Following the inaugural meeting of the ECA Council in Lisbon in 1997, much work has been done during the year. This includes the legal requirements to incorporate the ECA under Dutch Law, the first collection of National and individual subscriptions by the Treasurer, and moves to establish Special Interest Groups (SIGs).
Organisation of the ECA is via an Executive Committee who are responsible
for day-to-day operations, and a Council comprising one representative from
each country. Some actions of the Executive Committee must be ratified by
full Council during the year, and
e-mail is used for this purpose as
far as possible.
Executive Committee
Carmelo Giacovazzo (Italy, President),
Joel Bernstein (Israel, Vice-President),
Paul Beurskens (The Netherlands, Secretary),
Sybolt Harkema (The Netherlands, Treasurer)
plus three ordinary members:
Maria Carrondo (Portugal), Peter Paufler (Germany), Frank Allen (UK).
Council - The Executive Committee plus 28 National Representatives
There was a full Council Meeting during the Prague ECM (17 August 1998). Apart from the usual Committee procedures, the following facts should be of interest to BCA Members:
1. SIGs have been established in macromolecular crystallography; charge, spin and momentum density and aperiodic crystals
2. ECA News is Web-available at URL http://www.ba.cnr.it/eca
3. Future meetings will be held in
Nancy, France (August 26-31, 2000), Cracow, Poland (2001),
and probably in Spain (Bilbao or Oviedo) in 2003.
4. South Africa was accepted as a full member of the ECA
5. Further work is needed to establish protocols for corporate membership
Frank Allen
Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre
This was a huge meeting with many parallel sessions. I have several reports from Bursary holders and others. No-one mentioned the interesting commercial exhibition or the exhibit on artistic creations made by young children showing what crystals mean to them.
Kate Crennell
Bursary report
The conference began with 2 plenary lectures; I heard Venceslav Kaucic on
Inorganic Crystallography. The meeting then divided into 8
sections, each of which was divided into 8 sessions over the 5 day period. I
attended the C section lectures; Structural Aspects in Chemistry,
Chemical Crystallography. I describe the 3 sessions I found most
interesting and why (All the abstracts and the conference time table can be
found on the following web-page
http://krystal.karlov.mff.cuni.cz/ecm). They were on
Structure Determination by Powder Diffraction, Large
Supramolecular Assemblies and Inclusion Compounds and
Hydrogen Bonding.
In the Monday morning session Frank Herbstein spoke on a new classification for different forms of Polymorphism. After which I was scheduled to gave my talk on the Brucine Hydrate System. Susan Bourne (Kaapstad -Afrikaans spelling) gave a talk on inclusion compounds on Thursday. After the coffee, Jack Dunitz spoke about weak intermolecular interactions and in particular about Hydro- and Fluoro-Carbons. The afternoon session was about Databases.
The Tuesday morning session was on Structure Determination by Powder Diffraction. Talks by K. Shankland, K.D.M. Harris, D.W.M. Hoffmann and R. Rudert were all about their different pathways of finding the crystal structure based simply on the molecule out of which the crystal is built and the powder data, calculating by different means the crystal structure. I found this particularly interesting, because with a minimum of data and a maximum of chemical knowledge crystal structures can be solved.
The Thursday morning session was very interesting. although it lacked a common theme. Luigi Nassimbeni's talk was very useful, going over all possible techniques which should be used to get a clear idea about the system studied. Techniques like TGA, DSC, vapour pressure measurements and Powder X-ray Diffraction were discussed. The Thursday afternoon session on Hydrogen Bonds was exactly what the title indicated. All sorts of hydrogen bonds were discussed by amongst others Frank Allen and Paula Gilli. This was particularly useful because weak hydrogen bonds were discussed and the talks gave an idea of their importance.
The conference and day were suitably ended by the conference dinner (if you were fast enough you might have had something to eat, but I diverted my attention) and a few Pilseners (if you're a fast drinker and since I lived in Scotland.......).
Fokke J.J. Dijksma
University of Edinburgh
A very few words on the powder session at Prague...
The keenly anticipated "structure determination from powder diffraction data" session attracted an audience of some 200 people. The state-of-the-art in the field was presented, with some reference to structure prediction too. The results of the recent SDPD 'round robin' were disclosed by its organiser Armel LeBail. Only two groups out of the seventy that down-loaded the test data were able to solve the mystery compound, which turned out to be tetracycline hydrochloride.
Kenneth Shankland, ISIS