Chimia最新文献

Ensuring scientific integrity is of utmost importance in the research community, as it forms the foundation of reliable and credible scientific knowledge. Compliance with scientific integrity involves adhering to ethical principles, research standards, and legal regulations that promote transparency, honesty, and accountability. Fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism are common forms of research misconduct that undermine the credibility and trustworthiness of scientific findings. Institutions must establish clear policies and procedures to address and prevent such misconduct, including mechanisms for reporting, investigation, and appropriate disciplinary actions. This article examines the legal and operational aspects related to compliance with scientific integrity, highlighting key considerations and best practices in this critical domain.

This article introduces scientific and research integrity, with a particular emphasis on its implications for the active chemical community in Switzerland. It attempts to equate research integrity to good scientific practice and presents this as benefiting the researcher, the institution, and the discipline. The concepts are developed, and current and future challenges are identified.

Chemists are a vital part of the research and innovation (R&I) landscape. With their expertise, they shape progress and, thus, society. In order to live up to this responsibility, it is suggested to prepare young chemists for their future role as innovators with proper training. Here, it is important to go beyond the good scientific practice dimension of research integrity and add discourse performance and value assessments to the class outline of a "responsible chemistry" course. This becomes especially relevant in view of changing demands on chemical research and innovation as envisioned by the European Green Deal through its Horizon Europe funding scheme. This paper outlines the necessity of preparing chemists for the requirements of a green transition R&I policy and shows what that would mean for "ethics in chemistry" education.

Scientific integrity is the most important aspect that higher education institutions have to take care of, as it conveys credibility and acceptance of science to the public. Although science has a very powerful built-in self-regulation process for detecting and correcting scientific misconduct, there is a need for clear guidelines that have to be adapted on regular intervals to the rapidly changing world caused by scientific developments themselves. Outlined here are recent advances in how Switzerland increases awareness and transparency of scientific misconduct and how it handles cases of misconduct to improve the quality of science.

This essay critically analyzes the widespread phenomenon of claiming relevance when reporting original research. Specific examples from an area of method development in organofluorine chemistry demonstrate that the pursuit of worthiness of the corresponding research is mainly justified by putting forward a broad general industrial context that could potentially benefit in form of applications. However, it is deliberately ignored that such applications are in the vast majority of cases highly improbable or objectively unrealistic. Notwithstanding that scientists are nowadays often explicitly forced to orchestrate relevance, be it by researchfinancing institutions and/or journals' reviewers, it is argued that this is, from the point of view of research ethics at least, problematic.

In an increasingly globalized world, threatened by resource depletion, global warming and pollution, scientists in general and the chemists in particular are obliged to rapidly integrate ethical values into their work. This article shows that the codes of ethics are a valuable aid in this process. Two real life examples are highlighted. The first one concerns a misbehaviour situation from an academic, while the second one presents the entangled political, economic and legal implications brought about by the pollution by polychlorobiphenyls (PCBs) of the landfill La Pila, in the canton of Fribourg. Ultimately, the article underscores the collective responsibility of scientists, policy makers and economical players to uphold ethical excellence, for the benefit of the whole society and of everyone.

Drug discovery is a multi-disciplinary effort in which groups with expertise in a range of areas combine in a unified way to achieve a common goal: to deliver a clinical candidate to evaluate a hypothesis for improving human health. As a medicinal chemist this environment has provided multiple opportunities to be involved in cross-discipline interactions that have been both rewarding and led to outcomes that would not have been possible without an intimate interdisciplinary curiosity. Within this article I aim to share some of my experiences with the β2-adrenoceptor that have fostered such synergistic relationships with several disciplines, but in particular with in vitro pharmacologists looking at different ways to stimulate this G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR). This interest now spans over a quarter of a century and has been intertwined with the delivery of three clinical candidates.

(-)-Ambrox, the most prominent olfactive component of ambergris, is one of the most widely used biodegradable fragrance ingredients. It is traditionally produced from the diterpene sclareol chemically modified and cyclized into (-)-ambrox. The availability of the new feedstock (E)-β-farnesene produced by fermentation opened new routes to (E,E)-homofarnesol as a precursor to (-)-ambrox. Combining the chemical transformation of (E)-β-farnesene to (E,E)-homofarnesol and its enzymatic cyclization with an engineered Squalene Hopene Cyclase provided a new sustainable route for the production of (-)-ambrox at industrial scale. Compared to the traditional synthesis from sclareol, the new and innovative route from (E)-β-farnesene improves atom and step economy, reduces waste production, solvent and energy consumption.

Summarized here are some aspects of my research activities in Ciba-Geigy Central Research Laboratories (1985-1996), in Novartis and Syngenta Crop Protection Research (1997-2020). I have followed the chronological order of these research activities covering only published data.