Various musings

The lab I’m in currently is very interdisciplinary. The department is “biomolecular chemistry”, and the PI is originally a chemist by training, but now works with polyketide biosynthesis. His group has biologists, chemists, and biochemists working together. It’s great because there are people with all sorts of specialties, and the biologists have some proficiency in reading NMR spectra, the chemists might do a bit of molecular biology, and everyone works together. When you read his papers, you can tell that he thinks like an organic chemist, and even though he has projects that use molecular biology techniques, the goal of the lab is to understand the chemistry behind biosynthesis.

I’m happy because the project I’ve been working on uses everything I’m interested in: microbiology, molecular biology, synthetic chemistry, and spectroscopy. I’ve done a lot of bacterial culture, a conjugation, a proplast preparation, prepared spore suspensions, extractions, some DNA extraction and a restriction digest, looked at LC-MS spectra, and looked at NMR spectra. I get to hear talks about all these different projects—some chemistry, some biology, some biochemistry. It’s really stimulating because it’s all my interests coming together in one institute.

But what I’ve noticed—even here—is that I get a lot of questions. “Are you a biochemist or a chemist?” Both, I answer—because I really do feel like I’m a little bit of both at the moment. And while there are a couple people that truly are both—one Japanese post-doc for example--most people are one thing or another by training. As I am only an undergrad now, I don’t have expertise-level knowledge in any discipline yet. I’m proficient with basic biology lab techniques and basic (organic) chemistry lab techniques. I know how to read NMR spectra, but I am nowhere near an expert. With an experimental section and someone to show me where things are and how they are done in this lab, I can set up a synthesis and work it up, set up a bacterial culture, or do a DNA extraction. One of my professors described me as “riding the line between biochemistry and organic chemistry” and I guess he’s right.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past couple years doing organic synthesis, and I consider myself to be proficient in synthetic chemistry (for an undergrad). Yet my degree is in “biochemistry and molecular biology”. I feel like I always have to qualify myself as a chemist by appealing to my prior lab experience and coursework. Yet the biochemists are surprised by how much chemistry I know, and how I talk to chemists. But I’m not just a chemist. I know how to read biology papers. I know how to design primers. I know my amino acids and my DNA binding motifs. I was interested in biology first.

I feel like I’m well on my way to becoming one of those “jack of all trades, master of none” scientists that people seem to disparage so. I read a lot about this on the internet, how these new-fangled chemical biology PhD programs are producing scientists that are neither fish-nor-fowl and know a little bit about everything, but not enough about anything. I hear the “proper” way to go about an interdisciplinary career is to do a classical discipline and diversity from there (i.e. get a PhD in straight up total synthesis, then post-doc in chemical biology/biosynthesis/med chem.) I don’t know why this is seen to be the case. As an undergrad—whether you are a biology major or a chemistry major, you need to learn things that are entirely unrelated to what you will later study. Physical chemistry is entirely different in mindset than organic chemistry; it’s a different language all together. Likewise, a lot of biology programs (such as Reed’s) require you to take evoluntionary biology. While I’m not opposed to this—it’s necessary background—being an undergrad requires you to be very flexible and mutable. You need to learn a lot things that are very different from one another. Why not take advantage of this time—when I’m young and grabbing information, before my mind is set—to really learn about all these things that I’m interested in?

Coming from Reed, which is a very small school, I think so far I have had a rather unconventional biochemistry training. I had the time to take elective chemistry courses, but also there is no distinction between physical chemistry for biochemists and physical chemistry for chemists. My biology classes, likewise, were also biology classes for biologists. The training I have received so far was not so much a biochemistry education (in the classical sense) as both a biology and chemistry education. In fact, it’s probably more chemical than most biochemistry educations, largely due to my interests in chemistry.

The other thing that constantly strikes me as odd is that there seems to be this assumption among biologists and chemists that you can teach a chemist biology, but you can’t teach a biologist chemistry. I think this is absurd, and it’s a notion propagated by lazy biologists and arrogant chemists. I mean, obviously you’re not going to have a PhD-level proficiency in either subject, but I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically more difficult about (especially organic) chemistry than there is about molecular biology. Take two examples: synthetic organic chemistry and cellular biology. Both are incredibly complex, interrelated subjects that require a huge amount of background knowledge. Neither are particularly mathematical, and both are about arranging patterns in your head more than they are about memorization. I really don’t see why a cell biologist couldn’t sit down with an organic chemistry textbook or sci-finder and learn a bit about organic synthesis and more than a synthetic chemist couldn’t sit with a textbook and pub-med and learn about cell biology. It strikes me that there’s a lot of “chemistry-a-phobia” in biologists, and a lot of “my subject is intrinsically harder that your subject” in chemistry that is all a bunch of nonsense.