Letter from the President

Jim King is no more. I have lost a friend. The IUCr has lost a most precious, devoted, and efficient Executive Secretary. Jim King, became in 1969, the first Executive Secretary of the International Union of Crystallography. He knew everyone, everyone knew him, he knew everything about the Union, he was the Union. He was a key actor in all the modern developments of our Union, and many of them would not have happened without his indefatigable enthusiasm. His memory and his actions are recalled elsewhere in this Newsletter, but I would like to add here my own testimony and say how much I appreciated and enjoyed his cooperation during my presidency, and before. We were in almost daily contact during all of last year, and I admired his fortitude and his courage in a dramatic situation. He never lost his sense of humor and kept the utmost interests of the Union in his mind at all times and right to the end. We got along extremely well and were very good friends. His is a tremendous loss for all of us.

It is a sad duty for me to inform you that during the past triennium a number of other distinguished and well-known crystallographers left us, D. Harker, H. Lipson, Sir F. Claringbull, A.F. Andresen, L. Cavalca, W. Parrish, J. Wyart, F. Hirshfeld, I. Waller, L. Calvert, J.Iball, Z. Kaluski, C. Macgillavry, and J.L. Hoard. With them an important part of the history of our science and of our Union departs.

This is my last Letter from the President before the XVIth General Assembly in Beijing where a new President will be elected, and I would like to take this opportunity to say a few words about the activities of the IUCr during the triennium which is coming to an end. It was very active and fruitful.

The political changes which have happened in Central and Eastern Europe have brought about many changes in the membership of the Union which will be submitted for approval by the General Assembly. A new member from Latin America, Venezuela, has also applied for membership of the Union; this is very encouraging, and so is the rapid development of crystallography in the Asia-Pacific region.

It is in the domain of publications that the past triennium has seen the biggest changes. A new section of Acta, Acta D, on Biological Crystallography, was launched in Jan. of this year, and so was the present IUCr Newsletter. With a distribution list of 12,000, which is much larger than that of any journal of crystallography, it allows news from the Union to reach crystallographers in every part of the world. As readers become used to it, it will no doubt become an active forum for exchanges of all sorts. Furthermore, there are discussions under way concerning the possible launching by the IUCr of a J. of Synchrotron Radiation. Full details will be given at Beijing. Eight new titles have been published in the IUCr-Oxford U. Press book series which has really taken off. Volumes B and C of the International Tables have now appeared and Volumes D and E are in preparation. A dramatic change in the publication habits of crystallographers has been brought about by the introduction of the Crystallographic Information File, better known as "CIF." The time lapse between the conception and the implementation was remarkably short, thanks to the enthusiasm of Ted Maslen and Jim King, and to the keenness and skill of the Chester staff. The concept of a file format for the Storage, Transmission, Archiving, and Retrieval of data, "STAR", was developed by S.R. Hall, from the Crystallography Centre, U. of Western Australia, in 1988, and published in 1991. The application of this concept to crystallography was proposed to the Executive Committee in 1988, developed by F. Allen, I.D. Brown, and S.R. Hall in 1989-1991 and published in 1991. In December 1991 the decision was made that the Ninth edition of the World Directory of Crystallographers would be an electronic file in CIF format. In Jan. 1992 Acta C accepted its first CIF submitted manuscripts and instituted automatic checking of the crystallographic data and typesetting procedures using CIFtex. Now, nearly all Acta C manuscripts are handled as CIF files, about 30% of them being submitted electronically. This, combined with the checking of the crystallographic data in Chester at the same time places the IUCr at the forefront of modern publication techniques, and significantly increases the quality and accuracy of the published results. It puts the IUCr in the position to have the technical ability to publish an electronic journal in the near future. This raises many problems which the Executive Committee will examine critically. The remarkable qualities of the CIF file format have impressed other organizations which have now adopted it, including the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), the International Centre for Diffraction Data (ICDD) for powder diffraction, and the Protein Data Bank (PDB). Negotiations are also under way with the Fachinformationszentrum (FIZ) for the inorganic database. I think that in proposing a standard file format for the storage and transmission of crystallographic data and in having it adopted as a universal format, the IUCr is exactly fulfilling its role. Furthermore, it is very satisfying to know that the SMD Chemical Structure File will be in the STAR format. It will be called the Molecular Information File (MIF) and the responsibility for its development will be assumed by the IUCr.

At the same time that the IUCr has pursued all these developments, it has increased its policy of support to many scientific activities. The support to young scientists was raised from SF 35,000 in 1987 to SF 76,000 in 1990 and to over SF 100,000 this year. With seven Visiting Professorships in the past two years, this program initiated and managed by the Commission on Crystallographic Teaching has gotten off to a very good start. A new type of grant, for senior scientists from countries with currency difficulties, was launched during the last General Assembly and, although limited, has enabled 70 crystallographers to attend scientific activities of the Union. Eight grants, reviewed every year, have been made to libraries in the former Soviet Union in order to enable them to keep their subscriptions to Acta Crystallographica in the difficult transition times which have followed the political changes in that country. All these measures, which, for the most part, are aimed at helping countries experiencing difficulties, were only possible because of the sound and healthy situation of our finances. This is essentially due to the care and continuous efforts of the General Secretary and Treasurer, Asbjorn Hordvik, and also to our Finance Committee, which was established in 1981, and to its two conveners, M.M. Woolfson for the first three years, and R. Diamond for the past nine years. This shows how useful the Finance Committee is, how vital the position of convener, and how grateful we should be to our predecessors for having established these guardians of our finances.

Finally, let me say that if the past three years have been particularly busy for me, they have also been very enjoyable. It was really a great pleasure to collaborate with the members of the Executive Committee and with the members of our staff in Chester. The crystallographic family is a wonderful one, and it is a privilege to belong to it. I wish the future President and the new Executive Committee the best of luck in their work during the coming triennium.