On the first day of our recent OPRD conference in Charleston, we took our audience on a trip down memory lane…what was going on 25 years ago? Well, in the UK, Madonna was Top of the Pops with American Pie. Madonna said of her choice to cover the song: “To me, it’s a real millennium song. We’re going through a big change in terms of the way we view pop culture, because of the Internet. In a way, it’s like saying goodbye to music as we knew it—and to pop culture as we knew it.”
Ah, the internet. That segues nicely into our next bit of nostalgia: hard-copy journals. In 2000, journals were still printed and distributed to libraries and institutions. Articles weren’t instant-access in the way they are now. The good folks at the British Library kindly went into their archives and shared these photos.
While for some, this drew misty-eyed musings about missing the smell and feel of physical journals; others were pleased to see the back of it and 25% of the audience had only ever known the digital age so missed out on the ‘experience’ of photocopying articles.
We then moved the discussion onto what types of work the audience have been involved in over the last 25 years that would not have been commonplace pre-2000.
Flow was the stand-out with 32% of the vote, HTE next with 13% and biocatalysis with 10%. However, as the WordCloud shows, there are many new technologies, methodologies and modalities which means process chemists are a diverse bunch!
The final part of our retrospective asked the audience what we need to consign to the process chemistry annals and move away from. Again, the answers were quite diverse but the most common theme was OFAT with 20% of the vote.
For the second half of the discussion, we asked the audience what challenges they are expecting in the coming years. This proved to be a mixture of internal (e.g. accelerated timelines coupled with more complex target molecules) and external (e.g. geopolitical uncertainty on supply chains) pressures and of course cost.
Finally, we finished on a positive note – with every challenge comes an opportunity, after all! Here’s what our audience were most excited about when looking ahead. Here, AI/ML featured prominently (40% of votes mentioned AI) but for different reasons. Some voters are keen to embrace and see what it can do; others are clearly more cynical about what it may offer!
I wonder what a similar discussion will look like in 2050? Excited to be working on many of these new opportunities already!
Written by Dr Bec Newton, Scientific Update
