This afternoon I went to the Presidential Plenary Symposium, hoping to get a nice overview of what chemistry really has to do with global security. The symposium was in a huge ballroom, which looked all the bigger because only about 5 percent of the seats were occupied.

I was a little disappointed in these talks, in part because they didn’t have much chemistry in them. But there was certainly an interesting cast of speakers with impressive resumes. The talks started with Vahid Majidi, who’s the assistant director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate at the FBI. He’s also been chief scientific officer of the Department of Justice and the leader of the chemistry division at Los Alamos.

Majidi started out trying to relate global security to chemistry: while chemists work with moles per liter, he works with humans per area of land; chemists think about the nature of the analyte, he thinks about intent. “We both suffer from heterogeneous analyte distribution,” he says, along with “interfering species”— good people who look like bad people. I appreciated the attempted empathy but was still waiting for the connection to actual chemistry.

To that end, he went no farther than showing a few slides of case studies in which the FBI caught people with chemical WMDs — pufferfish toxin, ricin, uranium, chlorine. Pretty interesting cases, but after the overviews he focused on the FBI’s general strategy of stopping WMDs (various steps of intervention). There must be loads of fascinating research going into new ways of detecting and destroying chemical and biological WMD’s but it looks like I’ll have to seek out a different session for the real stuff. (Luckily, the schedule’s full of such goodies.)

After Majidi came Mark Wrighton, who was delivering the academic perspective on chemistry and global security. He’s chancellor of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and as advertised had a different view of global security than Majidi. To him, the greatest threats to global security are energy and the environment, problems which “will be with us for the remainder of the century,” he says. “Chemists will play a vital role,” he added.

This year he vice-chaired a National Research Council committee on America’s energy future, and spent much of his time at the symposium going over the committee’s analysis. He started out setting the rather grim stage of our current energy situation — our overreliance on fossil fuels (85 percent of our energy needs), scary population growth stats for India and China, mounting volatility in fossil fuel market prices, and of course climate change, which Wrighton calls the most compelling argument.

He listed the ways chemists could help with the CO2 problem — geological storage, photobiological reduciton of CO2 to fuels (i.e., biofuels), electrochemical reduction of CO2 to something more useful. All very interesting stuff, but he too left out all the juicy bits. I would have really liked to see Stephanie Burns give the business perspective, as she’s president, chairman and CEO of Dow Corning, but she wasn’t able to make it.

Overall, both talks were nice and easy. Though pretty shallow on the details, they gave some non-chemistry context that suggests potential global applications. I’ve got the next four days here to get all the details.

Image: ACS President Thomas Lane. ACS.org

This afternoon I went to the Presidential Plenary Symposium, hoping to get a nice overview of what chemistry really has to do with global security. The symposium was in a huge ballroom, which looked all the bigger because only about 5 percent of the seats were occupied.

I was a little disappointed in these talks, in part because they didn’t have much chemistry in them. But there was certainly an interesting cast of speakers with impressive resumes. The talks started with Vahid Majidi, who’s the assistant director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate at the FBI. He’s also been chief scientific officer of the Department of Justice and the leader of the chemistry division at Los Alamos.

Majidi started out trying to relate global security to chemistry: while chemists work with moles per liter, he works with humans per area of land; chemists think about the nature of the analyte, he thinks about intent. “We both suffer from heterogeneous analyte distribution,” he says, along with “interfering species”— good people who look like bad people. I appreciated the attempted empathy but was still waiting for the connection to actual chemistry.

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