Chemists amid coronavirus five years on: Lee Cronin

Lee Cronin, the regius chair of chemistry at the University of Glasgow, UK, who is also founder and chief executive of the deep tech chemical science company Chemify, faced significant challenges and struggles during the Covid-19 pandemic. But he says it helped fuel an appreciation for automation in the chemistry lab and created a revolution in the field.

‘Covid allowed me to concentrate people’s minds and basically establish the principle of chemputation,’ Cronin states. He describes chemputation as a universal method for programming chemistry that goes way beyond simple robotics seen in areas like peptide chemistry and Suzuki chemistry.

‘There was a lot of cultural resistance before the pandemic because people want to do stuff by hand in the lab, but the requirement for remote working, for using the robotics to do complicated chemistry, necessitated that we use chemputation,’ Cronin tells Chemistry World.

Another positive effect of the pandemic is that Cronin was able to spend more time in his at-home workshop and experiment on his own. ‘That was great – it also helped me build intuition for a lot of research projects,’ he adds. ‘I only cracked the assembly equation on my own in my workshop,’ he says.

This assembly theory, which Cronin conceived and developed with Sara Walker at Arizona State University, US, and other colleagues, provides a molecular mechanism by which emergence of life can be explained by chemistry. It drew significant backlash from researchers on social media and elsewhere when it was published in 2023, including by evolutionary biologists who have denounced the paper as nonsense, and even a Trojan horse for creationism.

On the other hand, Cronin says Covid-19 was the most isolating experience of his life. He went from travelling internationally for work almost every two weeks to a hard stop, which meant the loss of important networking opportunities.

A new building to return to

One of the things that eased his group’s transition back to the office and the lab was moving into a new building that opened in early January 2022 – just as lockdown was finishing. ‘Having a new building to move into to get people back from working from home was awesome, because they had this shiny facility with glass, all the robots and everything,’ Cronin says.

He still has two long-time group members who work flexibly and spend one or two days per week remotely, which Cronin says works out fine. Nevertheless, he insists that there is no substitute for in-person interaction.

Since January 2024, Cronin is travelling more than ever. He says all the cooperation and sharing of data and research findings during the pandemic has started a global transformation in scientific collaboration.

‘People are realising that they can explicitly encode their chemistry and share that code, and that has started off a brand-new line of research,’ Cronin explains. He says his lab can’t keep up with the demand of the ‘huge number of people around the world’ who want to access or recreate the robots they’ve developed for chemistry.

There are about 50 academic groups – mostly nonprofits – in line to use them, for purposes like sharing findings as well as validating and conducting research. ‘That has left an enduring legacy in my team – we want to continue that process of making important molecules and giving the code to other people and showing people how they can collaborate using these tools,’ Cronin says.

‘These are really smart people who have missed things on the training side’

He notes that another positive legacy of the pandemic is digital meetings, which promote accessibility and free people from the carbon footprints associated with travel. For example, he was supposed to give a talk in Japan recently but had a conflict and negotiated with the event organisers to deliver it virtually.

Covid-19 has also introduced more empathy into the academic research system, according to Cronin. ‘Now I understand, coming out of Covid and hiring people who don’t really have the CV or the research output I was expecting, that they were “Covid babies”,’ he says. ‘These are really smart people who have missed things on the training side – maybe they have a PhD in crystallography but have never used a diffractometer before because it was all remote, for example.’

It is crucial to have an awareness about what PhDs or postdocs might have missed during the pandemic and give them opportunities to fill in those gaps with hands-on experience, without any fear of embarrassment or reprimand, Cronin adds. He has redesigned some of his research with this in mind and believes this is the responsibility of all principal investigators in chemistry and other scientific disciplines.