Day 1: Jack Stocker: Hurricane survivor and ACS celebrity

I had a delightful impromptu brunch with Jack Stocker yesterday. Stocker, 82, is retired from the University of New Orleans. He is an ACS Councilor and was one of the scientists featured in the Nov. 21, 2005, C&EN issue that dealt with the results of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Readers may recall that Jack was pictured on the cover standing resolute in front of what was left of his New Orleans home.

I was just finishing up a late breakfast at the Hilton in Atlanta when Jack walked into the restaurant. I asked him to join me, and the fun began. “Once a year, you should be able to enjoy something you like and have as much as you want of it,” Jack said. And this was to be the day. For Jack, the something is bacon. “You usually get a couple of strips, but you want more,” he said. At the buffet, he loaded his plate with bacon—and some corned beef hash and potatoes plus a good batch of fruit. We were there two hours as he happily worked his way through this decadent meal.

[Jack Stocker (right) and Dick Hanley catch up with each other in Atlanta. Photo by Linda Raber.]

Jack has become a bit of a celebrity at the ACS meeting in Atlanta. While we were chatting, people kept coming up to the table to say hello and ask him how he is. He says he finds the attention kind of puzzling, but certainly doesn’t mind. He loves talking to people about most anything.

How is he doing? He is living in the French Quarter in New Orleans in the same building where one of his sons lives. He says his place is “an upper graduate-level apartment,” and he loves it. His son and friends furnished it for him so that he could move into a “ready-made nest.” For this, he says he is eternally grateful.

He is also in his element. The street in front of the apartment building is the staging area for many of the parades that pass through New Orleans. Of the tall, narrow old house across the street, complete with a balcony, he says: “All you have to do is look at it and you can hear Stanley Kowalski shouting ‘Stella!’ I knew I was home.”

While happily ensconced in his new apartment, Jack hasn’t had the best luck when it comes to his old home. Readers of the “Faces of the Storm” issue of C&EN know that Jack lost everything when the levees broke following Hurricane Katrina. This included a collection of more than 20,000 science fiction books that he treasured.

He wanted to salvage as much as possible, so he signed an agreement with a nonprofit group to move some sofas and other large objects that had been blocking the doorways but nothing else. He insisted, and they agreed, that he would be present when the removals were taking place. He had to wait until January.

Jack thinks it’s kind of spooky that his son’s girlfriend was having nightmares about the house in mid-January and insisted that she be driven over to see it. She found it gutted to the studs. Absolutely everything was gone and hauled away. Jack was devastated again. But he’s coping.

When the going gets rough, Jack says he likes to play Pollyanna’s glad game. He explains that in the story by Eleanor H. Porter, Pollyanna, whose father is a missionary, is sent a barrel with some crutches in it at Christmas instead of the doll she wanted. Pollyanna, relentlessly optimistic, finds something to be happy about and is joyful because she doesn’t need the crutches. Jack has coped by trying to find Polyanna’s spirit.

He tells me that the good things that have happened as a result of the hurricane are that he has an apartment in the French Quarter—a lifelong aspiration—and that Katrina blew all the mosquitoes away, so there isn’t as much West Nile virus. He has also been in touch with many friends and colleagues who contacted him as a result of the C&EN article.

After about an hour, our conversation drifted to science fiction and never really came back to Earth. I am a fan of this underappreciated genre, and Jack is the man to talk to. He offered recommendations for my reading pleasure and even suggested that scientists could use science fiction as a way to bring people into the sciences. “You don’t go to annual reports for your sense of wonder,” he says.—Linda Raber, filed at 8:28 AM

Day 1: ACS Meeting Eve

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