For more than 25 years now the chemical industry has been surrounded by grassroots activism: communities near chemical plants and toxic-waste dumps have been organizing to get waste sites cleaned up, reduce pollution, phase out the most dangerous chemicals from operating chemical facilities, and get moved away from the worst hazards. Other communities have tried to prevent chemical manufacturers from moving in nearby.

Much of this mobilization occurs under the auspices of the environmental justice (EJ) movement. The movement was galvanized in the early 1980s by the observation that toxic chemicals and other environmental hazards are concentrated in communities of color.  EJ activists, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement, began to argue that social equality demanded an end to this “environmental racism.”

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Across the country thousands of students recently began their second semester of organic chemistry. For some the course is part of the chemistry major; for others it is a medical school prerequisite course. Most have heard of organic chemistry and shudder at the phrase, their minds filled with horror stories from friends or even their family physician. Personally, I was excited to meet the challenge and viewed the course material as the means to solve a large puzzle.

A September 2008 Wall Street Journal article asked why premed students needed to bother with the study of organic chemistry. A particularly onerous stepping-stone on the long course to an M.D., organic chemistry as commonly structured seems to offer little that a physician would need. However, the problem-solving tools learned in the course are more valuable to most than the actual chemistry, and the question should be not whether organic chemistry should be taught but how it should be taught.

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Last week the European Union’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs put forth a proposal to ban energy-inefficient televisions by 2013. This news could be bad for plasma-TV producers because plasma TVs, on average, consume almost 50% to 60% more electricity than their LCD counterparts. Under the new legislation all but a few plasma TVs currently on the market would be banned within the EU.

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Jennifer Dionisio recently blogged about the Personal Genome Project and its initial efforts to build a genomic database. The Bio Banking 2009 Pharma Conference, which was held 13 and 14 January at CHF’s E.I. DuPont Conference Center, included a description of one group’s practical plan to help in the effort. The second day’s keynote presentation was given by Joe Mintzer, the executive vice president and COO of the Coriell Institute for Medical Research. Founded in 1953, the nonprofit Coriell Institute is internationally known for biomedical research. Its founder, Lewis Coriell, played a major role in bringing the Salk polio vaccine to the public and developed innovative cell-culture technology. Along the way, Coriell has become the world’s largest biobanking facility, distributing more than 160,000 cell lines and 50,000 DNA samples a year to researchers throughout the world.

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What to do when you’ve taken every personality test on the Internet, studied the traits of your horoscope sign religiously, and exhausted your inner depths in psychotherapy? Some are looking to personal genomics as their next means for self-exploration. In the New York Times article “My Genome, My Self,” psychologist Steven Pinker thoughtfully examines this new frontier in introspection.

As one of the original 10 participants in the Personal Genome Project, founded by geneticist George Church, Pinker has been afforded a peek at part of his own genome, weighing some preliminary results against physical observations. You have the same opportunity, as volunteers are currently being screened to expand the Personal Genome Project’s database from 10 people to 100,000. But before you apply, there’s one catch: whatever Church’s team uncovers goes straight into an open-access database for researchers to plumb (as do corresponding tissue samples).

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Ellen Kullman became the CEO of DuPont on 1 January, making her the first female CEO of a major chemical company. Kullman, who was the first female executive at DuPont,  was named a rising star by Fortune in 2006 and has been with the company for 20 years. She can now count herself as one of only six female CEOs of the Fortune 100 companies. While her appointment should be lauded as a step forward for women in science, it also provides an opportunity to take a broader look at women in the sciences, both in industry and academia.

According to an August C&E News article, the 42 publicly traded chemical companies have 405 directors—12.1% of whom are women. Additionally, only 8.1% of people holding an executive title are women. The Catalyst, an organization devoted to women in business, argues that the position of women in corporate America is stagnant. In 2003 C&E News reported similar data regarding director positions at public chemical companies—only 12.8% were female. Stagnant, indeed.

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