Volume 43, Issue 1

Last time I wrote to you, we were finishing 2019, IUPAC’s centenary celebrations and the International Year of the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements (IYPT). Since then, our world and how we related to it has changed dramatically. One year ago, we could not have imagined today’s reality. We are dealing with the consequences of a virus we knew little about and for which vaccines are starting to become available only now. The fact that the time for the development of vaccines has been shortened from several years to less than one year, is in itself the result of a huge scientific achievement; it involves interdisciplinary collaborations from microbiology to medicine, but also crucially underpinning chemistry. The pandemic has meant that our daily habits have changed, that we cannot travel or only with heavy restrictions, and that now we mostly meet on-line.

Nanotechnology has developed rapidly in the last two decades with significant effort focused on the development of nano-enabled materials with new or improved properties that offer solutions for current world challenges. The commercialization of products containing engineered nanomaterials (ENM) has progressed much more rapidly than the development of practical approaches to ensure their safe and sustainable use. The lack of adequate detection and characterization techniques and reproducible and validated methods for toxicological studies have been identified as major limitations. The rapid development of ENM of increasing complexity and diversity and concerns over the adequacy of existing regulations also contribute to safety concerns with these materials. The full potential of nanotechnology can only be realized when feasible, cost-effective strategies to ensure a safe-by-design approach, effective risk assessment approaches and appropriate regulatory guidelines are in place.

The uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are topics of presentations at most conferences today across diverse professional disciplines. Why? The following quote says it all:

Maintaining a plentiful and high-quality food supply is essential to enable humans to survive and flourish in the coming decades. In 2019/20, an estimated 2.71 Gt of food grains have been produced worldwide. This fundamental food source is alone enough to supply sufficient nutritional kilocalories for the entire current global population. And nutrition is supplemented by the many other crops, livestock and sea food that are part of the overall food system. Yet, in the same year, it is estimated that around 821 million people, more than one tenth of the 7.6 billion people in the world were chronically hungry. There are many reasons for this. Waste—the FAO estimates that around one third of food produced is wasted—is certainly one, but also important are the inequities in the food production and supply system. While much can and should be done to correct these two critical problems, sustainable agriculture remains as the core feature of a healthy food supply.

Many literature articles, conventional histories, and narratives about the origins of “Green Chemistry” describe it as being a result of concepts and actions at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and/or research in Academia during the 1990s and later. But many examples of increasingly environmentally friendly real-world chemical processes were invented, developed, and commercialized in the oil refining, commodity chemical, and consumer product industries in many countries decades before the 1990s. The earliest efforts evolved and accelerated into many environmentally-oriented and commercialized industrial examples of “Pollution Prevention” during the 1970s and 1980s. The “Green Chemistry” terminology and “Principles” adopted by the EPA and Academia in the 1990s evolved from and re-named the mostly industrial “Pollution Prevention” approaches and inventions.

At its General Assembly in Montreal, Canada, on Wednesday 18 August and Thursday 19 August 2021, the IUPAC Council will be asked to elect a Vice President, a Treasurer, and members of the Bureau to fulfill the vacancies created by retiring members. IUPAC National Adhering Organizations are invited to submit nominations no later than 31   March   2021 .

In July 2019, IUPAC held its General Assembly (GA) and World Chemistry Congress in Paris, France, and celebrated its centenary. Plans are on-going to hold the 2021 WCC/GA in Montréal, Canada, 13-20 August 2021 (iupac2021.org). The following WCC/GA in 2023 will be in The Hague, Netherlands, 20-25 August, and two years later, the Institut Kimia Malaysia will host the 50th World Chemistry Congress and 53rd General Assembly in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 11-18 July 2025.

To celebrate 60 years of its scientific journal Pure and Applied Chemistry, IUPAC with its publishing partner DeGruyter has compiled a virtual issue including the journal’s most cited papers. The set of articles should not be regarded as a simple “best of.” Over the 60 years of its existence, PAC has published more groundbreaking papers than we could possibly highlight, but this collection allows for a vivid glimpse of the rich variety of topics covered.

The International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements 2019 (IYPT2019) has been celebrated during the year in over 130 countries, with well over a thousand events and festivities, reaching millions of young and old people, scientists and non-scientists. The event as a whole has been very successful; the 160-page report released last October illustrated in length the community partnership for global outreach and the diversity and success of the activities that took place throughout the year.

As a follow-up to the 2019 International Year of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements (IYPT2019), the Government of the Russian Federation proposed to establish and fund the joint UNESCO/Russian Federation International Prize for the Basic Sciences in the name of the Russian chemist Dmitry Mendeleev. The initiative is to provide further support to the UNESCO’s International Basic Sciences Programme (IBSP).

During the 2019 Council Meeting in Paris, an attendee raised the point that two topics were the subject of high interest in his geographic region, specifically the uses of Blockchain Technology and Artificial Intelligence in scientific research and related activities. To follow-up with these questions, a Task Force was established to develop a White Paper on Blockchain Technology to be published and circulated to all NAO’s prior to the 2021 World Chemistry Congress. 

The IUPAC Committee on Publications and Chemical Data Standards (CPCDS) has initiated the release of regular updates especially for the attention of IUPAC members. It is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather useful and actionable. The intent is to highlight a few items that you and your community should be aware of or where your action is desired. If there are items you would wish to see covered in the future, please write to CPCDS chair, Leah McEwen at lrm1@cornell.edu.

Alexander Lawson (20 Oct 1944 - 23 Feb 2020), known to his friends and peers as “Sandy,” passed away in early 2020. He is recognized as a pioneer and far-sighted visionary in the fields of chemical structure handling, database searching, chemical nomenclature, reading machines, and the linking of text and structural information.