Of Science Fairs and the Republic of Letters

By Jim Schmidt
Sr. Scientific Advisor
ABC Laboratories
www.abclabs.com
 

A couple of weeks ago I had the privilege and pleasure of attending the 250th national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston.  I've attended ACS national meetings before, but for the uninitiated it can be a bit overwhelming: nearly 14,000 attendees; more than 9,000 individual oral papers presented to about thirty of the society's specialized divisions; and more than 300 companies exhibiting their services, instruments, publications, etc.; all spread out over more than a dozen meeting locations across Beantown.

I heard many terrific and relevant presentations sponsored or co-sponsored by the AGRO (Agrochemicals), ENVR (Environmental Chemistry), and ANYL (Analytical Chemistry) divisions, and even managed to catch a very interesting one on patents in the CHAL (Chemistry and the Law) division.  My colleagues and I also met with customers - both established and prospective, colleagues at our sister-companies of EAG, and some old friends as well.

One of the best parts of any scientific conference is the “poster session” – the poster presentations are almost always more focused and practical than the oral papers.  For me, they also evoke great memories of participating in “science fairs” from my younger days: the middle school tri-fold boards may be replaced by bigger, glossier, and more elegant professional posters; the lemon batteries and baking soda/vinegar volcanoes are replaced by more sophisticated investigations; still, the essence of the Scientific Method and the need to condense experiments to a short form of communication are all there.

AGRO poster session - ACS Fall 2015 Meeting - photo by Jim Schmidt

Most of all, for me, these meeting always evoke the spirit of the “Republic of Letters” – the intellectual exchange, over long-distances, among scholars in Europe and the Americas in the 1600s and 1700s.  I highly recommend a book I read a couple of years ago - Deborah Harkness’s The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (Yale University Press (2007) – for a sense of how it operated back then.  Centuries later, the ACS meeting in Boston remained witness to a thriving community of people who happily share their discoveries, interests, questions, and collections.

(As a modern bookend to the subject matter of The Jewel House, I also recommend the short and interesting article, “Cultivating Collaborations Online,” in the August 17, 2015 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, in which Bethany Halford explains how the Internet has “made chemistry partnerships blossom around the world”).

Look for my ABC colleagues at other upcoming conferences.

What meetings do you plan on attending in the near future? What excites you about attending them?