Something that I think we should be glad of is that chemistry (as a science and as a profession) can accommodate a wide variety of work styles and personality types. I’m pretty sure that there are several lines of work to which this this does not apply so easily, although I’m willing to hear about counterexamples. But chemists most certainly do occur as several different subspecies.
I’ll leave out the managerial aspects of the job (budgets, staffing, performance reviews etc.), since those tend to converge no matter what field you start from. Sticking with the research end, one obvious demarcation line would be the theoretical and computation chemists who never really work at the lab bench itself. That’s no disgrace, of course, because they are generating ideas and predictions that will end up put to the test there. The stereotype, though, is that many theoretical chemists were actually a bit hazardous back in the days when they did have to do experimental work, even if that goes back to undergraduate labs. I have no empirical data on this issue, but I do not find this hypothesis completely unbelievable.
The stereotype is that many theoretical chemists were a bit hazardous when they did experimental work
Once inside the lab, a useful classification might be those who are more interested in the process versus those who are more interested in the outcome. I experienced this change myself (as have many others) when I took a job in industry doing early-stage drug discovery. Total synthesis work in academia was (in theory) all about making the final product, but it was at least as much about making that product in the most elegant, unexpected, and novel way possible. It’s likely that a synthesis of Whatsamycin could be accomplished by brute-forcing one’s way through 50–60 steps of sure-that-should-probably-work reactions, but to what end? No, you were far better off crossing the finish line instead in fewer steps than anyone would have thought possible.
But in industrial early-stage drug discovery, no one cares about that sort of elegance as much. An elegant preparation is one that puts a sample into a vial by midweek so it can catch the next run of the primary assay, and if there’s enough compound in that vial, the yield is just fine. Personally, I found this a relief and never looked back. But there’s another area of industrial chemistry where reproducibility, shaving off synthetic steps, and painstaking attention to detail is valuable indeed, and that’s process work. For the most part, discovery chemists and process chemists would each be rather unhappy (and likely rather unproductive) if they were forced to switch duties.
I am certainly capable of setting up persnickety reactions […] but an endless series of these would have worn me down
One interpretation of this, although not the most charitable one, is that the ‘just make the stuff’ people are getting the most advantage they can out of what is probably fundamentally rather loose (or even sloppy) lab technique. I plead guilty to this. I am certainly capable of setting up persnickety reactions with precise orders of addition and controlled temperature and atmosphere, because there are some reactions that simply will never work unless you give them such royal treatment. But an endless series of these would have worn me down. I’ve always been more comfortable with the idea of throwing in an extra equivalent (or two), or turning up the heat some more if a reaction looks like it needs encouragement after a day or two. This means, by the way, that I would be terrible at cell culture or molecular biology, as my wife has taken many opportunities to tell me over the years
But chemistry is large, and contains multitudes. The dump-in-some-more-reagent crowd co-exists with the inorganic and organometallic specialists who live lives of Schlenk lines and rigorously maintained gloveboxes, who in turn find room for the analytical chemistry specialists who might spend as much time troubleshooting their equipment as they do generating results with it. There’s room for all of us, and that’s a good thing, because there’s a need for all of us too!
