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Bryant W. Rossiter -9- Prog. Coord. Conf. 



and it will hold its third this coming April. In Africa, the Chemistry 

 Committee of the Association of Faculties of Science of African Universi- 

 ties held the First International Chemical Congress in Africa in 1981. It 

 held the second in 1983, and it is now planning the third in the series. 

 The ACS's record, therefore, is well in step with the worldwide trend. 



When a society such as the ACS decides to sponsor an international 

 meeting, it is essential that it have a genuine commitment to full inter- 

 national participation. For many organizations, such a commitment is an 

 ideal more often honored than achieved. Certainly that has often been 

 true of many meetings sponsored in the U.S. by scientific societies. The 

 ACS, for example, is the largest scientific and educational association 

 in the world devoted to a single science. As a result, a danger always 

 exists that U.S. participants will dominate any international meeting 

 that the ACS sponsors. Such meetings, regardless of where they are held, 

 simply can become ACS meetings to which other people happen to be invited, 

 if we are not very careful. 



Of course, including participants from other countries involves in- 

 creased effort, and usually markedly increased effort when they are from 

 developing countries. Communications are more difficult, partly because 

 of the distances involved but often more so because of different customs 

 and organizational structures. Planning and organizing take more time, 

 and funding can be problematical. Thus, it is not surprising that it is 

 easier to conclude to "do it ourselves" rather than to put forth the ef- 

 fore needed to assure a truly international partnership. Nonetheless, 

 the CHEMRAWN conferences and the Pacific Basin Chemical Congress demon- 

 strate that the advantages from making that extra effort are striking. 



If a meeting is to be truly international, cooperative planning must 

 begin at the very earliest stage. Everyone must make a conscious and con- 

 tinuous effort to understand the other person's point of view and to be 

 willing to compromise for good of the whole. Our equally gifted but less 

 numerous colleagues in other countries must be given the full opportunity 

 —and indeed the full burden--of leadership. Only by taking these steps 

 shall we have the full benefit of everyone's creative powers. 



When planning an international meeting, incidentally, you need not 

 automatically think only of a full-scale meeting involving all or at least 

 most ACS divisions. An international meeting on the divisional scale, in 

 which you focus quite closely on a particular chemical subdiscipline, can 

 meet the need for international exchange; and a number of ACS divisions 

 have a tradition of sponsoring such meetings. 



Those who benefit from international meetings do not have to ask why 

 they are held or why they attend. They know firsthand that such activities 

 make a significant contribution, not just to facilitating exchanges of sci- 

 entific and engineering information but to the solution of pressing world 

 needs and the betterment of mankind as a whole. As Thomas Jefferson said 

 many years ago, "Scientific societies are at peace even though their na- 

 tions might be at war." 



