The Today’s Chemist at Work editorial staff has just come off our spring season of trade shows, exhibitions, and scientific meetings. There was an “away team” of five editors who went to the Pittsburgh Conference in early March. Two weeks later, we loaded up for a trip to the ACS national meeting in Orlando, followed three weeks later by an expedition to Analytica 2002 in Munich.

From a scientific standpoint, one might think trade shows overlap in their missions. After all, how much chemistry can there be to justify dozens of shows each year? But that belies the focus of the various types of exhibits. Each is unique in its approach to science and technology, as well as to its exhibition characteristics.

The exposition at the ACS national meeting is basically an ancillary function to the main focus of the conference, which is the presentation of scientific papers. ACS meetings are put on twice yearly by the Society in different cities around North America. If you look at the ACS meeting program, most of the pages are devoted to titles of symposia, papers, and poster sessions to be given over the week of the meeting. There were 11,697 conferees who came to the ACS meeting in Orlando, along with 1724 exhibitors. Scientific research is clearly the meeting’s raison d’être.

For the Pittsburgh Conference, the focus is on the exhibition hall. Given its size, Pittcon is limited to a small set of U.S. cities such as New Orleans, Orlando, Chicago, and Atlanta. Volunteers from the greater Pittsburgh area work throughout the year to put on this show. In New Orleans this year, the exhibit stretched out for over a mile along two tram aisles, and according to the Pittcon website, there were 11,415 conferees and 11,904 exhibitors. I would say that most people go to Pittcon to see the instruments or to display their company’s presence in the marketplace.

And then there is Analytica, a biennial show owned by the Munich Trade Fair Centre. This year, more than 34,000 people attended, almost all to walk the aisles of the 5 exhibit halls. The emphasis was on the commerce of showing potential customers the latest in chemistry equipment and not on scientific research or facilitating business-to-business interactions. Nothing wrong with that—just different from the other two meetings. The fact that chemistry supports meetings to emphasize the knowledge base of science as does ACS, the commercial base as does Analytica, or both, as does Pittcon, is remarkable. It is a tribute to both the enterprise and the practitioners of chemistry.

Note: Our August 2001 supplement on the history of separation sciences, Chromatography: Creating a Central Science has won both regional and national awards for excellence by the American Society of Business Publication Editors. This supplement followed on the success of Made to Measure, our 50-year history of analytical instrumentation published in 1999, and The Pharmaceutical Century, a history of drug development published in 2000. Next month will bring Luminaries of the Chemical Sciences, a look at some of the people who have made the most significant contributions to chemistry over the past 100 years. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we have enjoyed producing them, and we appreciate the recognition given us by our fellow editors through ASBPE.