PUT THEM ALL TOGETHER, THEY SPELL CHEMISTRY

Volume 5, #16The ScientistAugust 19, 1991 PUT THEM ALL TOGETHER, THEY SPELL CHEMISTRY In the spring of 1990, the advisory committee to the NSF chemistry division decided to conduct its annual meeting a little differently. Instead of devoting one hour to one topic before moving on to another, committee members decided to hold the meeting like a retreat. Says NSF chemistry division director Kenneth Hancock: "We decided to sit back and literally ask where the intellectual frontiers in chemistry are and where we think our science is and ought to be going in the next few years." Out of that "retreat" came a set of priorities that are used by NSF management when it makes its case for research funding appropriations. "It is a very interactive process that includes [recommendations by] this division, studies by the National Research Council, and the chemical community at large," Hancock says. To communicate the priorities he and his associates identified, Hancock uses the letters of the word chemistry: "C" is for critical technologies. The Office of Science and Technology Policy has come up with a list of critical technologies that need to be developed to maintain American economic competitiveness. "Chemistry is critical to 17 of the 22 critical technologies," says Hancock. "H" is for health sciences, which encompasses biology, molecular biosciences, biophysics--all of which are increasingly dependent on the specialized intervention of trained chemists. "E" is for the environment and alternative, nonpolluting sources of energy. "It used to be that if you wanted to build a new industry, society would have to be willing to suffer environmental consequences," says Hancock. "Or people would say, to have a pure environment, there would have to be curbs on industry. We finally realized that the trick is to do environmentally benign manufacturing, and chemistry plays a significant role in that." "M" is for materials. NSF is requesting $3 million for the chemistry division's portion of $25 million, foundation-wide initiative called Materials Synthesis and Processing. "Great advances are being made in designing composite materials from the molecular level up," says Hancock (see table for other chemistry division requests for 1992). "I" is for instrumentation, industry, and innovation. Says Hancock: "Chemistry undergirds the biggest set of industries in this country--petrochemicals, agrichemicals, pharmaceuticals, synthetic fibers, energy, and electronics. Most people don't think about the role of chemistry in the computer industry, but chip manufacturing also relies significantly on chemical processes." "S" is for separations, which has become one of the fundamental subfields in chemistry. "It is critical to environment applications, to the pharmaceutical industry," Hancock says. "T" is for chemical theory, which includes computation and modeling. "While chemistry is traditionally thought of as an experimental science, with people getting their hands dirty in the lab," says Hancock, "[now] computers have become such powerful tools that they can run the experiment before you go into the lab. It is not the same thing as doing the experiment, but it is an important complement." "R" is for reaction dynamics. Although this subdiscipline underlies all of chemistry, Hancock highlighted its application in knowing how chemicals are formed and decomposed in the biosphere, in physiological processes, and in manufacturing. "Y" is for, well, you name it, according to Hancock: "Buckyballs illustrate how exciting chemistry as a basic science still is. It shows how much there is left to learn. While this year we are focusing on materials, in the future we would like to follow up with chemistry's role in health, medical science, and biotech, in the environment, and we want to develop our computational science strengths." --R.E.

PUT THEM ALL TOGETHER, THEY SPELL CHEMISTRY

PUT THEM ALL TOGETHER, THEY SPELL CHEMISTRY

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