Nature’s Katharine Sanderson is now in sunny San Francisco at the American Chemical Society spring meeting. She’s under orders to attend as many of the 13,000 presentations and speak to as many of the 16,000 attending chemists as she can.
Her blog posts from the meeting are up on our In the Field blog.
Also in attendance at the meeting is a crack team from Nature Chemistry. Their musings can be found on our Sceptical Chymist blog.
Here are Katharine’s highlights so far.
Nanoparticles help deliver Taxol safely
One of the hopes of nanoparticle technology is for drug delivery. And the field is having some success. A paper in Nature, published today for example has shown how siRNAs can be delivered directly to tumours using nanoparticles. Eugene Zubarev from Rice University spoke at the ACS meeting this morning about some other successes in using nanoparticles, made from gold, for treating cancer. And it’s pretty neat stuff.
The theme of this conference is sustainability and green chemistry, loosely speaking. The plenary session this afternoon embraced this theme with gusto and focussed on how green chemistry can save the world.
Cold fusion calorimeter confusion
Since its triumphal return to the ACS three years ago, cold fusion seems to have gathered momentum.
The big hitters are out in force to tell us how important Green Chemistry is. None other than the father of green chemistry-turned EPA science advisor gave a talk this evening in impressive style.
Only 12,996 presentations to go Katharine…