Memory Lane: My 65-year voyage in the chemistry enterprise

I was born and raised in India and stayed there, passing through primary school to college to employment in my early life. During graduate research at Osmania University, our only recourse to keeping in touch with chemistry literature was through Chemical Abstracts—published by the American Chemical Society before computer databases—since our college could not afford to pay for journal subscriptions. We used to request reprints from authors to get access to articles relevant to our research work, following up on abstracts of published research. This continued during my research supervision years in India as a professor of chemistry. When I moved to the University of Toronto in 1978, journals were readily available, albeit in printed form. Nowadays, every journal is accessible online, and articles can be downloaded digitally. As a member of the Chemical Institute of Canada during that time, I could also register for ACS meetings and networking, and C&EN was a major source of information on postdoctoral fellowships and jobs in academia and industry. My first in-person presentation at an ACS meeting was in June 1988, when the 195th national meeting was held in conjunction with the Chemical Congress of North America in Toronto. My first publication in an ACS journal was in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on the isolation and characterization of a stable solid silaethylene. Since then, I’ve had publications in several ACS journals, such as Langmuir, Analytical Chemistry, the Journal of Organic Chemistry and the Journal of Mass Spectrometry. It is amazing