President’s Column - Chemistry in Australia - March 1993 Issue

Johnston GAR ‘In Praise of Large Conferences’ Chemistry in Australia, 1993, 60, 105

The first scientific conference that I ever attended was the IUPAC Symposium on The Chemistry of Natural Products held in Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney over two weeks in August 1960. It attracted some 500 chemists, including some of the all time greats of chemistry to Australia - like Barton, Djerassi, Robinson, Todd and Woodward. As a young and naive MSc student at The University of Sydney at the time, I probably thought that all scientific conferences would be more or less like this meeting. In actual fact it was a truly exceptional conference. It was the inaugural IUPAC Symposium on Natural Products and was a landmark event for Australian chemistry. It took advantage of Australia’s pioneering work in natural products chemistry and won many friends for Australian chemistry in the world at large. Being held in 3 cities was quite an innovation that added to the camaraderie that I now know to be such an important ingredient of conferences, and broke down some of the territorial barriers between a single host city and the visitors. The conference organisation itself brought many Australian chemists together in a common cause - and as with other international conferences in Australia, the conference topic was widely interpreted such that most Australian chemists could participate if they so wished!

1st International Symposium on the Chemistry of Natural Products (Johnson, 1993)

I was especially fortunate that this IUPAC Symposium gave me the opportunity to meet many of the world’s leading chemists; my next door neighbour in Sydney happened to be Claude Nicholls, then RACI President and Vice President of the IUPAC Symposium. I was able to meet the President of the IUPAC Symposium, Sir Alexander Todd, and was so impressed by his opening address in the Wilson Hall at The University of Melbourne that I decided that I wanted to do my PhD with him! Clearly, this IUPAC Symposium had a substantial effect on my career. Looking through the symposium literature recently reinforced my memories of a conference both scientifically and socially glittering. The Symposium Banquet (cost £3/-/-) was held at the grand old Hotel Canberra and featured good Australian food (oysters, sole, beef, and papaw dressed up with French names) and wine (Mildara Supreme Sherry, Tintara Eden Moselle 1958, Tulloch’s Pokolbin Dry Red Hermitage 1957, and Mildara Pot Still Brandy). This banquet gave me the opportunity to meet the President of the Australian Academy of Science, Sir John Eccles - I was to join Eccles’ department at ANU in 1965 and to work at the John Curtin School for a further 15 years!

All this demonstrates some of the positive aspects of large conferences. I have been to a lot of conferences over the intervening years - I went to the second IUPAC Symposium on the Chemistry of Natural Products in Prague in 1963 and to the 10th in Dunedin in 1976. A highlight of the latter was Fred Sanger’s lecture on his newly developed procedure for DNA sequencing for which he was to receive his second Nobel Prize. In more recent years I have become very involved in organising international meetings, including two very successful international meetings in Sydney, the pharmacology meeting in 1987 which attracted more than 3,000 delegates and the rather smaller neurochemistry meeting in 1991 (800 delegates). But now I am involved in a really large meeting - Pacifichem 95. The 1989 meeting of the chemistry societies from countries bordering the Pacific Ocean attracted over 7,000 people and we are expecting something like 12,000 for the 1995 meeting. We are organising lecture room facilities for 49 concurrent sessions. Fortunately the American Chemical Society conference staff are experts at providing for such large meetings - though they have the complication of having to accommodate the best intentions of the other host societies, the Canadian Society for Chemistry, the Chemical Society of Japan, the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry. International meetings are inherently more complicated than national meetings, cultural, economic and scientific diversities being what they are.

1993 Banquet Invitation	1993 Banquet Toasts	1993 Banquet Menu

The recent RACI 9th National Convention at Monash was a great success and the Convention Lectures were particularly good. Ron Dickson and his Organising Committee did an excellent job. I attended lectures in 4 of the divisional programs and gained the impression that the specialist, as well as the general, interests of chemists were well catered for. The gap between 8NC in 1987 and 9NC in 1992 was too long. We hope that we can get together a 9 year program of National Conventions with 10NC in 1995, 11NC in 1998 and 12NC in 2001. Furthermore, we want to encourage more international meetings to be held in Australia. The organisational cost is great but represents a most worthwhile investment of our time and energy. These large conferences are not only an important opportunity to show off and add value to Australian chemistry, they have far reaching influences on our young chemists and their future careers as my own experience illustrates.

Emeritus Professor Graham Johnston AM FTSE, FRACI, FRSN, FASCEPT, BSc, PhD, DPharm Graduated from The University of Sydney in 1959 BSc with 1st Class Honours & the University Medal in Organic Chemistry. PhD in organic chemistry at The University of Cambridge graduating in 1964. After a postdoc at The University of California, Berkeley took up a position in 1965 at the John Curtin School of Medical Research at The Australian National University. After 15 very productive years at ANU, moved to The University of Sydney to take up the Chair of Pharmacology in 1980. Formally retired in 2011 to become an Emeritus Professor of Pharmacology and Medicinal Chemistry continuing research studies. More than 32,345 citations in Google Scholar to January 2025; 3 publications areCitation Classics,and 82 have been cited more than 100 times (h-index: 92 publications have been cited at least 92 times). I am grateful to my many excellent students and co-workers that have enabled me to participate in such studies RACI President in 1993

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