SCIENCE
Efforts To Communicate Pimentel Report Set To Expand At final regional meeting on report, emphasis again focused on utility of chemistry for society, need to obtain increased financial support The fifth and final regional symposium on the National Research Council's report "Opportunities in Chemistry" was held recently at the University of California, Irvine. However, as emphasized by George C. Pimentel, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and chairman of the NRC committee that produced the report, and other speakers at the symposium, the real work for the chemical community is just beginning. That work must be a concerted effort to convey the central message of what, inevitably, has become known as the Pimentel Report to the people who need to hear it. The message is straightforward: Of all the sciences, chemistry is the most important in addressing tangible human needs, but it cannot fulfill its promise at present levels of financial support. The audience for that message, clearly, includes Congressmen and their staffs, funding agency officials, and others who control the purse strings. The bearers of the message, Pimentel told the two-day symposium, must be a large number of chemists from academe and industry working in unison over a period of several years. Though details of the campaign to communicate the message are still being worked out, several initiatives involving the American Chemical Society, NRC's Board on Chemical Sciences & Technology, and the Council on Chemi-
Pimentel: need to influence attitudes cal Research have been proposed and are being put into place. The Pimentel Report has been called a "towering achievement" and, indeed, as stressed by several speakers during the symposium, it is a remarkable catalog of chemistry's successes over the past 20 years and the intellectual challenges that lie ahead. Yet throughout the report, there is a not-at-all-subtle emphasis on dollars and the need for more of them, and that theme permeated discussions at the meeting. "You are probably w o n d e r i n g where your chemistry is in this report and how you are going to turn it into money," was how Harry B. Gray, chemistry professor at California Institute of Technology and a member of the committee that produced the report, opened his talk. The comment drew the intended laughs from the 50 chemists who participated in the symposium, but it was clear that such thoughts were in many of his listeners' minds. "Chemistry is in a golden age,"
Gray said, and he pointed to the contents of the Pimentel Report to make his point. "We must convince the public, legislators, and other scientists that this is so." The need to influence the attitudes of people outside chemistry is reflected in the structure of the report, Pimentel said. He pointed out that some chemists have voiced concern that the report's emphasis on chemistry's ability to address social needs might be construed by some as implying that chemistry is concerned primarily with short-term goals. The report's discussions of intellectual frontiers should lay such concerns to rest, Pimentel said. Another issue that has been raised is that by focusing on certain areas of chemical research as priorities for increased support, the report might stifle other important research. "That is the last thing we are interested in doing," Pimentel said. However, in an era of limited resources, choices must be made, and it makes sense to concentrate on promising areas. Hence the report's suggestion that research support be viewed as an investment portfolio with a significant part of the investment directed toward priority areas of research, another part directed toward "blue-sky" basic research, and a third part toward providing the expensive instrumentation needed to carry out the research. Judging by some of the comments at the symposium, chemists are coming to realize that, given the concern over the federal deficit, chemistry must actively compete with other disciplines for scarce resources. No one at the meeting was about to criticize other disciplines. However, there was a consensus that chemistry already is underfunded relative to, for instance, physics and astronomy, and because of the clear-cut January 27, 1986 C&EN
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Science benefits to society that can derive from chemical research, it should receive priority in a tight, overall research budget. Two other themes that ran through the symposium were the need to improve the public image of chemistry and the need to attract more and better students to careers in chemistry. Pimentel and other speakers suggested that "Opportunities in Chemistry" provides a resource for addressing both issues. Chemists, they said, should use the information in the report in public talks and other forums to convince people of the central role chemistry plays in modern society. And they s h o u l d use t h e r e p o r t in h i g h schools to convince students that chemistry, far from being the dryas-dust science many believe it to be, is in reality exciting and lively. According to William Spindel, staff director of NRC's Board on Chemical Sciences & Technology, those same three themes—increased financial support, improved public perception of chemistry, and attracting top students—ran through the four previous regional symposia on the Pimentel Report. Remarkably absent from all five meetings, he said, were suggestions that the report had slighted some important area of research in its coverage, an outcome he called a "pleasant surprise." Efforts to disseminate the Pimentel Report and implement its recommendations are under way, and others are being developed. Some of those recommendations, such as a National Science Foundation initiative to increase its support for chemistry 25% per year over the next three years, very likely won't happen, given the current budgetary climate. But as far as Pimentel is concerned, that should not be for lack of trying. What is needed, he says, "is a larger commitment of time by people in the chemical community to communicate the importance and needs of chemistry." ACS is making a major commitment to such an effort, including distribution of the Pimentel Report to Congressmen and several public education projects (C&EN, Jan. 20, page 53). Six regional coordinators have been named to assist those efforts, develop further activities, and 22
January 27, 1986 C&EN
facilitate communication among chemists interested in participating. They are chemistry professors William M. Risen Jr., Brown University; Royce W. Murray, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Arthur E. Martell, Texas A&M University; A. Louis Allred, Northwestern University; Mostafa A. El-Sayed, University of California, Los Angeles; and Alvin L. Kwiram, University of Washington. Until the end of the current academic year, when Kwiram returns from sabbatical, chemical engineering professor C. Judson King of the University of California, Berkeley, will act as the regional coordinator for the northwestern U.S. The Council on Chemical Re-
search also plans to take a lead role in disseminating the report, Pimentel said. Last year, representatives of ACS, NRC, and CCR met to discuss how to coordinate implementation of the report. Among their recommendations was that CCR hire someone w i t h a background in chemistry or chemical engineering to work in Washington, D.C., on such efforts. CCR also will work to provide industrial chemists and chemical engineers to lobby for the report. Academic chemists lobbying for research support can be viewed as self-motivated, Pimentel said. The same message from an industrial representative carries more weight. Rudy Baum, San Francisco
Revisions to periodic table spark controversy Rebecca L. Rawls, C&EN Washington
Mendeleev must be turning in his grave. More than five years after the American Chemical Society and the International Union of Pure & Applied Chemistry began efforts to find names for the groups in the periodic table that could be accepted by chemists t h r o u g h o u t t h e world, consensus seems as far away as it was when the effort began. Two years after the ACS committee dealing with the issue made its final recommendations, a prestigious group of U.S. chemists from the National Research Council is asking ACS not to implement those recommendations until the views of more chemists can be considered more thoroughly. "We haven't had a controversy as good as this one in a long time," says Mary L. Good, president of Signal Research Center, Des Plaines, 111. (a unit of Allied-Signal). "I think I annoyed some of my colleagues by saying I thought this whole situation was good for chemistry—and kind of fun," she adds. Good recently finished a four-year term as president of the inorganic division of IUPAC, which instigated the periodic table revision. Though Good may be able to smile about it, some others don't. "I shudder when I hear the words periodic table," says one member of the ACS Committee on Nomenclature.
Beginning in 1979 with the nomenclature committee of the ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry, ACS committees have been struggling, first to solicit opinions from the chemical community as to what would be an acceptable universal designation for the groups in the periodic table, then to meld those opinions into a recommendation that could be agreed upon throughout the community. From the committees' point of view, opinions were hard to come by when they would have been useful. Now, when the committees would like to consider the matter resolved, opinions, many of them sharply critical of the committees' recommendations, have become only too prevalent. The whole matter arose because European and U.S. scientists frequently use different letter designations for the same groups (or columns) in the periodic table. Though neither continent is completely uniform in its own usage, U.S. chemists usually follow the group number with the letter A when they are referring to the so-called main group elements on the right-hand side of the periodic table and the letter B for groups within the transition series. Europeans use the letters almost exactly oppositely. Thus, to most U.S. chemists, group IVB elements include titanium, zirconium, and hafnium. But to Europeans, this group usually means carbon, sili-
