn, now named something innocuous), and a conference center (the Schoenberg Center on the Gonzaga campus). The ACS National people recognize that putting on one of these conferences is a big deal, and is something that an individual person does not do real often. So they provide a lot of support. Starting with a conference held last April for all the General and Program Chairs of these conferences for the next couple of years, to give them some training in how to do all of this, and even give a list of what it is that needs to be done. Prior to the conference they promise various sorts of administrative support - like, they approved our contracts with the hotel and conference center, and prior to and during the conference, they will handle all the registration details, provide us with a web site, provide people and equipment at the conference for registration, and will even provide certain special interest seminars (job hunting and stuff like that). And you wondered where your hunnert bucks a year in dues was going...

Some of these conferences can be real productions. In our own area, the Portland meeting last year had 800 attendees and more importantly, a budget of about $40,000. That last part is probably one of the key points to remember. It can cost a bundle to put one of these things on. If you do it right, you will make it all back, and maybe a buck or two extra. If you screw up, then somebody has to pony up the difference, and it aint gonna be ACS National. They provide moral, physical, and educational help, but they are not dumb enough to open up a checkbook. That is for the local sections to do.

The good news, is, we have a few bucks left over from our last NORM conference a dozen years ago, and the NORM conference committee itself is prepared to give a small loan to the section putting on the conference. The better news is, we are planning for a Real Small, and I hope, Real Cheap conference. Portland had 800 people, Idaho Falls had 300, we are planning for maybe 200. I hope that with a smaller conference, and with our getting the use of the Schoenberg Center for free, that we will be able to have a correspondingly smaller budget, and that even if we give this party and nobody comes, the section's finances will not be completely tapped out.

So, what has to be done? First, of course, papers. That is the Program Chair's problem, and they probably will not have to deal with this till about this time next year (after the 2001 conference in Seattle). The good news is, these conferences are a good way for academic people and grad students to get their tickets punched, so there is some degree of interest out there in finding a venue for papers to be given. The bad news is, there is very little in the way of major research institutions locally. Idaho Falls, after all, has a National Engineering Lab with maybe 2000 people working there, and Portland has lots of big name schools and high tech companies. So the papers we are going to have to get will for the most part come from out of the area, unlike the situation at those other conferences.

This also means that most of the people attending this conference will have to come from out of the area. Our section has like 80 people in it, total. It is unlikely that all 80 of us will turn out for this thing. So, unlike the other recent conferences, we cannot depend on a majority of our attendance to be from the local area.

We are planning on a two day (Thursday/Friday) conference, with maybe some time on Saturday for special events for high school teachers if some interest in that can be generated. We expect to have a banquet Thursday night with a high profile (but not too expensive) speaker. And I am thinking of a Kaiser Mead plant tour on Saturday or Friday Afternoon. So far as I know, this is the largest chemical plant in this town.

In addition to formal papers, these things usually have something called Poster Sessions. This is a venue for people who do not want to give a complete 30 minute talk, but want to show their stuff anyway. Generally, this is done in conjunction with the Keynote Speaker's banquet, but it could be done as part of registration or as a nooner. However, we have to come up with the poster holders. I am told that they rent for $80/each. If we have any budding carpenters out there, maybe you could help by building some of these things.

I would also like to arrange some sort of local interest chemical seminar, something maybe with local environmental subjects as a focus. I hope with this to bring in some of our local people who would probably not be interested in yet another Diels-Alder reaction method, but something that affects our actual jobs. Most of the local industrial chemists that I know are in either analytical or environmental related jobs.

So, besides the program, what else is involved? Treasurer (that's me), fundraising (that aint me), exhibits (that's me again), publicity (ibid), and meeting arrangements (moi). The last two meetings got some significant bread from donations from local facilities. INEL gave a good chunk of cash to the Idaho Falls meeting, and local Portland companies spread some bread around there. I would not know any company here that would really be interested in coughing up a few C Notes just so they can have their logo on our front entrance. If anybody out there does know of such a benevolent, wonderful, supportive and farsighted company, let us know and we will try to send some money vampires their way. The chair of the Portland convention said that this part of his job was the absolute worst, having to crawl from company to company, cup in hand, panhandling his way into the various executive suites and practically doing a dance on the CEO's desk (I wuz gonna say table) to get a few bucks. Many years ago, when I worked at Kaiser's corporate headquarters, I took a course on business writing (shows, eh?) and one of the areas they taught us was how to turn down all the solicitation letters that Kaiser got every week. They at least tried to be nice about it, back then.

These conventions normally have an exhibit hall, where vendors of chemistry related items (VW&R, for instance) show up to show off what they got. And the convention gets some bucks out of this. However, it takes just about one full time person to get these people to show up, get them settled, keep them happy, and provide them with an audience, and we aint got that person, nor do we have the proper exhibit space. The vendors do NOT want to be relegated to some back building where nobody ever walks by, and our layout at Schoenberg is not real conducive to having vendors there. What the Training session suggested, and what I am planning on doing, is to provide space (tables) for vendors to display their stuff, without them having to be there hawking their wares. We will find a (cheap) student to man the space and make sure that everything does not walk away and keep track of people who showed some interest in the materials, and then ask for a significantly smaller donation from the vendor than is usually the case. I ran this by the vendors at the Idaho Falls convention, and heard generally positive comments. Of course, they probably aint gonna tell you to take your conference and shove it, so we will have to see how this really works out in real life.

The publicity guy (me again) has to generate the conference program book, send out calls for papers, send stuff to C&EN and the other sections in NORM announcing the conference, and in general do the sort of things that I like doing. I can hardly wait to see one of these newsletters in C&EN....

This stuff is starting to get organized now, and will go into real high gear about this time next year. From now till June of 2002, you can expect yet more sermons on this topic. If you would like to get these things to stop, you can 1) vote the newsletter guy out of office, or next best thing, 2) volunteer to help out with some of these duties so that the newsletter guy can quit nagging and can talk about more interesting topics.