Happy International Year of Chemistry!

Five days ago, I received a press release from the American Chemical Society touting the society’s participation in the International Year of Chemistry , which began on 1 January.

Without the ACS press release I doubt I’d have heard about IYC. Even though the year-long celebration is sponsored by the United Nations, even though ACS is the largest scientific society in the world, even though chemistry underlies so much of our everyday lives, chemistry rarely gets media attention in proportion to its importance.

It’s tempting to pin the blame for that neglect on newspaper editors, TV producers, and other media gatekeepers. They decide what science news you read, see, and hear. But the gatekeepers also compete with each other to deliver what they think you’re interested in. The habitual diet of astronomy, ecology, and medicine—rarely chemistry—served by the New York Times‘s weekly science section could reflect the paper’s own survey results and readership statistics. Chemistry isn’t popular.

My own interest in chemistry lay dormant for two decades. I studied the subject right through high school, but having chosen to pursue physics and then astrophysics, I didn’t give it much thought—even after I joined the staff of Physics Today and was obliged to look for stories across all the physical sciences.

What changed my mind was a visit in 2002 to a workshop on nanohybrid materials at the University of Chicago’s James Franck Institute . Like the institute itself, nanoscience is interdisciplinary. Biology, chemistry, engineering, materials science, and physics all contribute.

But it wasn’t chemistry’s participation in nanoscience that made me pay attention. Rather, it was chemistry’s particular role. One of the workshop speakers—I forget whom—outlined a theoretical scheme for making a functional material out of self-assembling nanoparticles. “But it won’t work,” I think he said, “until a smart chemist helps us find the right molecules.”

I do remember the name of the speaker, Xiaogang Peng of the University of Arkansas, who told the workshop attendees about the challenge of making nanotechnology friendly to the environment. Peng pointed out that one of the elements most often used to make quantum dots and other nanoparticles in the lab, cadmium, is extremely toxic. He and others are trying to find alternatives to cadmium.

Since the workshop, I’ve come to appreciate other aspects of chemistry, unlike some of my fellow science writers. Just this morning, I heard a news story on National Public Radio about the controversial use of chelation therapy to treat autistic children. According to standards arbiter ASTM International , chelating agents are

Unfortunately, the fascinating chemistry of chelation was missing from the NPR story. To the people who heard the story, chelants are just another drug that somehow works.

I hope IYC is successful in promoting chemistry. Then, the general public might want to learn more about the drugs, fuels, plastics, cleaners, and other chemicals in their lives. They might also want to know more about how chemical reactions on prebiotic Earth produced the first self-replicating molecules or how synthetic enzymes might one day produce cheap abundant fuel from plants.

And if IYC needs a booster, an anniversary in 2014 will provide a promotional opportunity: the centenary of the chemistry set .