CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS 1155— 16th St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 (202) 872-4600 Letters to Editor:
[email protected] EDITOR: Madeleine Jacobs MANAGING EDITOR: Rudy M Baum SENIOR CORRESPONDENTS: Lois R Ember, James H. Kricger, Wilbert C. Lepkowski NEWS EDITOR: Richard J. Seltzer ACS NEWS EDITOR: William G. Schulz EDITOR-AT-LARGE: Michael Heylin BUSINESS William J. Storck, Assistant Managing Editor Northeast: (908) 906-8300. Marc S. Reisch (Senior Editor), Elisabeth Kirschner (Associate Editor), George Peaff (Associate Editor), Rachel Eskenazi (Administrative Assistant). Houston: (713) 558-2912, Susan J. Ainsworth (Bureau Head); (713) 486-3900, Ànn M. Thayer (Senior Editor). H o n g K o n g : 852-2984-9072 JeanFrançois Tremblay (Associate Editor). London: 44 181 870-6884. Patricia Layman (Senior Editor). GOVERNMENT Janice R. Long, Assistant Managing Editor Washington: (202) 872-4495. David J. Hanson (Bureau Head), Bette Hileman (Senior Editor), Linda R. Raber (Associate Editor) SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY/EDUCATION Pamela S. Zurer, Assistant Managing Editor Washington: (202) 872-4505. Rebecca L. Rawls (Senior Correspondent), Stuart A. Borman (Senior Editor), Mairin B. Brennan (Senior Editor), Doron Dagani (Senior Editor), A. Maureen Rouhi (Associate Editor). Northeast: (908) 906-8301. Stephen C. Stinson (Senior Editor). West Coast: (510) 849-0575. Elizabeth K. Wilson (Assistant Editor). London: 44 1256-811052. Michael Freemantle (Senior Editor). EDITING & PRODUCTION Ernest L. Carpenter, Assistant Managing Editor Robin M. Giroux (Associate Editor), Stephen K. Ritter (Associate Editor), Julie Grisham (Assistant Editor), Arlene Goldberg-Gist (Head, Editing Services), Rita E. Johnson (Assistant Editor). ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT Patricia Oates (Administrative Assistant), Diana L. Higgins (Program Assistant) GRAPHICS & PRODUCTION Alan Kalian (Head), Phillip Payette (Art Director), Linda Mattingly (Staff Artist) Composition Systems: Vincent L. Parker (Manager), Robin L. Braverman (Assistant) ADVISORY BOARD Jeannene Ackerman, Steven W. Baldwin, Marvin Cassman, E. Gary Cook, Debbie C. Crans, Samuel J. Danishefsky, Gerald Epstein, James E. Evans, Slayton A. Evans Jr., Michael J. Ferris, Marye Anne Fox, Diana Garcia-Prichard, Man' L. Good, Carlos G. Gutierrez, Dudley R. Herschbach, J. Roger Hirl, Robert J. Huggett, Richard A. Lerner, Stephen J. Lippard, Leo E. Manzer, Gary L. Mossman, Hans C. Noetzli, Jane Margaret O'Brien, Don H. Olsen, Janet G. Osteryoung, Gregory A. Petsko, Alan Schriesheim, Peter J. Stang, Kathleen C. Taylor, David A. Tirrell, Tamae Maeda Wong Published by AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY (202) 872-4600; TDD (202) 872-4432 John Kistler Crum, Executive Director Robert H. Marks, Director, Publications Division PUBLISHING BOARD Joseph A. Dixon (Chairman); ACS Board of Directors Chairman: Joan E. Shields; ACS President: Ronald Breslow; Paul S. Anderson, Judith C. Giordan, Eisa Reichmanis, Paul H. L. Walter
• E D I T O R ' S F»AC3E
Beyond The Headlines
A
s editor of this magazine, I have a ι recurring nightmare: It's 9 AM FriIday, and the magazine is being collated at 10,500 copies an hour at the Mack printing plant in Easton, Pa. I turn to the Reuters newswire and learn that MegaChemical Corp. has bought its competitor for $4 billion. The news will be in Saturday's newspaper—but we've lost the story for our issue dated Monday and will have to wait an entire week to write about it. That's the recurring nightmare of a weekly newsmagazine—at some point, the magazine goes to press, but the news goes on. So we at Chemical & Engineering News recognize that we can almost never compete with a daily newspaper for breaking news—the pa per will usually have it out before we do. One exception is in our reporting of hard-core chemical research—an area largely ignored by the daily media but of great interest to our readers (see page 6). What we can routinely do bet ter than a daily newspaper—and what we strive to achieve each week—is delve beyond the daily headlines to illu minate the news. The stories in this week's issue are examples. To begin, we have the cover story (see page 10) by Senior Correspondent Lois Ember. Last week, the media re ported on the security guard who was finally cleared as a suspect in the bomb ing at Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park in July. Almost unmentioned in some of these stories was the fact that this bombing remains unsolved—and could be the act of a disgruntled indi vidual or a group intent on terrorism. Ember has been following the efforts of law enforcement officials to counter possible terrorist activities, a task that has become this country's top national security priority. She wrote about those efforts in the July 1 issue (page 22) and follows up in this issue with a News Focus about a major multiagency effort spearheaded by the FBI to combat chemical and biological terrorism. You won't find this story, involving the work of chemists and other scientists, in any other publication. Or take the story by C&EN Associ ate Editor Elisabeth Kirschner on plas
tics recycling—another topic capturing daily headlines (see page 19). Kirschner takes a critical look at what's happened to the plastics recycling industry, now going through "a rough adolescence.'' Also in the business department, our Pacific Rim Correspondent JeanFrançois Tremblay brings an insider's look to the Thai chemical industry as it seeks to become a petrochemical powerhouse in Asia (see page 23). On the government scene, Associate Editor Linda Raber reports on the upcoming efforts by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to increase the proportion of high-risk, potentially high-payoff biomedical research it supports. NIGMS supplies over 60% of NIH research support to chemistry departments and is clearly venturing into uncharted territory. C&EN was one of the first publications to write about the promise of combinatorial chemistry. Now that this field has entered the mainstream, Senior Editor Stu Borman examines a hot new application being pursued by several of chemistry's brightest stars: using combinatorial techniques to discover catalysts for enantioselective synthesis. Borman points out that no catalysts have yet been found using these methods, but several have been identified by parallel synthesis and high-throughput screening—techniques that begin to approach combinatorial chemistry in technical sophistication and efficiency. Senior Correspondent Rebecca Rawls takes readers behind last month's headlines on the experiment to ^fertilize" the oceans with iron (see page 40). Reading Rawls's story, I was especially struck by the statement that results from the experiments "make iron a great candidate for what causes the temperature changes that produce ice ages." Of course, there's more in this issue . . . but there's a hot story that I've got to track down . . . so I've got to run. But remember, you read it here first.
^fïUJUiukjuQjUffa' Editor
NOVEMBER 4, 1996 C&EN 5
