News of the Week
ACS ATTRACTS 6400 TO HOUSTON The American Chemical Society's 179th national meeting last week in Houston was not big by Texas standards. And even by ACS standards, its size, measured in number of registrants and of papers presented, was not so large as some other recent meetings. By midweek, registration had reached about 6400. And a total of about 2100 papers was presented by 26 ACS divisions. Highlights among these varied technical presentations included details of the newly developed meltprocessable conducting polymer poly(p-phenylene sulfide) (see page 36); peptides involved in human fertility; polymers wrapped around metal clusters; and laser fluorescence immunoassay, which has been developed as an alternative to radioimmunoassay. These scientific advances are described in the next several articles. But there was much more going on in Houston, including meetings of the ACS Board of Directors and ACS Council, a hearing by the U.S. copyright office, and a well-attended question-and-answer session on the Toxic Substances Control Act conducted by spokesmen from the Environmental Protection Agency. And the ACS Employment Clearing House, a regular feature at national meetings, carried on its business at a steady, if not spectacular, pace. By midweek some 1400 interviews had been conducted among 360 employee candidates and 212 employers. At its first of four scheduled meetings this year, the ACS Board, among other things, approved an almost break-even 1980 general fund budget of a little more than $59 million. Within that budget, dues-supported activities are scheduled to run up a $300,000 deficit this year. The board also approved sending Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev a letter from ACS strongly protesting persecution by Soviet authorities of Nobel Laureate physicist Andrei Sakharov. The statement will be prepared by the ACS International Activities Committee's subcommittee on scientific freedom and/or human rights. The ACS Council, in a five-anda-half-hour session, voted to increase ACS national dues next year $4.00 to 4
C&EN March 31, 1980
reach $52. As was the case last year, councilors exercised their option to raise dues by a smaller amount than the automatic escalator, which would have been $6.00 for 1981 dues. Among other actions, councilors approved meeting sites for 1986 to recommend to the ACS Board—Atlantic City in the spring and Anaheim, Calif., in the
fall. They also approved 1981 subscription prices for ACS journals and magazines. The council acted on eight petitions to change the constitution and/or bylaws. Of these, it adopted five, recommitted two, and declined a request for urgent action on another (C&EN, March 10, page 43). •
FROM ACS HOUSTON
ticularly workers, exposed to toxic chemicals in the workplace. He presented his studies to the Division of Chemical Health & Safety. Broitman has been doing epidemiologic studies, and he and his colleague Joseph A. Vitale are associated with Boston City Hospital. Their paper was given in the Division of Agricultural & Food Chemistry. Vitamin A deficiencies can lead to gastric ulcerations. Rodents deprived of the vitamin can become especially susceptible to toxins, including alkylating agents, Seifter says. Exposure to such toxic chemicals represents a kind of stress, he explains, and the body's response is to shift to muscles blood from organs such as the stomach and the skin. "Vitamin A can abrogate these responses," he says. Recently he has extended these observations to include radiation damage as well as toxic chemicals effects. Increasing dietary vitamin A relieves some of the damage inflicted by these external stresses, he continues. The vitamin doses are in "the safe range," being about 10-fold higher
Lack of Vitamin A, iron tied to gastric ulcers A sputtering interest in nutrition as a means for controlling cancer was in evidence at the ACS meeting in Houston. But the sprawling nature of the meeting apparently helped to keep people with similar interests from coming together. The case of Eli Seifter and Selwyn A. Broitman is an example of two scientists who have made similar observations but whose disciplines are keeping them in separate domains. The result typifies the mismatches that often occur at large meetings. But it also is typical of the state of nutritional research, which tends to drift into the larger public arena before being evaluated or consolidated. Seifter is a biochemist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. He has been studying vitamin A deficiencies in rodents, but his interests extend to people, par-
