Our brutal science system almost cost us a pioneer of mRNA vaccines

> Some people make fantastic researchers and are terrible at selling themselves and their work. It seems like a bad deal for everyone if these people are blocked from making contributions to science.

Sure...lots of people make fantastic technical workers, and are terrible at selling themselves and their work. I'm not denying their existence. I'm saying that academia is an organization made up of humans, and as such, has the same bias toward self-promotion and social skills as any other field. At the end of the day, people make the decision of who get to be professors, get grants, and so on. Success in an academic discipline, for most people, is about being known, liked and respected amongst the small circle of colleagues who dominate that discipline.

The mythology I am combatting here is that academia was ever this magical unicorn land where introverts and brilliant weirdos can prosper. It happens more often than some fields, I guess, but mostly the same social dynamics apply. It's kind of the same wishful thinking you see from brilliant engineers who can't work on a team -- they invariably stop progressing, and wonder why they don't get promoted up the technical ladder. They can still contribute in the area of their greatest skill, but they're limited in the long run by their social abilities.

It's really common to see brilliant people with no interpersonal skills wash out in grad school. It's almost a cliché. The ones who do make it, rarely advance to a professorship -- they'll get stuck at postdoc or staff scientist or something like that, because some professor is more than willing to keep them around, hidden in the lab, for their exceptional technical skill.

The Reagan Recession was brutal.

> Hazardous material does not become hazardous waste if you can legitimately sell/ship it off the site as a worthwhile product instead. Otherwise if you need to truly discard excess (even prime chemical assets then become a liability) you need to not only usually pay, but bump your paperwork and liability up from merely dangerous goods to full waste documentation requirements.

This is what I meant. For a small organization I would expect a lot of small volume experimental products that are not exactly known in composition combined with perhaps some rinse acetone or other solvents.

Have you encountered an example where this works? I've done consulting for startups in exchange for a fume hood before, so I guess it's not that out there. It's much harder to imagine doing this for a big hazardous waste site, but maybe?

Thanks for the idea, I definitely won't be trying to do that but maybe there could be a symbiotic thing going on there. Probably a lot easier to do that with a university somehow? A national lab will be too stuck up to accept hazardous waste or advice, but maybe a university would hire you part time to work for them while letting you use the space for your own project.

Yup, I'm moving toward "retiring" from my employer and doing without a lab for a bit as I decide to get back into more action than the employer can muster.

I'll be able to maintain a good relationship with them and if I do go back into private practice nearby they will be able to handle the few liters a month I would expect to generate single-handedly.

Which is a drop in the bucket of their few drums, which are a drop in the bucket of the EPA waste hauler's truckloads.

Unknowns-R-Us.

OTOH the only time I went without a lab I built, was 2013 and I was tempted to try and operate in some vacant small-university space in my late father's retirement location, but I did not have the resources to _branch out_ while I still had my main lab in mothballs.

Things were also very uncertain plus one of the surplus spaces had already been unfavorably occupied by a not-very-well liked commercial EPA testing lab that I think failed just a year or two earlier and left everyone involved with a bad impression.

Now after recovering a bit from natural disaster, I'm going to check out UH where they took over the old Schlumberger facility as part of their energy effort a number of years ago. It still seems not fully occupied but I'll find out for sure eventually. Before the internet I sure spent a lot of time in the UH library.

When it comes to an actual university operation though, about half the time when I check out a chem department's equipment it looks like they sure could use some help from someone with more than just a few years on the gear, and often so underequipped I could bring in & restore the surplus electonics to double their capabilities within a year not much differently than at a commercial lab. Also without a PhD there are actually some long-term employment or career positions already funded which could be conformed creatively to this effort. If I did this I would want to hit successive universities since I am very fast, but I am mainly retiring from employment more so than my present employer's facility which I expect to routinely continue to visit as long as I am in their areas, to our mutual advantage.

I started out as a teenage businessman anyway so I'm not worried about going forward with only a briefcase again.

Hilversum