Do you acknowledge?

I have many guilty pleasures. Reading other chemists’ thesis acknowledgments is one of the most delightful. I even hunt out and download random masters or PhD dissertations just to see what their acknowledgments section looks like. What these people achieved in terms of research isn’t the name of the game; a lot of their findings were published long before I sat down with their magnum opus. Sure, I might be curious to see what remained unpublished – but what I really want to do is sneak a glance inside a fellow scientist’s soul. Thesis acknowledgment is an under-appreciated form of genre literature, one that rivals the haiku for potency of meaning packed into brevity. It shows scientists at their most human and interesting. And we need to give it more attention.