Roe as an Extension to the Right of Personal Privacy

(Note: The following is more of musings more so than anything definitive. I am certain I overlooked details, so please feel free to criticize my work.)
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Thirty-five years ago marks the day the U.S. Supreme Court passed judgement on Roe v Wade. For the past 35 years, American women have utilized their right to privacy and have participated in legalized abortions. For the past 35 years, the issue of abortion and the government have polarized the population into two distinctive camps named by their members: pro-lifers and pro-choicers.

But what does this argument boil down to? Arguments about the beginning of life and the sanctity of life are pitted against arguments concerning individual privacy, freedom of thought, and sexual autonomy. Arguments of the health and welfare of the mother are issued by both sides. The situation becomes overburdening when sectarian motivations are entangled with secular mechanics. How does one make sense of all these arguments, their sources and motivations, and connect them into a logically coherent statement?

For Roe, the case ultimately pitted the interest of privacy granted by the combination of penumbra of the fourth, the complete ninth, and the complete fourteenth amendments versus the interests of the state. Certainly the state has a vested interest in the health of the mother and safeguarding potential life. Consequently, the individual certainly has the right from government interference and intrusion on private effects. A balanced medium must be sought between both parties of vested interests.

The Right to Privacy and Roe
An underlying philosophy of any constitution, whether it be state or federal, is summarized by a quote of Thomas Jefferson in an address concerning the reformation of the Virginian Constitution:

Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the Covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment... laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind... as that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, institutions must advance also, to keep pace with the times.... We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain forever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

Certainly, the Constitution is not a stagnant document but meant to be flexible with the ever changing power of social movements. This includes incorporating into the intentions of the present Bill of Rights any technology and knowledge that expands the venues address by the amendments and the text. It is with this spirit Roe and subsequent laws concerning abortion ought to be analyzed.

The Fourth Amendment reads: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be iolated..." (emphasis mine). Though the Fourth is addressing precisely warrants of arrest, it was written with the common spirit of privacy from government intrusion into personal affairs. The technology of 1791, the year of ratification, did not include the luxuries of the 19th century telephone or the 20th century facsimile or the 21st century email. In order to initiate contact with an individual, you were forced to either be present or write a postal letter (concepts that escape my generation, I'm sure!).

Reading the Fourth in combination with the First ("Congress shall make no law...abridging..the right of the people peaceably to assemble") gives rise to the clear indication that the federal government may not, without due process, prevent a meeting between two citizens. But what of the mail system? The Supreme Court, with statement by Justice Fields, found in Ex parte Jackson (1878):

In their [Congress] enforcement, a distinction is to be made between different kinds of mail matter -- between what is intended to be kept free from inspection, such as letters, and sealed packages subject to letter postage, and what is open to inspection, such as newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and other printed matter purposely left in a condition to be examined. Letters and sealed packages of this kind in the mail are as fully guarded from examination and inspection, except as to their outward form and weight, as if they were retained by the parties forwarding them in their own domiciles. The constitutional guaranty of the right of the people to be secure in their papers against unreasonable searches and seizures extends to their papers, thus closed against inspection, wherever they may be. Whilst in the mail, they can only be opened and examined under like warrant, issued upon similar oath or affirmation, particularly describing the thing to be seized, as is required when papers are subjected to search in one's own household. No law of Congress can place in the hands of officials connected with the postal service any authority to invade the secrecy of letters and such sealed packages in the mail; and all regulations adopted as to mail matter of this kind must be in subordination to the great principle embodied in the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.

With the idea of letters being an aspect of a persons papers and requiring a warrant for seizure, the spirit of privacy from the federal government continued. Though such privacy became contracted in initial proceedings surrounded around wiretapping the telephone, Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote an excellent dissent in Olmstead v. United States (1928):

Whenever a telephone line is tapped, the privacy of the persons at both ends of the line is invaded, and all conversations between them on any subject, and although proper, confidential, and privileged, may be overheard...

The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings, and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure, and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone — the most comprehensive of rights and the one most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

In summary, Justice Brandeis held that a literal reading of the Fourth detracts from the spirit of the motivations behind it. That is, an utter disgust of government intrusion without a justifiable cause. This spirit was born from the history of colonialism and the abuse of the Crown, including the writs of assistance. Simply because the manner in which such intrusion can occur does not exclude the concept of right to privacy engendered in the Fourth and subsequent elucidation from the Ninth ("The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.").

The precedent set by Olmstead centered around the location of the wiretapping. However, in the 1967, this precedent would be overturned in Katz v. United States, where Justice Stewart wrote: "The Fourth Amendment protects people, not places".

Certainly it can be charged that the right to privacy is not explicitly written in the Constitution. However, neither is the right to educate your child in either public, private, or parochial school nor is the right to study any foreign language or philosophical position of ones choosing. The entire idea of freedom of conscience is not explicitly written into the Constitution, yet it surfaces at the conjunction of the First and Ninth amendments. The federal government does not have the ability to censor or otherwise hinder the dissemination of information. Congress may no more ban a book than ban a complete school of thought. Yet this concept of freedom of thought or freedom of conscience is no more present in the literal texts than this right to privacy of which this essay is centered upon. This is why it is imperative to utilize fully the intentions of Madison's wording in the Ninth Amendment. Also, consider the text of the Tenth: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people" (emphasis mine).

Before Roe, another case came before the Supreme Court which expanded the concept of the right of privacy into distinctive zones. In Griswold v. Connecticut, Justice Douglas wrote: "Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance...Various guarantees create zones of privacy." The case was concerning the criminalization of the usage and distribution of contraceptives. Justice Douglas argued that there is a both a right to privacy in the marital relationship and a right in assemblage with the medical practitioner or contraceptive distributor. The wording of the antiquated law gave rise to a possible scenario of the state issuing a warrant to search every marital bed for evidence of contraceptive usage. This situation grated with the current rend of the right to privacy granted by the penumbra of the Bill of Rights.

All this led, in part, to the decision in Roe. Justice Blackmun wrote the following concerning the general right to privacy in relation to terminating pregnancy (all emphasis mine):

This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. The detriment that the State would impose upon the pregnant woman by denying this choice altogether is apparent. Specific and direct harm medically diagnosable even in early pregnancy may be involved. Maternity, or additional offspring, may force upon the woman a distressful life and future. Psychological harm may be imminent. Mental and physical health may be taxed by child care. There is also the distress, for all concerned, associated with the unwanted child, and there is the problem of bringing a child into a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it. In other cases, as in this one, the additional difficulties and continuing stigma of unwed motherhood may be involved. All these are factors the woman and her responsible physician necessarily will consider in consultation.

With the idea that State intrusion does significant harm to the rights of the mother to her privacy, the majority found the criminalization of abortion unconstitutional. It is this right to privacy that transpires into the sexual autonomy desired by the women right activists that ought to be celebrated and championed. It is this fundamental right that ought to be protected with voice and fervor.

On this day, privacy won, and it will only be through the efforts of those who care for it to continue for years to come.

Random Musings

The spring semester is in full swing now at LSU. Senior labs and thesis research will keep me (un)happily busy for the greater part of the semester. And this semester will probably be the only one I'll consider blogging on the inferior* parts of chemistry, such as synthesis and analysis.

But I suppose first I must actually begin posting topics from physical chemistry...

In other news, it is about time for graduate schools to begin sending out letters of acceptance and rejection. I wonder where academia will lead me?

Happy Yule

Season's greetings to you and your family.

I am simply posting an interesting find my father told me about. It appears there is a YouTube for scientists. It is an effort by the NSF, PLoS, and SDSC called SciVee.tv. Check it out; I'm particularly fond of the magic cup demo and the mu-meson experiment on time dilation.

Quantum Gradnamics

Jorge Cham has a very good wit to him. I have enjoyed reading Piled Higher & Deeper comics since my freshmen year. His Quantum Gradnamics series is perhaps one of the funniest series he has yet, in my opinion.

Egg on Netflix's face?

The arXives blog has an interesting post. It seems a group of bored computer scientists have managed to de-anonymize the data set of Netflixes $1 million contest.

I wonder if those bored computer scientists will eventually win the prize. It does put a whole new meaning to the phrase trend setting.

Davies Writes Ridiculous NYT Op-Ed

Society seems to move faster than my ability to comprehend science. As I struggle to understand both the history behind and the solutions to the N-representability problem (eg. utilizing an electron pair representation of the electronic energies to solve many-electron problems) as coined by Professor John Coleman, society seems more than able to confound itself in basic principles. This is no different with Paul Davies, who as a notable popularizer of physics and a college professor, ought to know better than to cultivate confusion in the general populace over what physics says, physics implies, and what physics does not do for either at the moment.

All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

Complete nonsense. When a physicist smacks a molecule with a femtosecond pulse, s/he certainly expects a certain result based on hypotheses rooted in conjecture formulated from prior observations. But our expectancies are not allows the result. Consider the Franck-Condon principle. The FCP is an elegant mathematical model of expected vibronic transitions, yet in photoinonic studies the FCP breaks down at energies in large excess of the energy of a chemical bond. This is due to the effects of Cooper minima on molecular vibrations (an effect of the change in sign of the dipole matrix element versus photon energy). The breakdown of FCP required experimental evidence to indicate the presence in photoionic spectroscopy, and the explanation later came from the mathematical model and how this model does not interfere with the previously established model.

Though physics is not a reduced form of phenomenology, it ultimately requires some phenomena to map mathematically. Certainly a desire of several mathematical physicists is to be able to start from various basic mathematical axioms and derive the entire universe. However, their derivations ignore the history of science which built such principles on established knowledge rather than prior dispositions.

A classic relic from the history of science is the birth of quantum physics during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As physicists discovered the electronic freedoms of hydrogen and other gaseous elements, they found themselves in a quagmire. Classical physics simply failed to account for the electronic freedoms of atoms and molecules. However, classical physics gave a certain mathematical tool set that was able to be adapted and fitted into solving the problems faced by the turn-of-the-century physicists.

Planck utilized his knowledge of oscillators to give a mathematical derivation of the black body spectrum. Einstein used his knowledge of colliding particles to initially describe the photoelectric effect of metals. Bohr incorporated the discretized energies of gas spectrum and Rutherford's planetary model of electronic orbits and fashioned his quantized model that forced electrons into energy orbits and defied the Larmor formula which dictated that accelerating (and thus, orbiting) electrons emit E&M waves.

Sometimes...no, I would say all the time, science is dictated by what is observed and not by what is expected. Scientific knowledge is highly provisional, and we cannot create discrepancies with science due to this provisional limitation. But provisional knowledge is not what the general populace desires, and the acceptance of non-concrete answers to certain questions often invoke confusion and anti-science in audiences. So I can empathize with the scientific popularizer in the difficulties of addressing science to a general audience.

When I was a student, the laws of physics were regarded as completely off limits. The job of the scientist, we were told, is to discover the laws and apply them, not inquire into their provenance. The laws were treated as “given” — imprinted on the universe like a maker’s mark at the moment of cosmic birth — and fixed forevermore. Therefore, to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin. You’ve got to believe that these laws won’t fail, that we won’t wake up tomorrow to find heat flowing from cold to hot, or the speed of light changing by the hour.

I have never been instructed as such. I have always been told that the laws and theories came from observational evidence. As a student I have even tested the various classical laws and theories that are simply time-tested (eg. electron diffraction indicating the wave-like nature of electrons and photoionization indicating the particle-like nature of electrons). I have always been told that these laws are provisional. They could potentially change tomorrow; however, the likelihood is slim. And if they do change, there is a discoverable mechanism that shows how it changed.

Note I did not say why. Personally, I think why questions are unnecessary in science and cannot be answered as precisely and accurately as how questions. Ultimately this leads into a rhetorical battle of words, but this essentially rooted in the previous provisional knowledge of science. Scientific knowledge is rooted in operational language. This is due to two reasons: (1) the heavy reliance of observational data and (2) the heavy reliance of concise definitions. More on this later.

If the laws of physics were just any old ragbag of rules, life would almost certainly not exist.

Poppycock. I doubt it has been determined that simply changing the permittivity of space would disallow the formation of molecules that look very much like the metabolic process we observe in organisms. Since that is the defining feature of life-- metabolism-- I think it is a bit rash to conclude that only this set of universal constants are necessary for the universe to produce through time intelligent observers.

This is why I like PZ Meyers' summary of the anthropic principle: "[a] tiresome exercise in metaphysical masturbation that always flounders somewhere in the repellent ditch between narcissism and solipsism." I wish I was a mastery of words like this biologist.

(Note: Peter Woit seems to blame Davies' hang-up on the anthropic principle and multiverses on string theory. I agree. String Theory gets too much hype from pop science authors where there is little experimental linking. But that's a digression.)

In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.

Now we come to the culminating end, and Davies' defeat at supporting his argument. As John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts points out, Davies suffers from two gross fallacies: an enthymeme and a fallacy of reification. Davies takes the universe and assigns it as having the certain property of possessing laws.

I promised to return to the operational description of scientific knowledge and where it was going in this conversation. Wilkins has allowed me to springboard into this discussion. There is a difference between words and the world. As humans, we often believe our words are the world. But they are not. They are our attempts to describe the world through our words. Mathematics is elegant and much of our understanding of the world can be expressed in such elegant terms, but mathematics is not the world. Mathematics is the language, and physics is the study. The laws do not necessarily exist beyond our observations and use of them. The universe simply is, and though that is such profound statement to many, often inciting displeasure and discontent amongst the populace, it creates none where it is understood.

Note: The Edge seems to be gathering a list of responses.

Letters about NOVA:"Judgment Day"

NOVA (viz. PBS) recently aired a wonderful documentary on the Kitzmiller case. Being someone who has followed closely the entire intelligent design movement, the documentary did not really expand much of my knowledge. However, I found it to be a concise representation of the events surrounding the trial and the occurrences within the court room. I highly recommend it to anyone who desires to know more about the so-named Dover trial.

What I find more interesting, however, are the responses to the NOVA film. I figured that there would be both positive and negative feedback on the documentary, but the level of inanity expressed by the responders was unexpected. PBS Ombudsman has displayed several of the responses from viewers. I recommend reading all of them to create a clearer picture of the necessity of adequate science education in public schools. I have chosen a few that I find necessary to address.

Then, there's the immoral implication of evolution. "Survival of the fittest" follows from evolutionary theory. Evolutionists, to be logical and true to their faith (it takes faith to believe in it since there is no clear, unimpeachable physical evidence for macro-evolution) should see nothing wrong with what Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc., did in the genocides of millions of people. Since the exterminated ones were "weak," in terms of evolutionary faith, evolution proponents should all just shrug off these murders as being inconsequential (which is how the ones responsible for the murders saw them). But most don't, and the reason is we know those were atrocities. We know to murder another human being is wrong. And we know this because we have consciences given to us by our Creator.

I disagree. Why would "evolutionists" be forced to believe that those who lost their life to socially powerful dictators be considered "weak" and their death ultimately necessary or predictable? Also, I doubt the dictators considered the killings inconsequential considering each murder had a specific agenda or goal to acquire. Yes, oddly enough, though somewhat twisted in certain instances, the mass murders had a certain directive to achieve according to the ones who committed such atrocities.

My question to this viewer would be how does evolution require me to allow such actions to occur? I am not one who thinks dictators are deservedly powerful, and their means are often self-destructive to them as well as destructive to the society. Ultimately, why must I agree with the dictator due to me recognizing evolution as a reality?

And do I not murder because Providence forbids murder, or do I not murder because I recognize the humanity within other individuals? I choose the latter. One could argue that the Divine allowed me to recognize such humanity, but that is really on equal footing with my reasoning acquiring such a position independent of such divine revelation. That is, we simply do not know, and I have no reason to provisionally accept the position of divine revelation when other concepts derived from human reasoning cannot be explained by divine revelation.

The recent Nova special on Intelligent Design vs. Evolution was one of the most blatantly biased pieces of so-called "journalism" or scientific documentary. It was extremely insulting to the idea of Design. The whole tone of it was very sarcastic against Intelligent Design and completely victimized evolutionary thought by the evil villains of religious ignoramuses. It gave precious little air time to ID scientists who have plenty of legitimate research, but gave plenty of time towards evolutionary research. This was especially evident during the reenactment of the trial, when all evolutionary thought was propagated without rebuttal. However, the design theory was constantly interrupted with instances of anti-design narrative and arguments from outside the dramatization.

I invite this reader to read up on the details of the case. They will find (as the documentary does point out) that the prominent figureheads of the ID movement (1) had removed themselves off the defense witness list during the trial and (2) refused to hold an interview with NOVA unless unprecedented guidelines were imposed. Secondly, the evolution research discussed was that which appeared in the trial, or that which occurred during the trial (such as the fossil find Tiktaalik).

Intelligent Design is not religion. The end of the lesson does not offer any path to eternal salvation, claim that we are spiritual beings, or delve into supernatural phenomena; it merely states a theory of the origin of humankind that people in any arena should not be afraid to discuss. If public schools are assuming the responsibility of telling students to tolerate alternative lifestyles (which really has no place in the atmosphere of academia), then they should certainly open up the dialogue of alternative theories of evolution.

A religion does not need to address humanity as spiritual beings or address life after death. Though those are the qualities most modern religions have, a religion is simply anything which deals with non-natural phenomena. Despite your claim to the contrary, ID requires a discussion of non-natural entities, notions beyond the scope of testability and measurement themselves, or else such mechanisms are neither intelligent nor design based on the definitions provided by ID. Thus, if nothing else, ID is religion. And to state that ID is on even an equal plane concerning evidential claims is rather laughable.

As to the program's claims regarding Intelligent Design being taught in the public classroom as a violation against the First Amendment — it was completely out of line. The First Amendment says nothing of the "separation of Church and State." It says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or PROHIBIT the free exercise thereof." It protects religion from being persecuted by the State, not the other way around. If anything, the Constitutional First Amendment protects Intelligent Design being taught in school, and anything less is a violation of said Amendment.

The viewer missed the first clause, also called the Establishment clause, which prevents the government from mandating the instruction of religious thought. Ergo, a separation of church and state. And the second clause (the Free Exercise clause) does not extend into a public school setting. That is, it is true that the student can believe if humans emerged from a sea of Pepsi Cola and the student may not be jailed, fined, or censored for such thoughts. However, the clause does not protect the school's ability to teach the Pepsi Cola origins story since the school is effectively the government.

And the theory of evolution has been left wanting in lieu of proven concepts of science such as the Anthropic Principle (design and purpose in the universe), and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (everything unravels into chaos without an outside source of energy to bring order and purpose).

The anthropic principle only accounts for the existence of observers in a universe and our relation to making observations in such a universe. It is more of an application of science to philosophy of mind more so than an actual advent of scientific inquiry. This viewer's definition of the second law of thermodynamics is a bit off the beaten path. The second law is only concerned with the transfer of heat from one body to another. In an isolated system, heat transfers from the hotter body to the colder body. It requires work on the system to transfer heat from the colder body to the warmer body, and this application of work makes the system no longer an isolated system.

The Sun supplies energy and thus work onto the surface of the Earth. Thus, the Earth is not an isolated system (if we were, there would be no need of wind as temperature gradients would not exist across the surface). Also, concerning entropy and biochemical reactions, I think I recall a lecture on the mechanisms involved in DNA replication. Effectively, the reactions follow normal thermodynamic expectancies, and the side-reactions which give rise to genetic mutation also follow normal thermodynamic expectations. The unmutated DNA (aka "product") is more favorable; however, nature is quirky in that simply because one product is more favorable does not mean it is the only product produced. This is a consequence of the statistical nature of chemical reactions occurring at a given temperature. So, effectively, if I recall correctly from the lecture, the biochemical mechanism which gives rise to mutations in DNA replication is, ironically, thermodynamically sound (But, I will look into this further at a later date, and feel free to correct me in my comments).

Isn't it interesting, when evolutionists speak of ORIGINS they go into a long winded explanation of life on earth and how things operate and function, yet never tell you the source or offer a SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION OF THEIR TRUE ORIGIN. And according to their own definition of the word science, it's only that which can be TESTED AND MEASURED THAT SHOULD BE ACCEPTED AS VALID. You may be able to test, examine and explain many things, yet if you cannot put the ORIGIN OF THE MATERIALS to the same LITMUS TEST OF EXAMINATION AND MEASUREMENT, then your position is just another theory or religion as well. THEREFORE, LOGICALLY, Biological Evolutionists are forced to do one of two things, they are forced to acknowledge and accept that their position ULTIMATELY cannot be tested according to their own DEFINITIONS AND CANNOT STRICTLY BE CLASSIFIED AS SCIENCE. Or, they are forced to accept as VALID, theories that use the same logical reasoning processes like that of Intelligent design TO OBSERVE WHAT IS OBVIOUSLY DESIGN IN NATURE.

The hypotheses concerning the origin of the starting organic materials necessary for organic life are, indeed, simply hypotheses. Most of these hypotheses are rooted in experimental studies, however. For example, it is not an absurd notion that inorganic materials, such as methane, carbon dioxide, water, and ammonia, can give rise to certain amino acids. Similar results have been shown with other simpler organic materials, and it has been shown that certain clays can catalyze various pertinent organic reactions to abiogenesis studies. But it is the humble scientist who recognizes that such searches would never lead to a definitive scenario concerning the source of beginning organic materials. No, but it gives a provisional concept rooted in experimental evidence, and it is this experimental evidence which makes such scenarios more scientific than creationism via the *poof* mechanism. Secondly, evolution in general applies only to populations that reproduce.

I will never understand an individual who believes that ID is an actual scientific avenue. Only time will tell if it falls by the wayside like other preposterous notions in history or it manages to manhandle itself into school curricula by political and legal persuasion.

What Once Was Few Now Is Many

This blog has cameos at -1:16 and -0:23.

(via Pharyngula)

Much Needed Update

I have been a bit overwhelmed with academics and nearly forgot that I had this blog. But, with the dust settling, I can focus more on my passions and less on my obligations.

I have been perusing the internet for decent tutorials on physical chemistry. I was hoping to find something short and concise and would stress the overall importance after the derivations. Yet, alas, I have not found any to my liking. I might be too picky, however.

I simply desire a good reference on the basics I can point newcomers to so any preliminary/elementary questions can be answered there. For instance, in my current line of work, it would bog me down every time to describe the sign problem with the fermion density matrix in the canonical partition function for the Feynman path integral expression.

However, I guess if one is not pleased with the current selection, one needs to fix the situation themselves. It will be odd sprinkling introductory quantum and the necessary mathematics while commenting on current research, but I guess a challenge is necessary for one to grow.

Chemistry GRE Reflection

I have to admit that the last organic class I had taken as an undergraduate was my freshmen year. Granted, that is still no excuse for not refreshing my memory on the reagents necessary to undergo various reactions (eg. anti hydroxylation of alkenes), but what is done is done.

However, was it me, or did there seem to be more protein chemistry than necessary?