The Chair’s Corner

Welcome to September 2021! We are excited this month to be holding another exciting chemistry presentation. We, of course, had hoped this meeting would have been live, but ultimately decided that it was best to hold it via zoom. On Friday, September 24th, at 6:30 PM, Dr. Eric Simanek the Robert A. Welch Professor of Chemistry and the Chair of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Texas Christian University will present a talk titled, “The Science and History of Whiskey." Please join via zoom at: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7176687551 This summer has been busy with the selection of the winners for both the Wilfred T. Doherty and Werner Schulz Awards for 2021. Congratulations to Dr. Mihaela C. Stefan, Eugene McDermott Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Associate Dean for Graduate Education, School of Natural Science & Mathematics, University of Texas at Dallas for being the 2021 Wilfred T. Doherty award winner. Congratulations to Dr. Heather Thompson Science Educator at Mansfield ISD for being the 2021 Werner Schulz Award winner. Additional information is in this Retort about the award winners. Our sincere thank you to the awards selection committee.

Once again, the executive committee continues to be very excited about 2021 and the local section's future. If there is anything that I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to reach out at any time (trey.putnam@ttuhsc.edu). Best, Trey Putnam 2021 Chair

DFW Local Section of the ACS

And Another Thing... What???

By Denise L. Merkle, PhD

In September of 2012, after many years of publication under the consistent leadership of Dr.E. Thomas Strom, the Southwest Retort morphed from hardcopy to electronic format and the editorship of Connie M. Hendrickson, PhD. 'And Another Thing...' (AAT) debuted in that first eedition, and has appeared in nearly every e -dition since. In deciding how to kick off this 10th year of the Southwest e-Retort, I re-read some of the early AAT columns. How wild to see how lighthearted were the topics! How well I was able to amuse myself back in the day. To where did that happiness in prose flee? Some of the Joy of Random Musings was pounded down by the random-seeming but deadly SARSCoV-2, that rolled over us like a giant spiked mace unleashed by a particularly virulent liege lord. Much more is now known about the causative agents and their effects than was available less than two years ago, but there is so much more to discover. Thud. Some joy of verbiage was slurped away with the energy required to refrain from losing one's eyeballs while rolling them in the face of anti-science illogic. How many times must chemists hear, 'I saw a video on social media and I like what the guy said, so I'll follow his masking suggestions', before their eyes roll out of their skulls, or so far back into their orbits that they're lost forever? We need a points system: 10 points for every incidence of squelched desire to smack someone who's still sharing information released even before SARS-CoV-2 was identified. 5 points for each time scientists refrain from howling like coyotes in pain at family gatherings, when a relative with no science training whatsoever explains how vaccines do not work and are actually spreading illness. 2 points for every snort-turned-sneeze when a physician who's not an epidemiologist or virologist knocks the World Health Organization's data, in favor of some anecdotal mishmash comprised of allergies and puzzling statistical mysticism. And of course, a whopping 20 points could be awarded for any scientist who's been called nasty names for pointing out that science isn't absolute, but a result of iterating to gain knowledge in the most unbiased way possible. If someone with better people skills than I have can persuade the airlines to count Scientist Torment Points as air miles, I'll buy you a drink as we sit in First Class and fly somewhere out of the reach of the Deep State Conspiracy, Bioweapon-wielding, It'sA-Hoax-And-There-Are-Medications-ToTreat-It Clan. Do we know what is going to happen with SARS-CoV-2 and its variaints? No, no we don't. Do we want to be dinosaurs, gazing at a meteor and thinking, 'Check out that hoax?' No, we don't want that, either. The` good thing is, at some point, we're at lot more likely to avoid coronavirus than we are to outrun a meteor. There may be some joy in that.