The International Year of Chemistry (IYC) was brought to a close yesterday in Brussels, Belgium, with a bang as Iupac president Nicole Moreau made the most of the media spotlight to announce that the names for elements 114 and 116 had been give provisional approval.

The event, which attracted more than 800 people from 70 countries, was a time for reflecting on what had been achieved over the year and how much more there was still to do in raising awareness of the contributions that chemistry plays in everyone’s lives. Many of the speakers made much of the fact that tough times are ahead, as we face unprecedented global challenges in energy, food, water and many other areas. But there was real optimism that the next generation of young chemists is up to the job.

The young leaders gave us a taste of that optimism by taking us on a trip into the future, presenting their intriguing vision of how chemists currently at school would be make the world a better place by 2050. They envisaged a world where biochips could rapidly sequence genomes to tailor disease therapies to the patient, where plant-based purification systems provided enough clean water for everyone and zero-carbon eco-cities are the order of the day. It’s a world that can’t arrive soon enough!

The IYC was timed to coincide with the centenary of the first Solvay Conference and Marie Curie's chemistry Nobel

But will the accomplishments of the IYC live on? There were certainly lots of eye-catching events that made it into the media, like the global water experiment, some beautiful IYC stamps and a whole host of other experiments and events. But will this event be a one off, with chemistry disappearing off the public’s radar next year? Moreau said that if she had one criticism of the IYC it was that too often chemists were talking to other chemists, rather than politicians, journalists and the public. Others said that the legacy of the IYC will be a better informed public with an appreciation of how dependent the world is on chemistry and the chemical industry.

Another of the messages that resonated throughout the event was happiness. Young leader Rui Vogt Alves da Cruz, senior R&D manager at Dow, drove home how important it was for people to have fulfilled lives and how chemistry could give them that chance. The young leaders showed the audience how chemistry will add to the world’s net happiness by making sure that no one goes hungry, by treating illness and disease, and by freeing society from energy worries with cheap solar power. Nobel laureate Ada Yonath, who won the 2009 chemistry prize for her work on the structure of the ribosome, echoed their words, saying that it was important to go to work with a smile on your face and that pursuing her scientific career had given her just this chance. And Ellen Kullman, chief executive of DuPont, talked about how her happiness had been enhanced by a career that let her indulge her love of puzzle solving.

While talking about how chemistry could improve the world, Yonath used her platform to make an impassioned plea for drug companies to invest more money in developing antibiotics. She warned that the world is running short of effective antibiotics as resistant bacteria become a growing problem. Antibiotics, she pointed out, are one of the reasons we now live far longer than we did in the 1950s and she is looking at how her work on the ribosome’s structure can inspire new drug molecules.

At the end of the day, the speakers all seemed to be in agreement: IYC is not the end, it is just the beginning. As Da Cruz puts it: ‘We have to continue education, and as I mentioned it will take years for all those seeds we are planting now to give us more science students.’

Patrick Walter

                  

Source:
http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/?feed=rss2