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Report from IUPAC-Sponsored Symposium

 

International Congress on Analytical Sciences 2001 (ICAS2001),
6-10 August 2001, Tokyo, Japan

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by David S. Moore

The International Congress on Analytical Sciences 2001 was held 6-10 August at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. It was an extreme honor for me to be able to represent the IUPAC at this wonderfully-organized and executed congress. The congress is organized every ten years and is a huge undertaking—26 symposia, 5 plenary lectures, 281 invited talks, 250 other oral presentations and nearly 450 posters. It is truly international in scope and attendance—with nearly a thousand participants from 39 countries. If that isn't enough, this time the Congress was held jointly with Asianalysis VI—the Sixth Asian Conference on Analytical Sciences—and a Symposium on Traditional Chinese Medicine! Clearly the organizers of ICAS 2001—chaired by Tsuguo Sawada (Univ. of Tokyo), along with his Vice-Chairs: N. Nakamura (Sci. Univ. of Tokyo), Y. Umezawa (Univ. of Tokyo—member of the IUPAC Analytical Chemistry Division Committee), and K. Matsumoto (Waseda Univ.—member of the IUPAC Analytical Chemistry Division Committee) and the other 29 members of the Organizing Committee and 17 members of the International Advisory Board (chaired by H. Akaiwa, Gunma, Japan)—and the organizers of Asianalysis VI—chaired by T. Hobo (Tokyo Metropolitan Univ.) and the other 10 members of the Organizing Committee and 17 members of the International Advisory Board (chaired by B. Huang, Xiamen, China)—had to work together efficiently and smoothly. The excellent conferences they produced provide strong evidence that they more than succeeded in their task.

The symposia at ICAS 2001 covered all the fields of analytical chemistry that it seems possible to think of. From analytical atomic spectrometry and applied laser spectroscopy to nano-technology, separation science, and sensors of all kinds, the symposia and posters painted a broad canvas of the present state of the art in analytical science, and also suggested future directions and dreamed about future capabilities. What else could one want in such a conference? The only problem was selecting which of the many relevant and varied symposia to attend. I found myself wishing cloning was already a reality, or that I had accomplices with whom to share the task!

The International Advisory Board suggested to the ICAS organizers that the field of Analytical Science was developing rapidly enough to warrant thinking about increasing the frequency of this conference from once per decade to twice. The general consensus was that, while this increase would mean a doubling of their work load, the payoff to the international analytical science community would be worth the price. Regardless of their decision, the international analytical science community anxiously awaits the next ICAS, and we at IUPAC hope to be again involved.

The plenary lectures by Drs. A. Manz, S. Terabe, M. Takagi, G. M. Hieftje, and Y. R. Shen as well as two selected invited talks by Drs. E. Yeung and T. Sawada are now published in the October 2001 issue of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The Conference editor, Dr. Yoshio Umezawa insured that the papers were like the lectures, well balanced in terms of chemical and physical methods of analysis, and all were seminal.

David S. Moore is President of the IUPAC Analytical Chemistry Division.

<http://www.iupac.org/publications/pac/2001/7310/index.html>

 

> Published in Chem. Int. 24(2), 2002


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