The meeting is winding down a little and although the week has been good, I’m pleased because I’m ready to come home. These meetings are usually tiring but this one in particular seems to have really taken it out of me. Maybe the jetlag and the 11 hour flight play a role but mostly it’s the long days and that you never really switch off during the week.

This ACS meeting I’ve really struggled to find the time to go to that many presentations so I’ve not really got much to say about the science that has been presented. The ones I have seen have been on the whole good, but people don’t tend to present their latest findings at ACS meetings – unlike in more closed meetings such as the Gordon conferences. So the best way to get the latest info is to just talk to people outside of the presentations. That’s why before I came I organized to catch up with a handful of chemists who I wanted to chat to about various things, like what they were up to in the lab at the minute, their opinion on our first 12 issues (everyone I spoke to likes what we doing – Yay!), what they’ve seen in the literature that’s exciting them etc.

And they always have a load of questions for me too. A few have cropped up in pretty much every conversation this week. Everyone wants to talk about impact factors. I can understand why, because they have (quite ridiculously) become, it seems, the most important metric to measure a journal and therefore a way to measure an academic by noting where they publish. To answer the questions that I keep being asked – we don’t really think about it, we haven’t got one yet, it comes in 2011 and it’s far too early to predict (I jokingly tried to predict it in earlier in the year, extrapolating using 2 (!) weeks of citation data and came up with an impact factor of 140,000! I think I was a little out).

Another question that comes up all the time: do you sit near the editors of the other physical science journals (Materials, Nano, Physics, etc…) and do you discuss papers? Yes, I sit just close enough to Peter Rodgers of Nature Nanotechnology to remind him that the pretty football Arsenal play isn’t going to win them the Premier League, but no, we don’t discuss papers that have been submitted. The journals based in London share the same office and we go for lunch and beers together (not at the same time!) but we are completely editorially independent and, in fact, rivals for certain papers that could fit the scope of several NPG journals.

There are other questions that get asked about our editorial processes and I think we’ll try to answer a few of them over the coming weeks and months on the blog.

I have a few more meetings so I’ll keep track of what I’m asked and keep you posted.

Gavin (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

I’ve arrived safe and sound in sunny San Francisco for the ACS meeting. The journey here was trouble-free and actually quite pleasant. I managed to watch a film, read four manuscripts and see the stunning scenery of Greenland, the Rockies and San Francisco.

The meeting is underway and I spent the morning in a session dedicated to Bob Madix (hopefully I’ll blog more about it later) but no amount of coffee is letting me break through the jetlag wall that I’ve just hit. So I thought I’d skip the afternoon sessions and retire to my hotel room to send some emails and write a quick blog entry.

This is my third ACS meeting in as many years and I think that I’m learning how to cope with them. They’re crazy meetings in that there are thousands of people here, tens of parallel sessions and just a phenomenal amount of chemistry being fired at you from all directions. I do enjoy them but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a tough week. My plan for this meeting is to catch up with a few people over lunch and dinner, chat to whoever swings by the Nature stand (booth #1000 – come say hi!) and maybe take in fewer sessions than I usually do i.e. I might miss a session here and there unlike in previous years when I’ve been to all sessions possible. It does feel a little like cutting class though!

I’ve got a very loose plan for which sessions I’m going to attend but the actual planning of where to go is a bit of a nightmare. To help out those of you who are unsure about who you should see speak, I thought I’d mention a few sessions that I think are worth a visit. Firstly, there is a great line-up of speakers in a session on Tuesday that has been organised by a group of students (The Graduate Student Symposium Planning Committee – GSSPC). They’ve organized a symposium called ‘Chemistry and the developing world’ and have some top chemists giving presentations (Angela Belcher, Paul O’Brien and Sean Cutler for example). For more info see here.

Secondly, one of our very recent authors, Randy Goldsmith, is giving a presentation tomorrow and he has the unenviable task of speaking at the same time as the Presidential event. The research he’ll be talking about was published in, and is in fact on the cover of, our current issue and it is very cool (single molecule spectroscopy of a fluorescent protein) so do go along and see him talk.

I’ll also be in the Physical Chemistry Awards Symposium which is always great. This year’s eclectic bunch of presentations sees, amongst other topics, some atmospheric chemistry from Kim Prather, some computational nanoscience from George Schatz and a presentation on the dynamics of electronic excited states from Peter Rossky.

And also don’t miss Nature’s very own Jason Wilde (he’s the boss of my boss!) speaking on Tuesday in a session on the Future of Scholarly Communication.

Make sure you follow our tweets from @naturechemistry and also the Twitter tag #acs_sf during the week!

Gavin (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

I’ve arrived safe and sound in sunny San Francisco for the ACS meeting. The journey here was trouble-free and actually quite pleasant. I managed to watch a film, read four manuscripts and see the stunning scenery of Greenland, the Rockies and San Francisco.

The meeting is underway and I spent the morning in a session dedicated to Bob Madix (hopefully I’ll blog more about it later) but no amount of coffee is letting me break through the jetlag wall that I’ve just hit. So I thought I’d skip the afternoon sessions and retire to my hotel room to send some emails and write a quick blog entry.

This is my third ACS meeting in as many years and I think that I’m learning how to cope with them. They’re crazy meetings in that there are thousands of people here, tens of parallel sessions and just a phenomenal amount of chemistry being fired at you from all directions. I do enjoy them but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a tough week. My plan for this meeting is to catch up with a few people over lunch and dinner, chat to whoever swings by the Nature stand (booth #1000 – come say hi!) and maybe take in fewer sessions than I usually do i.e. I might miss a session here and there unlike in previous years when I’ve been to all sessions possible. It does feel a little like cutting class though!

I’ve got a very loose plan for which sessions I’m going to attend but the actual planning of where to go is a bit of a nightmare. To help out those of you who are unsure about who you should see speak, I thought I’d mention a few sessions that I think are worth a visit. Firstly, there is a great line-up of speakers in a session on Tuesday that has been organised by a group of students (The Graduate Student Symposium Planning Committee – GSSPC). They’ve organized a symposium called ‘Chemistry and the developing world’ and have some top chemists giving presentations (Angela Belcher, Paul O’Brien and Sean Cutler for example). For more info see here.

Secondly, one of our very recent authors, Randy Goldsmith, is giving a presentation tomorrow and he has the unenviable task of speaking at the same time as the Presidential event. The research he’ll be talking about was published in, and is in fact on the cover of, our current issue and it is very cool (single molecule spectroscopy of a fluorescent protein) so do go along and see him talk.

I’ll also be in the Physical Chemistry Awards Symposium which is always great. This year’s eclectic bunch of presentations sees, amongst other topics, some atmospheric chemistry from Kim Prather, some computational nanoscience from George Schatz and a presentation on the dynamics of electronic excited states from Peter Rossky.

And also don’t miss Nature’s very own Jason Wilde (he’s the boss of my boss!) speaking on Tuesday in a session on the Future of Scholarly Communication.

Make sure you follow our tweets from @naturechemistry and also the Twitter tag #acs_sf during the week!

Gavin (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

In December, we published an editorial called “Questioning chemistry” that discussed the definition of chemistry on the back of the recent awarding of the Nobel prize in chemistry for research into the “structure and function of the ribosome”. It was further discussed here on the Sceptical Chymist.

We have since received a comment from Dr. Paolo Ghigna at the University of Pavia giving his views on the apathy of some chemists to the award. These can be found below and may just spark off a little more debate on the subject.

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

The Editorial in the December 2009 issue of Nature Chemistry remarked on the apathy of the chemical community for the 2009 Nobel prize.

Of course, such a debate would entail the definition of ‘chemistry’, and the editorial defines chemistry as ‘the study of matter and its transformation’. Although it is true, as the editorial says, that “defining research topics is becoming increasingly difficult”, this definition is really too broad to be effective. On one side, elephants are pieces of matter, and during their lives, they go through transformations; on the other side, neutrinos are also pieces of matter that also transform. But no one would doubt the fact that the study of elephants’ life is pertinent to biology, and that studying neutrino oscillations would be the business of physics.

We are then carried back to the question ‘What is chemistry?’. For sure, chemistry is a way of studying matter but we also have to ask how chemists study what kind of matter. To answer this question, as is implicit in the editorial, we need to think about what is the focal point in chemistry classrooms. The large majority of the chemical community would agree that this is the notion of ‘chemical reaction’: chemists are proud of their chemical intuition, that is the ability of being able to predict how a compound would react even in the absence of detailed kinetic and thermodynamic information.

A further step forward can be made simply by looking at the IUPAC definition of a chemical reaction “a process that results in the interconversion of chemical species” Now, a definition of ‘chemical species’ is required. Looking again at IUPAC one finds that a ‘chemical species’ is “an ensemble of chemically identical molecular entities that can explore the same set of molecular energy levels on the time scale of the experiment. The term is applied equally to a set of chemically identical atomic or molecular structural units in a solid array”. Note how, with this definition, questioning about what is pertinent to chemistry does not involve problems of length scale: any crystal of rock salt belongs to a chemical species, is usually much bigger than a ribosome, and is not a molecular species (this is a point chemists tend to forget. For example, CaF2 was named ‘molecule of the week’ on the ACS website).

Probably, one of the reasons for the debate could be that chemists do not recognize a ribosome as a “chemical species”: a ribosome does not fulfill the IUPAC definition. Or, to look at the flip side of the coin, can we apply our chemical intuition to a ribosome?

In December, we published an editorial called “Questioning chemistry” that discussed the definition of chemistry on the back of the recent awarding of the Nobel prize in chemistry for research into the “structure and function of the ribosome”. It was further discussed here on the Sceptical Chymist.

We have since received a comment from Dr. Paolo Ghigna at the University of Pavia giving his views on the apathy of some chemists to the award. These can be found below and may just spark off a little more debate on the subject.

Gavin Armstrong (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)

The Editorial in the December 2009 issue of Nature Chemistry remarked on the apathy of the chemical community for the 2009 Nobel prize.

Of course, such a debate would entail the definition of ‘chemistry’, and the editorial defines chemistry as ‘the study of matter and its transformation’. Although it is true, as the editorial says, that “defining research topics is becoming increasingly difficult”, this definition is really too broad to be effective. On one side, elephants are pieces of matter, and during their lives, they go through transformations; on the other side, neutrinos are also pieces of matter that also transform. But no one would doubt the fact that the study of elephants’ life is pertinent to biology, and that studying neutrino oscillations would be the business of physics.

We are then carried back to the question ‘What is chemistry?’. For sure, chemistry is a way of studying matter but we also have to ask how chemists study what kind of matter. To answer this question, as is implicit in the editorial, we need to think about what is the focal point in chemistry classrooms. The large majority of the chemical community would agree that this is the notion of ‘chemical reaction’: chemists are proud of their chemical intuition, that is the ability of being able to predict how a compound would react even in the absence of detailed kinetic and thermodynamic information.

A further step forward can be made simply by looking at the IUPAC definition of a chemical reaction “a process that results in the interconversion of chemical species” Now, a definition of ‘chemical species’ is required. Looking again at IUPAC one finds that a ‘chemical species’ is “an ensemble of chemically identical molecular entities that can explore the same set of molecular energy levels on the time scale of the experiment. The term is applied equally to a set of chemically identical atomic or molecular structural units in a solid array”. Note how, with this definition, questioning about what is pertinent to chemistry does not involve problems of length scale: any crystal of rock salt belongs to a chemical species, is usually much bigger than a ribosome, and is not a molecular species (this is a point chemists tend to forget. For example, CaF₂ was named ‘molecule of the week’ on the ACS website).

Probably, one of the reasons for the debate could be that chemists do not recognize a ribosome as a “chemical species”: a ribosome does not fulfill the IUPAC definition. Or, to look at the flip side of the coin, can we apply our chemical intuition to a ribosome?