Band 44, Heft 2

When you hear the name of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), you would naturally be reminded of the chemical nomenclature you learned in chemistry class or textbooks. At that age, you may have resented the people who created such “complex” naming system to make life difficult for you as a student but as you get older, particularly when you are pursuing chemistry as a career be it in academia or industry, you learn to appreciate the standards that have been put in place to make life easier for you.

Following the 100 Year Anniversary of IUPAC celebrated in Paris in 2019, Artificial Intelligence was made the focus of the following global 2021 World Chemistry Leadership Meeting (WCLM). Note: The program of WCLM 2021 is available online. A detailed account of WCLM2021 will follow in the next issue of Chem Int. at https://iupac.org/event/wclm2021/. Once it was clear the prevailing COVID-19 conditions would mean that the 2021 WCLM would be virtual, the planning committee decided to take advantage of an online setting to have a truly global meeting and to have the event follow the sun round the world using three time zones and “visiting” the next two IUPAC Congress sites, i.e. The Netherlands 2023 and Malaysia 2025.

In 1997, a collection of twenty personal perspectives from eminent chemists was published in Pure and Applied Chemistry to mark the centenary of physical organic chemistry [1]. This Symposium in Print, entitled Physical Organic Chemistry in the 21st Century (POC21C), was organized by the IUPAC Commission on Physical Organic Chemistry, which was chaired at that time by Tom Tidwell, who contributed a historical prologue in which he suggested Stieglitz’s 1899 proposal of carbocations as reaction intermediates as (unwittingly) having given birth to the discipline. The principal authors were Edward Arnett, Daniel Bellus, Ron Breslow, Fulvio Cacace, Jan Engberts, Marye Anne Fox, Ken Houk, Keith Ingold, Alan Katritzky, Ed Kosower, Meir Lahav, Teruaki Mukaiyama, Oleg Nefedov, George Olah, John Roberts, Jean-Michel Savéant, Helmut Schwarz, Andrew Streitwieser, Frank Westheimer, and Akio Yamamoto. Tidwell noted that, whereas they were not all known as physical organic chemists, yet they had all used the tools of this discipline in their work and were able to comment upon the utility of physical organic chemistry for the practice of other areas of chemistry as well. The theme that ran through all the essays was that the future of the field lay in an interdisciplinary approach, that physical organic chemists would use all the tools available to them, and that they would not be fettered to narrow views.

Helen Stevens, Boston University B.A. Class of 1905, was a chemist and educator who taught at Boston University for over four decades. She offered stern guidance to students and helped shape the department as it came into being in the early twentieth century.

We need more basic sciences to achieve Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This is the message sent to the world by the United Nations General Assembly on 2 December 2021: Member States approved by consensus the resolution 76/A/L.12 promulgating the year 2022 as the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development (IYBSSD2022).

Michael E. Jung, of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA, has been awarded the 2022 IUPAC-Richter Prize in recognition of his research, which has afforded new drugs for the treatment of advanced prostate cancer. The acceptance lecture will be held in New York, NY, USA (26-29 June 2022) at the 37th ACS National Medicinal Chemistry Symposium and Jung will present a second lecture at the XXVII EFMC International Symposium on Medicinal Chemistry in Nice, France (4-8 Sept 2022).

The 2022 Science for the Future Solvay Prize has been awarded to Katalin Karikó, adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and professor at the University of Szeged (Hungary), for her work on the biochemical modification of synthetically produced messenger RNA (mRNA), which has enabled the rapid development of vaccines. Her research was most notably used by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna to build COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, which have saved many lives. It could also help fight other diseases like cancer, infection from influenza, malaria or HIV in the future. Professor Karikó has dedicated her 40-year career to using RNA as a therapeutic, with chemistry as a key element to modify the mRNA to avoid the risk of rejection by the immune system.

The CHEMRAWN VII Prize of USD 5000 is granted to a young investigator (less than 45 years of age) from an emerging region and who is actively contributing to research in Green Chemistry. The Prize was first announced in August 2008 and since it has been awarded every two years at the IUPAC International Conference on Green Chemistry. Nominations for the 2022 Prize must be submitted by  31 May 2022 .

The World Metrology Day Team has confirmed that the theme for World Metrology Day 2022 is “Metrology in the Digital Era”.

AsiaChem’s Editor-in-Chief has started a tradition of focusing on chemistry in specific member countries within the Asia-Pacific expanse and which echoes the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies (FACS). With the December 2021 edition, AsiaChem covers the wealth of Chemistry in Japan.

The Division of the History of Chemistry of the American Chemical Society (HIST) is 100 years old in 2022. To celebrate, a special issue of the Bulletin for the History of Chemistry has been prepared and made available open access to anyone. Prominent chemist historians and historians of chemistry were invited to contribute essays on the theme “Novel Insights in the History of Chemistry: Looking Back Yet Mostly Looking Forward.”

Emeritus Fellows are former members of IUPAC Divisions and erstwhile Commissions and Subcommittees, who have made outstanding contributions to IUPAC and, through chemistry, to the chemical sciences in general.