Here I am having a whale of a time at the Fraser Stoddart 65th birthday celebrations. Celebrating a birthday with science; I like it. I like it a lot. The line up of speakers is incredibly impressive. These are all people I would want to hear talk at, say, a huge meeting like the ACS. But the beauty of this conference is that you don’t have to wade through 15000 abstracts to find the best speakers. They’re all here, undiluted.

I wrote a news story about the festivities, but was just too late to include one of the highlights of the conference – Chad Mirkin has used his dip-pen nanolithography technique to draw Fraser’s portrait in a one-molecule high layer of 16-mercaptohexadecanoic acid on a gold surface. Unfortunately I can’t post pictures here, but I will update later with a link to the pic. It’s well worth seeing.

UPDATE: The portrait is here