Volume 38, Issue 6

A recent survey conducted by British scientists shows that, though the public has a positive impression of chemistry’s role in social development and the improvement of human welfare, many people are not very sure about what chemists actually do ( CI May 2016, pp16-19). In some ways, IUPAC’s influence on chemists is like that of chemistry on the general public. From the very start of our careers, chemists benefit from IUPAC, its periodic table, naming systems, standards, data, etc. . But many chemists are not familiar with IUPAC’s daily work. This situation reminds me of an aphorism of the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Zi in his Tao Te Ching: “[The ubiquitous Tao is like] a loud but inaudible sound, a great but indiscernible semblance.”

Georgia became a member of the International Chemistry Olympiad (IChO) at the 2014 Olympiad in Vietnam, but our first participation in IChO was in Washington in July 2012, when I [Elizbar Elizbarashvili] was an observer.

The Strategic Approach to International Chemicals Management (SAICM) is a policy framework designed to foster the sound management of chemicals globally. SAICM is a key United Nations initiative on sustainable development that is being undertaken jointly through the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Health Organisation (WHO). These two agencies have organised the SAICM Secretariat. SAICM builds on the series of World Summits on Sustainable Development that recognised the economic importance of the chemical industry, but also its potential environmental and health costs (see box).

In February 2011, I participated in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Conference held in Washington, DC. At the conference, I attended a symposium titled, Powering the Planet: Generation of Clean Fuels from Sunlight and Water organized by Harry B. Gray, the Arnold O. Beckman Professor of Chemistry and Founding Director of the Beckman Institute at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). I’d known Harry since he was my mentor during the two years (1990-1992) that I was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech. At the AAAS symposium, Harry talked about the Solar Army, the outreach branch of the Center for Chemical Innovation in Solar Fuels (CCI-Solar, www.ccisolar.caltech.edu), an NSF-funded consortium of 13 universities and 19 laboratories centered at Caltech and headed by him. I joined the Solar Army right after that symposium. This is a story about the Solar Army from an international perspective and of how, through the transforming power of scientific research done by thousands of students around the world, Harry is leaving a lasting legacy to the children of the world.

An ongoing IUPAC objective is to ensure that Chem­istry International ( CI ) meets the ever-changing needs and expectations of its readers. Today, those needs and expectations are in flux as the combination of publishing technologies and digital content continues to significantly alter how information is accessed, read, and used. E-versions of journals and magazines increasingly include interactive features and functionalities that are impossible to replicate in their print versions, and IUPAC is examining how we can move CI in that direction.

In August 2016, the Royal Society of Chemistry released a report titled Future of the Chemical Sciences which explored what the chemical sciences might look like in ten to twenty years.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the IUPAC 2017 Distinguished Women in Chemistry or Chemical Engineering Awards. The purpose of the awards program, initiated as part of the 2011 International Year of Chemistry celebrations, is to acknowledge and promote the work of women in chemistry/chemical engineering worldwide. In 2011, 23 women were honored during a ceremony held at the IUPAC Congress in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on 2 August 2011. At each of the subsequent IUPAC Congresses, 12 women received this recognition; in Istanbul, Turkey in 2013 and in Busan, Korea in 2015. A similar award ceremony will take place during the 2017 IUPAC Congress in July 2017 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The 2017 IUPAC-SOLVAY International Award for Young Chemists is intended to encourage outstanding young research scientists at the beginning of their careers. The awards are given for the most outstanding Ph.D. theses in the general area of the chemical sciences, as described in a 1000-word essay. The award is generously sponsored by Solvay.

In 2019, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry will celebrate its 100th anniversary. In anticipation of the anniversary celebrations, IUPAC is holding a logo design competition.

In Venice on 5 September 2016, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (“UNESCO”), in partnership with PhosAgro and IUPAC, presented leading young chemists from around the world with the latest round of grants for research in the field of green chemistry. The presentation took place during the opening of the 6th International IUPAC Conference on Green Chemistry, which will be followed by a symposium dedicated entirely to a discussion of the grant programme.

The 2016 Hanwha-Total IUPAC Young Scientist Award has been awarded to Moon Jeong Park and Brent Sumerlin.

Royal DSM, a global science-based company active in health, nutrition, and materials, announced that Professor Steven P. Armes (54), Professor of Polymer and Colloid Chemistry at the University of Sheffield, UK, has been awarded the DSM Materials Science Award 2016. The Award recognizes his exceptional contribution to the advancement of macromolecular architecture, which is applied in many everyday situations, including the development of dirt-repellant coatings and lubricants that reduce wear and fuel consumption.

In the Abstract of an article we published in Chirality , we wrote, “There are frequent situations in both supramolecular chemistry and crystallography that result in stereogenic centers whose absolute configuration needs to be specified. With this aim, we propose the inclusion of one simple additional rule to the Cahn-Ingold-Prelog (CIP) system of priority rules, stating that non-covalent interactions have a fictitious number between 0 and 1”. [1]

In a recent Editorial in IUCrJ , Desiraju [1] characterised the three stages by which crystal engineering has developed: from crystal packing analysis, through crystal design strategies, to property design. He suggests that targeting properties has only recently come into its own, needing maturity at the earlier stages before its systematic development.