You travel a good few thousand miles and the last thing you want to see is your boss (no offence Stu). Thankfully, he’s back in the UK happy that I’m here doing all the running around associated with an ACS meeting, but I just can’t seem to get away from pictures of him.

I went to a talk by Sir Fraser Stoddart yesterday at which he received the 2008 ACS Arthur C. Cope award. His talk was a nice run through of some of the beautiful work he’s done (both aesthetically and chemically). Fraser likes to give credit to his old students by putting photos of them up on slides when he talks about the work they did. The Nature Chemistry chief editor, Stuart Cantrill, is a Stoddart protégé and thus the talk was littered with Cantrill references and pictures, to the point where he was acknowledged, alongside Stuart Rowan and Omar Yaghi, as a pioneer of the newly branded area of chemistry ‘mechanostereochemistry’ — high praise indeed.

Fraser even gave Nature Chemistry a mention. Reaching more people than I ever could in my whole week here, he named Stuart as someone who as the founding editor of Nature Chemistry could “considerably influence how chemistry develops in the future”.

And there was me thinking he was just someone who could considerably influence the time at which the Nature Chemistry editors get their next cup of tea! Get the kettle on Stu!

Gav

Gavin Armstrong (Associate editor, Nature Chemistry)