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Scheduling plenary lectures

Dear Bill:

I urge the program committee to avoid parallel scheduling of plenary lectures at the XVII Congress and General Assembly of the IUCr in Seattle in 1996. Parallel lectures were introduced in Ottawa in 1981 because no lecture theatre was large enough to accommodate all participants. The system has the great disadvantage that the two lectures are on very different subjects (e.g., proteins and surface structure of materials) so that participants tend to stay with the field closest to their own work. These lectures present an ideal opportunity to gain appreciation for advances in all areas of crystallography. A good plenary lecture will be comprehensible to the nonspecialist without boring the expert. It should be possible to find specialists capable of giving these general talks that help maintain unity in crystallography.

G. King, Belgium