AUSTRALIAN FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE, 2008

The Shine Dome, Canberra, 21-22 February

Session 5: Nanoporous materials: New science and future technologies
Chair: Professor John White, FAA

John White is Professor of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry in the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University and an Honorary Fellow of St Johns College at the University Oxford, UK. Previously he was Director of the international Institut Max von Laue-Paul Langevin, Grenoble, France. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and a Fellow of the Royal Society. From 1997 to 2001 he was Science Policy Secretary of the Academy concerned with policy on Australian education, human cloning, stem cell research and nuclear science. President of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute (20012003) he is the immediate past of the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering. His research interests are in molecular self assembly in chemical and biological systems to make new materials and the structure of the oil-water interface, particularly in emulsions. He is currently chair if the International Advisory Committee for the 'Joint Project' between the Japanese Atomic Research Institute and the Japanese High Energy Physics Institute to construct a $US1.3 billion research facility.

I have been delighted by what we have just been listening to, and even more delighted that some people still call what we have just been listening to 'biological chemistry'. It seems to me that there are many aspects to chemistry, and one that I am particularly fond of is that the subject is extremely acquisitive and chameleon-like. I can remember that my supervisor's supervisor's supervisor, a man who became Sir Harold Hartley in 1905, was enormously miffed at being accused of doing physics because he was interested in Faraday's laws or electrolysis and, of course, went on to modern electrochemistry and so on.

What we are going to hear now picks up the way in which chemists turn their minds to finding out what it is that they are seeing, trying to understand that in some methodological or hypothetical or theoretical way, and then to seeing what they can do to make things which are like it, or better than it, or something of that kind. It seems that that really is chemistry: to understand and then to make. And I think that that is the theme of what we are going to be listening to from Cameron Kepert and Rachel Caruso.