Valiant reporter Gez Cross got hot and sticky in the line of duty, and wound up by Web fever in Orlando last August
The meeting was smaller than usual, with fewer than 9 000 attendees compared to 12 - 15 000 for other ACS meetings that I have attended. There also seemed to be fewer exhibitors at the exposition. This seems to be a consequence of the Spring and Fall meetings being both in roughly the same geographical area. I suppose the fact that Orlando in late August is not the most comfortable place to be may also have had something to do with it - we had thunderstorms virtually every afternoon or evening and it was very hot and humid the rest of the time. The things we have to suffer in the line of duty!
Both CINF (Chemical Information) and COMP (Computers in Chemistry) Divisions had some good, interesting papers, especially on the Internet and Intranet applications, including a joint symposium on Chemical Information Intranets. This included a paper by CSA stalwart Sheila Ash, now working in St. Louis for Tripos on 'Web enabled Drug design for the chemist.' Other papers that I found of particular interest were those by MSI and MDL on their respective WebLab and Chemscape applications. It did seem that the major interest of most people attending the meeting was in this area of web technology, whether inter- or intranet. The sessions in these topics were generally very well attended. I went to the Skolnik award symposium honouring Dr Milan Randic, but most of it was above my head, and so I cannot comment on the papers.
Mixing and matching seems to be the name of the game these days, with users applying different software from any number of software developers to achieve the searching, viewing, analysing etc capabilities that they need for any given job. An example in one paper was a speaker who used Tripos 'Sketch and Fetch' as the front end to draw and search in Derwent's World Drug Index database held in Daylight format and display the results in what looked like a standard Merlin results display. Other examples were seen in the various collaborations announced, such as CAS, Daylight and Synopsys agreeing to work together to provide inhouse solutions for customers to link SciFinder with their own inhouse databases.
Other announcements included the creation of new centres for chemists on the Web: ChemCenter (http://www.ChemCenter.org) by ACS Pubs/ CAS; ChemWeb (http://www.ChemWeb.com) set up by MDL/Current Science. Both are worth visiting. ChemCenter is a useful tool if one is planning to go to a future ACS meeting , as it has easy links to the Meeting pages so that one can check out the programmes and accommodation. The next meetings are in San Francisco (Spring) and Las Vegas (Fall).
Social highlights included the CAS poolside barbecue on Saturday evening - unfortunately, my flight got in too late to manage the CINF reception as well - Harry's party on Monday evening, the Skolnik award reception on Tuesday and several very good meals, in the course of business discussions, naturally. Meeting up with other CSA members including Peter Nichols (whom I have to mention because he bought me a drink) and having the occasional chat (usually in the bar) with them is also part of the attraction of such meetings.
Gez Cross