Basolo elected ACS president-elect Fred Basolo, petition candidate from Northwestern University, has been elected president-elect of the American Chemical Society for 1982. Mail ballots cast in the society's national election and counted last week at ACS headquarters in Washington, D.C., reveal that he received a total of 15,752 votes in the three-way race, almost half of the 32,348 valid votes cast. Of his two opponents, Pauline Newman received a total of 11,154 votes and David C. Young received 7808 votes. Total votes for Basolo and Newman include second-choice votes for them indicated on first-choice ballots for Young. ACS bylaws call for this procedure when in a three-way race no candidate receives a majority of firstchoice votes. In the contest for seats on the ACS Board of Directors, Warren D. Niederhauser was re-elected from Region III, and Clayton F. Callis and Peter E. Yankwich were elected directors-
at-large, all for three-year terms beginning in 1982. For Region VI, the tally for candidates Richard M. Lemmon and Alan C. Nixon was so close (2675 for Lemmon and 2668 for Nixon) that an error in distribution of ballots proved sufficient to cast the results in doubt and thus require a rerun of the balloting for that post. The irony of this difficulty becomes evident in light of the previous election for Region VI director three years ago involving the same two candidates. Nixon, having lost that election by a very narrow margin, charged irregularities in ballot counting and filed suit against his opponent Lemmon and ACS in which he petitioned the courts to require a rerun of the election. None of the suits was successful, however. The problem in this year's Region VI balloting stems from a computer programing error in obtaining a list of members entitled to vote in that region, according to David A. Shirley, chairman of the ACS Committee on Nomination & Elections. That error, he says, resulted in the committee's
Berkeley honors Hildebrand on his 100th birthday Joel H. Hildebrand (right), celebrating his 100th birthday, acknowledges wellwishers' applause at a convocation of the College of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, that last week attracted more than 1000 friends, colleagues, and students. Hildebrand, an emeritus professor of chemistry at Berkeley, is wearing the newly established Berkeley Medal, which has been presented to him earlier by Berkeley vice chancellor Roderic B. Park (left). In presenting the medal, Park noted that Hildebrand already had received every other honor the university could bestow on an individual, including being the only person ever to have a building named after him while still alive. "So with our customary resourcefulness," Park said, "we created a new honor reserved for special people on very special occasions." A number of other speakers lauded Hildebrand's accomplishments as a resercher, teacher, and outdoorsman. C. Judson King, dean of the College of Chemistry, read birthday greetings from President Ronald Reagan, and chemistry professor George C. Pimentel read a resolution introduced in the U.S. House Committee on Science & Technology which noted the "active and noble life of Joel H. Hildebrand on his 100th birth-
day." The convocation kicked off a week of events honoring Hildebrand including a series of five research symposia on the chemistry of the liquid state, the centenarian's own area of research.
Fred Basolo
sending ballots to 1279 members in Canada in addition to the 421 Canadian members entitled to vote in Region VI. "The error was detected in time for us to identify, on receipt in Washington, nearly all the ballot envelopes returned by Canadian members who are not in Region VI," Shirley explains, "and we were able to determine the maximum possible vote error in this balloting. Thus, had one of the candidates won the election by a margin of more than this error, we should have been able to show unequivocally that the error could not alter the election outcome. "When the ballots were counted, however, the vote totals of the two candidates were so close that, with the questionable ballots taken into account, our committee could not determine with certainty that one candidate had won and the other had lost," he says. Thus, the committee declared the first balloting for that region's director invalid. It already has mailed (first class) new ballots to eligible members in Region VI for a revote. Deadline for receipt of the voted ballots at ACS headquarters is Monday, Dec. 21. In winning the president-elect post, Basolo successfully has challenged what he calls the practice within ACS in recent years of electing "our national officers by the efforts of a small group of well-organized members who rely on the indifference and inertia of the majority." He reckons that his candidacy by petition offered ACS members an alternative to that practice, recalling the period "when the presidency of ACS was a distinction conferred on some of the [country's] most able chemical scientists." His Nov. 23, 1981 C&EN 5
