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I 



WHY INTERNATIONAL MEETINGS? 



I sincerely appreciate the invitation of John Whittle to partici- 

 pate with you in this 13th Program Coordination Conference . Its major 

 purpose is to plan symposia and general sessions for future ACS national, 

 regional, and divisional meetings, but it also has a very important ad- 

 ditional purpose and that is to begin planning the Third Chemical Con - 

 gress of North America . This Congress will be held in Toronto, Canada, 

 in June 1988, and it will be sponsored by The Chemical Institute of Can- 

 ada, the Chemical Society of Mexico, the Mexican Institute of Chemical 

 Engineers, the Mexican Pharmaceutical Association, and the American Chem- 

 ical Society. It will be an important congress in its own right, but it 

 will also be important by being a regular national meeting of each of the 

 sponsoring societies. 



Everyone in this room knows how much time, energy, dedication, and 

 money are required to organize and conduct a successful meeting. It is 

 certainly therefore reasonable to ask ourselves, "Why are we doing this?" 

 When we consider the added complications posed lay an international meet- 

 ing, it becomes doubly important to ask ourselves, "Why are we doing 

 this?" and to have some very clear answers. 



As someone who has helped organize and conduct several major meet- 

 ings--and who has been helped by many in this room--I feel a genuine 

 kinship with you as you seek to make both your national meetings and 

 your international meetings successful. As a meeting organizer, I have 

 enjoyed both easy times and difficult times. I served as chairman of 

 the Third Northeast Regional Meeting a decade and a half ago, and it 

 virtually ran itself. It was held in Rochester, New York, where the 

 company for which I work, Eastman Kodak, contributed many of its re- 

 sources. Control was easy, and the meeting itself was a scientific suc- 

 cess. It was also a financial success, having— as a scientific society 

 says — an excess of revenue over expense, thanks to good attendance and 

 the contributions from industrial organizations in the region. 



I also have had the privilege of being the chairman of the CHEM - 

 RAWN II International Conference on Chemistry and World Food Supplies . 

 It was sponsored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemis- 

 try (lUPAC), and it was held in Manila. Philiooines, in December 1982. 

 It was the second in lUPAC's series of conferences on the theme CHEM- 

 ical R^esearch Applied to World Needs. As you might expect, it differed 

 so much from typical meetings conducted in the U.S. and in other de- 

 veloped countries that many persons advised that it not be undertaken. 

 The challenges, they said, were too great. 



In the first place, I was told that lUPAC had never undertaken a 

 major meeting in a developing country and that moreover the Philippines 

 did not belong to the established family of lUPAC-adhering countries. 

 I was also told that the meeting would fail, because it could not be put 

 in the hands of long-established and successful professional meeting or- 

 ganizers, such as the professional bodies represented here today. An- 

 other supposed high hurdle was our proposed meeting strategy, which was 

 to involve heavily the leaders in developing countries in every aspect of 



