It’s Saturday evening, the night before the American Chemical Society’s spring national meeting opens in Atlanta. This is my umpteenth ACS meeting, and no matter what’s going on in the rest of my life at the time, I always get a little anxious and excited in the days leading up to a national meeting. There are a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that I am a chemophile.
I took a late flight to Atlanta so I could spend the whole day with my family before nearly a week away from home. One son had a soccer game, and the other one is having a birthday party. (His birthday is next week, but we were celebrating early.) And my dear wife spent our last few hours together bracing for the coming days of taking care of all the family activities on her own. I’ll give her a call when I get to the hotel. She understands. Really. This is the ACS national meeting.
Besides disrupting the family routine, another reason I get a bit off track is that as a science journalist it’s my job to go through the thousands of scheduled presentations and try to make objective choices about which ones to write about. I spend quite a bit of time ahead of the meeting trying to identify symposia or individual talks that stand out.
I hope I speak for my C&EN colleagues when I say that we relish our roles in discovering the leading stories that unfold at national meetings and then conveying them to the rest of the chemical community. I believe this filtering and sharing is important for those chemists who don’t make it to the ACS meeting. It’s even important for those chemists who are at the meeting, because there’s no way to get around to see everything of interest. The technical program is simply too big.
At C&EN, our staff divides up the technical program to share the love and the load. For Atlanta, I am covering the Fluorine, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry, and Inorganic Divisions. I started by looking through the final program to see what looks interesting. After that, I made a few phone calls and sent a few e-mails to get more details.
I actually read the entire ACS meeting program cover to cover—every title of every talk or poster. I don’t want to take a chance on missing anything. It’s something I started doing as a graduate student, and I can’t break the habit. You can learn a lot just by reading the titles: You can see creativity or the lack of it. You can identify trends and use those to figure out what other chemists think is important at the moment. You really can pinpoint what the best talks will be.
What am I going to be covering? I plan to attend at least part of the weeklong symposium in the I&EC division on “Nanotechnology and the Environment.” The push to learn about (that is, predict) the potential environmental impact of nanotechnology, already much discussed, is about how science and society can work together to ensure that we gain the most benefit from nanotechnology without suffering human health and safety problems and otherwise fouling the environment. This is certainly one of the great challenges for science in the next few decades.
One of my colleagues is covering a second major symposium in I&EC, on ionic liquids, which have great promise as green solvents and have grabbed a lot of attention, although a lot of people think they have been over-hyped. But when you have dozens of talks on a topic at a national meeting, plus another major international meeting on the topic coming up next fall, there must be something to it.
I also hope to get to a few of the national award winners’ talks; there are several in the Inorganic Division. Where else can you have the world’s best scientists give you an hour of their time telling you about their work? I’ll also be going to quite a few individual talks in the Inorganic and Fluorine Divisions, some to just stay caught up on the chemistry, but others that I plan to write about. Stay tuned to C&EN Online and the print edition over the next few weeks to see what my C&EN colleagues and I find out.
As I write this evening, I am flying on a late flight to Atlanta. The area around the Georgia Dome near my hotel and the meeting venues may be buzzing from the NCAA basketball tournament regional finals. I already gave up on my bracket, since Duke and North Carolina have bowed out. (I’m from North Carolina: Who else would I pick?) C&EN Editor-in-Chief Rudy Baum, a Duke man, had tickets to the games in Atlanta. I’m not sure how he’s feeling right now after Duke’s loss. Who do I think will win? I live a few miles from the George Mason campus in Fairfax, Va., just outside Washington, D.C. Everyone around home is a George Mason fan this week.—Steve Ritter, filed at 1:00 AM EST
