{"id":2798,"date":"2011-08-10T00:28:01","date_gmt":"2011-08-10T00:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/2011\/08\/icbic15-feeling-jaded.html"},"modified":"2011-12-20T11:06:58","modified_gmt":"2011-12-20T11:06:58","slug":"icbic15_feeling_jaded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/2011\/08\/icbic15_feeling_jaded.html","title":{"rendered":"ICBIC15: Feeling jaded?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greetings from Vancouver, where I am attending ICBIC15<\/a> \u2013 the international conference on bio-inorganic chemistry. As the name suggests, this is the 15th instalment of this series of conferences\u2026or is it? There have been quite a few mentions of a mysterious \u2018ICBIC zero\u2019, which happened 35 years ago, also here at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Chris Orvig, the chair, showed us the programme from that meeting during his welcome address \u2013 as organizer, he was interested to see that there were no times for any of the talks, just \u2018morning\u2019 or \u2018afternoon\u2019! The only speaker at that conference who is also speaking this year is (no prizes for guessing) Harry Gray, who is quite a godfather of this field.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s not the only godfather though, and many long-standing members of this quite friendly community are giving jade anniversary lectures, to celebrate the 35 years passed since \u2018ICBIC 0\u2019. These jade lectures aren\u2019t the plenaries, however: these are being given by speakers who have never given plenaries at an ICBIC<\/span> before. All this adds up to a pretty good mix, because there have been some excellent plenaries from speakers at the younger end of the spectrum.<\/p>\n

There is a bit of drawback to these lectures (and not just that the conference programme has been printed black and white, so the jade lectures don\u2019t stand out like they do in the PDF<\/span>): the difficulty of trying to fit a lot of work into just 20 or 30 minutes! After complimenting Ed Solomon on doing well to keep to his 20 minute slot, Harry Gray said he was going to go one better and fit 35 years of work on electron transfer in proteins into 3 slides! He just about managed\u2026<\/p>\n

One of the jade lectures that I enjoyed the most was from Karl Wieghardt, and he almost managed to get through his whole talk without moving past the title slide! He was talking in the radical enzymes and non-innocent ligands sessions and certainly convinced me that bipyridine and terpyridine aren\u2019t anywhere near as innocent as people think. Terpyridine in particular can take on four electrons and thus have five different oxidation states and a variety of spin states. Although that\u2019s not what it says in Cotton & Wilkinson, it\u2019s what the X-ray data and DFT<\/span> calculations suggest.<\/p>\n

As this is quite a distinct and friendly community, I\u2019m going to leave the last word to Harry Gray. In his talk he mentioned that the two most important reactions in the world are photosynthesis and respiration. As he said, they\u2019re both firmly in the bio-inorganic field\u2026so tell that to the organic chemists!<\/p>\n

Neil<\/p>\n

Neil Withers (Associate Editor, Nature Chemistry)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greetings from Vancouver, where I am attending ICBIC15 \u2013 the international conference on bio-inorganic chemistry. As the name suggests, this is the 15th instalment of this series of conferences\u2026or is it? There have been quite a few mentions of a mysterious \u2018ICBIC zero\u2019, which happened 35 years ago, also here at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Chris Orvig, the chair, showed us the programme from that meeting during his welcome address \u2013 as organizer, he was interested to see that there were no times for any of the talks, just \u2018morning\u2019 or \u2018afternoon\u2019! The only speaker at that conference who is also speaking this year is (no prizes for guessing) Harry Gray, who is quite a godfather of this field.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conference-reports","category-neil-withers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/thescepticalchymist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}