ACS Sets Full Agenda For Next Week's Meeting

More than 8,000 chemists will gather in Miami Beach next week forthe 198th national meeting of the American Chemical Society. At the convention, researchers from around the world will present 3,500 technical papers and discuss issues faced both by the entire human race (environmental problems) and by ACS alone (membership problems). Twenty-nine technical divisions will sponsor sessions throughout the week. In addition to presentations of general papers, each division will feature special topic symposia. Some of these areas have sparked so much research that it will take up to nine separate sessions to cover all of the papers. Among the topics that will require multiple sessions at next week’s meeting are textiles, liquid crystals, global environmental chemistry, coal science, exotic nuclear spectroscopy, and computer simulation of synthetic polymers. Conspicuously absent from the upcoming agenda is cold fusion. At the 197th meeting last April in Dallas, cold fusion fueled a last-minute special presidential event. In fact, hardly any of the topics that were hot enough to require several sessions in April will require them next week. “Chemistry is constantly changing,” says Paul G. Gassman, president-elect of ACS. Predicting any future research trends in chemistry, he says, is basically a guessing game. “If anyone knew where the pot of gold is, he’d be there.... What next year’s breakthrough will be, God only knows.” Gassman, a Regents’ Professor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, will begin his term as president on January 1. Although the symposia topics in each of the technical divisions may change from meeting to meeting, the presidential plenary sessions seem fixed on environmental issues, at least for this year. At the meeting last April, the plenary featured environmental issues in biotechnology. Next week an international panel (with speakers from the Soviet Union, the United States, and Canada) will concentrate on atmospheric chemistry. The panel, presided over by current ACS president Clayton F. Callis, will discuss stratospheric ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect, and acid rain. Presidential plenary sessions, according to Gassman, serve a twofold purpose. Not only do they provide chemists with an opportunity to discuss pressing issues, but they serve to educate the public and to improve chemistry’s foundering image, which he says has suffered from media sensationalism and the public’s overall scientific illiteracy. “Chemistry, from the public’s perspective, is not the glory science anymore,” says Gassman. “The media has played up the downside of chemistry. When we look on how to improve our public image, we look to topics that the public is very, very aware of. We try to have a good scientific discussion of these rather than mass hysteria in the media. I think we’ll continue to see more and more of this in the future.” The scheduled plenary session for next fall’s meeting in Washington, D.C., will he chemistry’s public image. Bad P.R. is not the only ailment afflicting chemistry and the Amencan Chemical Society. According to Attila E. Pavlath, chairman of the ACS membership committee, old members are not renewing their memberships, causing stagnant growth (The Scientist, June 12, 1989, page 8). Says Pavlath, “Many members perceive what they get for their membership dues is not in balance with what they pay.” Pavlath also notes that when a new member joins, he or she is most likely to drop out during the first five years. Pavlath hopes to alleviate what could be a membership crisis by proposing two possible new dues structures at the ACS council meeting next week. The first format would offer discounts on dues during the first five years of membership. The second format would tie dues to the professional income of the members. As to the potential problem of investigating members’ salaries, Pavlath says he would like to use the “honor system” and “leave it up to the individual to report his or her salary.” Pavlath adds, “After the council meeting in Miami Beach, we will have a feeling as to which system would be used. And, hopefully, we’ll vote on this at the spring meeting in Boston.” Gassman, however, contends that the ACS membership problem was “blown out of proportion” by the ACS’s membership committee. “We have 138,000 members. And, depending on which set of statistics you use, we have close to 70% of all chemists as members. That’s a phenomenal amount.” Gassman warns, however, that the chemistry profession as a whole is heading for a crisis. “We’re now facing large numbers of retirements,” he says. “And the number of chemists is not growing very fast. The number of Ph.D.’s who will graduate each year until the year 2000 is steadily going down.” Furthermore, a growing proportion of chemistry students studying in the U.S. are foreign. Gassman says these students return to their homelands after graduation, partially because of tightening immigration laws. As a result, they are not contributing to the pool of practicing chemists in this country. “Also,” he notes, “the number of native-born Americans going into chemistry is steadily decreasing. We will not be able to balance attrition in the 1990s. We’re heading for a very serious problem.” The ACS will discuss this and other aspects of chemistry education at the presidential plenary session during its spring meeting.

ACS Sets Full Agenda For Next Week's Meeting

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