In my imagination, conferences in the past involved a passionate speaker (usually wearing a hat) who was disclosing his/her latest discoveries, vehemently speaking or writing on a blackboard (sometimes performing live experiments) while the audience was listening in a profound, respectful silence.

Today, what I saw was somewhat different – and I’m not talking of speakers not wearing hats. Actually, I was at a presentation seating next to a professor, who was preparing the powerpoint he was going to present in the afternoon. To do this, he had to ask his collaborator, seated next to him, about the meaning of some graphs he intended to include in the presentation. This took approximately one hour, and was quite disturbing to all the people around, since the discussion included mumblings and laughters.

So, without even considering half of the members of the audience who checked their e-mails or the news on CNN every 5 minutes on their iPhone, I was wondering whether the speaker was noticing this lack of attention. The answer I guessed is probably no (because speakers are generally too busy and stressed to notice what happens behind the front row) but still, I’m wondering why people go to talks to prepare their own slides??

Besides, I wanted to mention today’s plenary session, where Prof. Michael Grätzel from EPFL (it’s always funny to go abroad to attend talks from our own faculty) presented the latest advances in dye sensitized solar cells (DSCs). I still hope to write a full post about Prof. Grätzel’s work sometimes (like next October 6th), and here I just want to mention that there is now a Michael Grätzel Center in Wuhan (China) which, I think, is quite something. The optimism and enthusiasm of Prof. Grätzel are always extraordinarily communicative (especially when it comes to recent applications), and I’m deeply convinced that the future is bright for dye-sensitized solar cells

Of course, I am not critisizing the recipients‘ work (anyway, I couldn’t since I am a chemist and don’t know lots of things about ribosomes, apart from their double-potato shape they always have in basic biology textbooks) nor the fact that it deserves recognition, but the point is that the Nobel prize in chemistry went to people who actually do chemistry, say, five times in the last 10 years (2000: conductive polymers, 2001: catalysis, 2002: mass spec and NMR, 2003: cell membranes, 2004: ubiquitin and protein degradation, 2005: metathesis, 2006: eukaryotic transcription, 2007: chemistry on surfaces, 2008: GFP and 2009: ribosomes). So, what about creating a Nobel Prize in biology? They did it for Economics in the 60s…

Well now we just have to wait for next year – and hope that people working with molecules lighter than 50 kDa will be recognized as chemists. I’m quite sure there are hosts of guys working in organic synthesis, catalysis, nanotechnology or physical chemistry – to mention a few – who deserve to get the next Nobels. And regarding Grätzel… I keep my celebrating post for next year!