Ethan Burghardt

A palladium artist is painting a picture. His models are a molecule of bromobenzene and phenyltributyltin. It is a still life painting.

Stille Life #chemsky #chemistry #realtimechem

I’ve spent a good chunk of my career relying on American science and engineering to keep me alive. Yesterday, RFK Jr. testified at the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. It was sad to see him try to destroy the life’s work of so many American scientists. He shouldn’t be in this job.

A picture worth a thousand words. I’m holding the manuscript (in prep) for my paper detailing the optimization of a natural product for treating FLT3-ITD AML. The bag below it holds my stem cells, collected for transplant into a non-related leukemia patient. Truly a full circle moment #chemsky

Did You Work on a Terminated NIH Grant? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You. The National Institutes of Health is canceling grants that are seen as conflicting with the Trump administration’s priorities. We want to hear from researchers who have been affected.

Did You Work on a Terminated NIH Grant? ProPublica Wants to Hear From You. www.propublica.org/getinvolved/...

Royal Society prize winner returns award in protest over Elon Musk [FREE TO READ] Andrea Sella is latest scientist to express dismay over UK science academy’s refusal to criticise tech billionaire

@sellathechemist.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy, a @ucl.ac.uk chemistry professor, has returned his 2014 Michael Faraday Prize to protest the @royalsociety.org's failure to take more decisive (or any) action against Elon Musk for his attack on science. 👏

NIH staff break ranks in open letter to Director Jay Bhattacharya Bethesda Declaration urges reversal of recent policies, including funding cuts

"Generally, I don’t like to sign things, but ... the future of our research enterprise .... is at stake here." NIH staff spoke frankly to @laureloldach.bsky.social at @cenmag.bsky.social about their decision to sign an open letter asking for a reversal of funding cuts. cen.acs.org/policy/resea...

Inhibited bond rotation gets into atropisomers and the naming conventions surrounding their stereochemistry is far less concise than cis/trans

You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President For generations, U.S. presidents have gone to great lengths to avoid potential conflicts of interest. When I was elected, I followed suit by placing my small business in a blind trust to assure our citizens that I would always put the country’s interests ahead of my own. It’s a vital presidential tr

Jimmy Carter for The Onion: You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President. “Maybe I’m just a sucker. Apparently, all I needed to do was hand off control of the farm to my family.” [theonion.com]

Lysenkoism 2.0 and the dismantling of the NIH Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "make America healthy again" is basically Lysenko 2.0. It's come to the NIH and is destroying the crown jewel of US biomedical research with ideology and cronyism.

Via @gorskon.bsky.social : “Lysenkoism 2.0. It’s all there: ideology trumping science, scientists not buying into the new scientific dogma losing favor, being fired, or even otherwise punished, while scientists who do are rewarded, sometimes richly.”

sciencebasedmedicine.org/lysenkoism-2...

Friends who study computer aided synth — can you please make a program that predicts ideal conditions for RCM processes based on substrate strain and olefin reactivity? The expanse of conditions are incredibly variable and successful ones are often idiosyncratic. Would be worth its weight in gold!

I’ll raise the alarm bells when ambeed, oakwood, strem, etc are forced to follow suit. I’m shocked that folks are buying exclusively sigma reagents in the first place

My institution (I’m a GS, not faculty) had the opposite experience. Normal number of offers extended but much higher matriculation than expected. Sounds like we are getting a handful of folks whose offers were rescinded elsewhere. We’ll have ‘25 > ‘24 >> ‘26

RFK Jr: "Everyone should do their own research."

NIH: "No, not you, scientists."

PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081

When people ask me about chemistry, especially younger people wanting to do synthetic chemistry, I emphasise the practical elements. Not to discourage anyone, far from it, but because it is one of the wonderful things about chemistry: you get to be "good with your brain" and "good with your hands".

reminds me of this A+ tweet, which is 100% true

The Division of Organic Chemistry (DOC) congratulates the sixteen 2025 DOC Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) awardees and gratefully acknowledges the generous sponsors.

zurl.co/x1kZh

NSF halves graduate fellowship awards Students from all fields lose out on tens of millions of dollars in career-boosting funds this year

Funding via the NSF GRFP grants dropped 56% for chemists this year, but all chemistry subfields were hit about the same. More on the gutting of the GRFP from @cenmag.bsky.social. Words by @bribarbu.bsky.social, data by me cen.acs.org/policy/resea...

Lactate legs: Fans drew the structure of lactic acid on the road during the 2024 Il Lombardia cycle race. Tadej Pogačar, the cyclist pictured, rapidly overcomes the adverse effects of glycolysis.

Lactate legs: Fans drew the structure of lactic acid on the road during the 2024 Il Lombardia cycle race. Tadej Pogačar, the cyclist pictured, rapidly overcomes the adverse effects of glycolysis. cen.acs.org/biological-c...

The fluoride debate The nuance you may be looking for

With RFK Jr. talking about de-flouridating the water it looks like it's time to resurface this post from @kkjetelina.bsky.social yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/the-fluori...

What a lovely day to be a Wisconsinite. Voting for #susancrawford was a privilege and a pleasure

Hey Elon!!!

Wisconsin is not for sale, bitch!!!

Vote for Judge Susan Crawford tomorrow.

A brain drain would impoverish the United States and diminish world science Europe is advertising itself as a destination for embattled US scientists. It seems many are considering leaving.

Europe is advertising itself as a destination for embattled US scientists

https://go.nature.com/4cdKKcx

Notre Dame graduate students engage lawmakers at 6th Annual Indiana Science Communication Day Graduate students from the University of Notre Dame joined peers from across Indiana at the Statehouse for the 2025 Indiana Science Communication Day, a...

Check out this article written about our recent event at the Indiana Statehouse! publicaffairs.nd.edu/news/notre-d...

Skeletal editing targets double bonds Two new techniques selectively install nitrogen atoms into complex molecules

Researchers have independently developed ways to cleave double bonds and install nitrogen atoms in a range of simple substrates and complex bioactive molecules.

Discussion from @dereklowe.bsky.social of the recent paper in Nature Chemistry from Liu, Polikanov, Myers et al. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Exploiting the inherent promiscuity of the acyl transferase of the stambomycin polyketide synthase for the mutasynthesis of analogues The polyketide specialized metabolites of bacteria are attractive targets for generating analogues, with the goal of improving their pharmaceutical properties. Here, we aimed to produce C-26 derivatives of the giant anti-cancer stambomycin macrolides using a mutasynthesis approach, as this position has been shown p

NEW in Chemical Science!

"Exploiting the inherent promiscuity of the acyl transferase of the stambomycin polyketide synthase for the mutasynthesis of analogues" by Kira Weissman and Bertrand Aigle et al.

Read it here: pubs.rsc.org/doi/D4S...

#ChemSky

3rd row from bottom, 3rd column from right happens to be my badass partner! Happy international women’s day, Zoë!

South Bend shows up! #StandUpForScience

Disappointing news. I was there for grad recruiting a few years ago and they had a lot of good folks there