Greetings!

This us my final letter as President. We are about to elect new officers, and I hope that each of you has already voted. The slate presented by the Elections Committee is a strong one. I am confident that the Society will be well tended into the twenty-first century. The results should be in by the time of the Iguazú Falls meeting next month, and the winners will be announced there.

Speaking of the Iguazú Falls meeting, Dick Weiss and Frank Quina have an outstanding one planned, and I understand it will be our largest ever. The Society appreciates their efforts very much. I know it has taken a lot of work on their part. See y'all there! Plans for the January 1997 meeting in Clearwater Beach, to be chaired by Paul Barbara and Cliff Kubiak, are well underway. That too looks like an excellent meeting. Read about it elsewhere in this issue.

Our Web home page is up and ready for business. You will find out more about it too elsewhere in this issue. I don't have all the names so I will issue a general statement of appreciation to the perpetrators rather than naming them and risk leaving someone out. I have looked at it, and I think it is splendid. DO offer your own thoughts on the page. It is the Society's and it should reflect the desires of its members broadly. Consider what we have now as a first step, and contribute to its evolution.

Spending this year at NSF has been interesting and thought-provoking. Let me provoke your own thoughts on the future of photochemistry.

We all had a chuckle at the sound of the phrase, "paradigm shift," at last year's Gordon Conference on Organic Photochemistry. It sounds like bureaucratic jargon at first. However, Nick Turro has been talking about it for a while now, and I believe that it behooves us all to listen and think about it seriously. Many photochemists (me included) work on the "molecular paradigm." If a project helps us better understand molecular behavior, specifically that of an excited state or of its consequential intermediates, or leads to new photoreactions or new classes of molecules, it falls within the molecular paradigm. We've been doing this as a community for some forty years now. We will continue to do it, and much good science will result.

At same time it is clear that society will continue to press its basic research community for efficiency, rightly or wrongly. Few, maybe none, of us in the US, for example, expect that the research budget will be held sacrosanct when Federal budget cuts are the order of the day for the next decade or so. Efficiency means more payoff for societal goals with fewer dollars. Impossible? No. Unreasonable? Again no. Difficult? Well, sure it is! It will require leadership, goal identification, prioritizing, and in my opinion - here it comes - a paradigm shift, or even more than one!

Goal identification means asking ourselves the question, "How much is enough?" There are plenty of challenges left within the molecular paradigm of photochemistry, but if all the ones we now see were met would non-photochemists change the way they use photochemistry? I doubt it. The goal is not the perfection of the molecular paradigm, or at least it shouldn't be. I think it is to use photochemistry for maximal impact on science as a whole and on society at large. New buzzword: the "impact paradigm." Ask yourself when considering a project, "Who besides a colleague in my field is going to use this?"

To those of you who would say, "What I am doing is changing thought within photochemistry, and I will continue to do it," I say, "Wonderful! By all means continue, but judge your progress by your work's impact on others, and by its contribution to the impact of photochemistry on science outside itself." However, to those of you who say, "Basic research cannot be accountable for its end use; we should support all that is well conceived. Some of it will be useful, but we cannot predict which or how much." I could say, "Have you had all the well conceived children you possibly can? Some of them may be outstanding as adults, but we cannot predict which or how many." You would talk about inability to afford your biological limit and/or about the demands and constraints they would put on your life. These are valid reasons; but they are isomorphic to some of the reasons Congress would give for drawing a line on the Federal research budget. Pragmatically, the whole is the more defensible when increased progress toward societal goals can be presented.

It sounds like I am disparaging curiosity-driven basic research. Not so. I believe the impact paradigm leaves much room for that. Specific sub-paradigms consistent with it abound. Examples include the "materials paradigm," how photonics and photonic materials may advance; the "biological paradigm," how light-induced biological processes may be better understood and controlled; the "environmental paradigm," how light may help in environmental remediation and in minimizing pollution; and the "basic science" paradigm, how photochemistry's unique features, such as inter alia generation of an ensemble of reactive species within femtoseconds and/or in environments in which diffusion is severely restricted, can contribute to a broader understanding of science.

Do these paradigms, and the many others your own interests will surely suggest, eliminate basic photochemistry from the menu? Absolutely not! With a well-considered goal in mind, one will frequently face questions requiring more basic knowledge. Such problems are important to tackle. I believe we must remember that it will be the overarching goal that best justifies the work. What I think, pragmatically, that the future holds is a lower priority than we have enjoyed for decades on work which is solely justified by curiosity.

The paradigms I mention imply multidisciplinary work. Perhaps that suggests the "multidisciplinary paradigm." Clearly starting with goal identification will bring in some cases a realization that the intellectual and physical resources of a single group are insufficient for a project. We DO have the resources to "think big" when progress toward the goal is worth the expense to society. While I believe that cottage-industry chemistry, as we mostly work, is going to continue to be the major mode of operation, more of us will work at least partly within teams with extradisciplinary goals. Although that will leave university promotion and tenure committees with some real headaches, I believe it will be in the best interest of science to encourage some, those who want to, to operate in this style.

Some of you in academics, and perforce all of you in industry, have been thinking this way already, indeed some for a long time. I believe that, for the health of the science, more of us should join you. Let us blend some "top down" thinking into our research. Consider how our work will be used, not just how interesting it is. If a modest number of us succeed, we will thrive.

Once again, it's a pleasure to be President when there are so many skilled and energetic people willing to work in the Society's interest. My thanks to you all.

Richard A. Caldwell
Chemistry Division, Room 1055
National Science Foundation
4201 Wilson Boulevard
Arlington, VA 22203
(703)-306-1847
rcaldwel@nsf.gov

ps: The views I express are my own and have no bearing on policies, practices, or opinions of NSF.