By Bethany Halford
Like almost every other chemistry journalist and blogger at the ACS meeting, I spent Wednesday afternoon at the "Total Synthesis of Complex Molecules" symposium, or as I’d come to think of it: "The Hexacyclinol Showdown." You can read C&EN’s news story on hexacyclinol here.
The hexacyclinol debate may have been born in the literature, but it achieved soap opera status in the blogosphere. And when bloggers pointed out that the saga’s two main players—James J. La Clair of the Xenobe Research Institute and Scott Rychnovsky of the University of California, Irvine—both had papers in Wednesday’s session, they predicted La Clair would finally get some kind of comeuppance. UCI’s Iota Sigma Pi even started selling custom-made T-shirts for the event. There was no way I was going to miss it.
So I packed my bags to catch the red eye home and spent the afternoon scribbling about the mood in Moscone 132. Later, while Emma Marris was enjoying her butternut squash soup, and Mark Peplow, Dylan Stiles, Kyle Finchsigmate, and some anonymous informant put their thoughts on silicon, I was flying across the country, trying to type as much as I could before my two pathetic hours of battery life were up. (As an aside, I don’t know how you kids do it. I always thought I was a fast writer, but this blogging stuff takes me forever. It’s cutting into my beauty sleep.)
By the time La Clair takes the stage, a few hundred chemists have packed into the room, lining it from wall-to-wall. The last time I attended a Wednesday afternoon organic synthesis session at an ACS meeting was when I was a graduate student giving a talk on my research. I remember feeling lucky to have more than 30 people in the room. I only spot one hexacyclinol T-shirt in the crowd.
When La Clair speaks, he opts to forgo the mike. He’s not quiet, but everyone has to keep silent in order to hear him. He mentions hexacyclinol, but spends this talk on another topic. For the duration of the 20-minute talk, the room’s collective anticipation builds until finally the acknowledgement slide goes up. Here La Clair names and thanks the small army of coworkers he’s had over the years—amends for not naming his technicians in the hexacyclinol paper? He even gets a laugh by showing a picture of the T-shirt with a nod to "creativity in all forms."
But when La Clair asks for questions, no one steps forward. This is as quiet as an ACS meeting ever gets. The presiding chemist shirks his obligatory question. And just like that it is over. As the room empties, all I can think is "cowards."
I almost never ask questions at scientific meetings, but 24 hours later it occurs to me that I was the biggest coward in Moscone 132. Asking questions is my job. And if anyone should have prepared a question, it's the C&EN reporter with a Ph.D. in organic synthesis. The thing is, I just can't decide which question I should have asked La Clair:
Do you feel you've squandered the perfect opportunity to clear the air about your work with hexacyclinol?
Or:
What is it like to face a room full of people who will anonymously call you a fraud on a blog but can't summon the courage to even ask you a question in person?
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