Volume 38, Issue 2

As I sit down to write this column, IUPAC is about to tick off one biennium and begin another. Each time this happens the organisation renews itself as new people cycle into the positions and committees that plan, initiate, and undertake the work of the Union. It is a time when we look forward and consider our priorities—we seek to make our marks and to advance the discipline.

When Lars Öhrström started paying real attention to chemistry, during his high school years in the early 1980s, the three-letter symbols then designating any element with atomic number higher than 103 seemed like a permanent fixture to the periodic table in the chemistry classroom. In the following years, he learned that they were only temporary placeholders for elements that fulfilled the criteria of “being discovered” but where, for unclear reasons, a name had not yet been agreed.

The procedures to be followed in the naming of new elements fall into two distinct phases. The first of these is done jointly between IUPAC and the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) and involves the validation of a claimed discovery and its assignation to a laboratory or to a collaborating group of laboratories. The second phase is carried out by IUPAC alone, which utilises its standard procedures for the recommendation of a suitable name. After this recommendation has successfully gone through the usual stringent refereeing processes, it is then finally approved by the Council before being formally announced.

The Chemical Structure Association Trust (CSA Trust) is an internationally-recognized, registered charity that promotes and supports the advancement of scientific discovery through the application of computer technologies in the management and analysis of chemical structure information. In support of its Charter, the Trust provides grants specifically to nurture young scientists, ages thirty-five or younger, who have demonstrated excellence in research related to the storage, retrieval, and analysis of chemical structures, reactions, and compounds. Since its inception in 1988, almost one hundred students and researchers worldwide have benefited from travel bursaries and the CSA Trust Grant Program to further their education and research work, but the organization has a rich history that predates the formalization of its charity status. Its roots were planted half a century ago in 1965, when the Chemical Notation Association (CNA) was formed in the United States. It has been an interesting journey from the CNA to the CSA Trust and I have been blessed to have been a part of it almost from the beginning, along with other members of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Chemical Information. In honor of the organization’s 50th Anniversary, I’d like to give a brief overview of its past and its present activities.

On 30 December 2015, IUPAC announced the verification of the discoveries of four new chemical elements; the 7th period of the periodic table of elements is complete.

Four major international science organisations (ICSU, ISSC, IAP and TWAS) have joined together to develop and support an accord that includes a set of guiding principles on open access to big data, which is necessary to protect the scientific process and assure that developing countries can participate more fully in the global research enterprise. Limits on access to big data knowledge, they warn, raises the risk that progress will slow in areas such as advanced health research, environmental protection, food productio,n and the development of smart cities.

ICSU Executive Director Heide Hackmann has been appointed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon to serve on a special advisory group, drawn from civil society, the private sector, and the scientific community, which will support the Technology Facilitation Mechanism, a key part of the post-2015 architecture for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.