Among the few ladies who presented talks during this symposium, the most amazing was the performance of Prof. H. Sleiman about incredible DNA assemblies. It is not exagerate to say the audience was stunned by the impressive pictures and videos displayed during this (super high-speed) presentation! In the same morning we had Nobel Prize Jean-Marie Lehn giving a philosophico-chemical lecture on adapative, almost darwinian, chemistry.

In the afternoon we attended a special session dedicated to six professors celebrating their 65th birthday in 2009. This session was chaired by the very funny Prof. H. Ringsdorf, who had great cartoons and quotes, but who also reminded the audience of the time when people were giving presentations with the help of transparencies and overhead projectors ! We then had presentations given by Profs Javier de Mendoza, Seiji Shinkai (who, as retired now, occupies simulataneously four different positions), Roeland Nolte (who found time to prepare a talk in spite of being main organiser of the whole conference), Julius Rebek (who fears to be killed by Barry Trost as his chemistry is highly non-atom-economical), Peter Tasker (who introduced us to the subject of extractive hydrometallurgy) and finally Jean-Pierre Sauvage (who is still considered as an inorganic chemist despite ligands syntheses involving more than 30 steps).

Prof JKM Sanders opened the next morning with a neat presentation, concluded by a very interesting advice: “expect, welcome and search carefully for the unexpected”! Prof S. Otto then explained why sometimes, chemistry requires to be “shaken, not stirred” and Prof. L. Cronin was the first people I ever saw who cited Kylie Minogue in a talk (he went too fast on it, unfortunately, I had no time to write the quote on my notebook). But his talk was quite impressive as well, dealing with huge systems obtained through self-assembly.

I finally must pay tribute to the great conference dinner we had… Dutch really know how to welcome guests (host-guest chemistry at its best…) and the result was a sparse audience in the next morning, as well as a lesser motivation in making notes… Remarkable was the talk given by K. Suzuki, a PhD student from Prof M. Fujita – and remarkable as well the possibility offered to a PhD student to present his work at this conference! And finally, after the presentation of Prof I. Goldberg, a discussion about the general question ‘what is it good for?’ a remarkable answer was given by Prof. Izatt, as another question: ‘What a new-born baby is good for?’ – I should remember this one for next time some friends of mine ask me why people do research…

In the opening address, it was mentioned that the meeting was initially planned to be held in Amsterdam, but, considering the ‘many potential distractions’, it was moved to Maastricht…

During the first session, Prof. S. Stupp mentioned how delighted he was of being ’surrounded by people who think supramolecular chemistry is interesting’, and Prof. E. Yashima showed us how to still manage a talk when a computer crashes right before. Then, Prof. M. Eddaoudi gave us an nice introdution on Molecular Organic Frameworks (also known as ‘MOFs’, a word to remember since it’ll came roughly every second talk of the conference) and MOMs (Molecular Organic Materials, a new acronym to me).

At the end of the session came the Izatt-Christensen Award ceremony, delivered to Prof. Omar Yaghi from UCLA. In his introduction, J. Fraser Stoddart mentioned that Yaghi and his work had been coined as “sucker for carbon dioxide” in the Los Angeles Time (the article can be read here)… After a series of congratulations came the lecture, a truly amazing presentation on MOFs, COFs and ZIFs, of which several thousands have been synthesised and characterised over last years (I definitely have to spend a post on Yaghi’s work sooner or later). Furthermore, many of these compounds were shown to be able of storing important gases such as CO₂ or methane. Explaining why it is so important to build complex artificial materials, Yaghi said beautifully that one ‘cannot build aeroplanes from proteins’.

After that, the opening buffet (not to mention a short walk on the empty town – sunday evening) concluded a very promising first day, and I’ll tell more about this conference in following posts – as well as how we ended up discussing the chirality of snails at a pizzeria table!