Guest Editorial: Celebrating Canadian Chemistry

The year 2017 sees a number of landmark anniversaries. Not only does Canada celebrate 150 years since confederation, but Canadian chemists also commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Canadian Society for Chemistry.

Canadian chemistry, like Canada itself, has its roots in the contributions of immigrants. From the early 20th century up to the 1960s, academics in Canada were principally recruited from the UK, with others from France, Germany, and other countries in Europe and worldwide. Indeed, some of Canada's most decorated chemists were newcomers to the country. While working at McGill University in Montreal, Ernest Rutherford, originally from New Zealand, performed his investigations into the disintegration of elements and radioactive substances, prompting the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Gerhard Herzberg was born in Hamburg, educated in Europe, moved to Saskatchewan in 1935, and ultimately became the Director of the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa. His work on (electronic) structure and geometry of molecules, particularly free radicals, resulted in the 1971 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Over the years, the NRC welcomed many other visionaries to Canada. Among them, John Polanyi, born in Berlin, was attracted initially to the NRC as a postdoctoral fellow. Recruited to the University of Toronto, John went on to share the 1986 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with D. Herschbach and Y.-T. Lee for his work on chemical kinetics. Another example is Michael Smith. While working at the University of British Columbia, Smith, originally from Blackpool, England, studied site-directed mutagenesis and shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with K. B. Mullis.

Over the years, the Canadian academy grew and produced successful Canadian-born researchers. Internationally renowned chemists such as Ray Lemieux and E. W. R. Steacie were models of excellence for the next generation. Other Canadian-trained chemists went on to success around the world. Nobel Laureates Rudy Marcus and Henry Taube, for example, were educated in Canada, but achieved their research breakthroughs in the USA.

Canada's population has almost doubled over the past 25 years (to ca. 35 million), and the academy has also expanded by recruiting highly qualified people from within Canada and globally. Scientists in Canada continue to benefit from the interactions with experts from around the world, either among their colleagues, or by international collaborations. Prominent among such international relations have been collaborations between Canadian and German chemists. These links have grown dramatically in the past three decades. This development has been motivated by the world-leading science that has characterized German academia for generations, but also by Germany's sustained efforts to be among the world leaders in internationalizing science. Landmark programs including fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst; German Academic Exchange Service) as well as the International Research Training Groups (IRTG) supported by the DFG have been critical in these efforts. Such support has facilitated an increasing number of German undergraduate and graduate students as well as postdoctoral fellows choosing to pursue “foreign training” in Canada. At the same time, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) has supported Canadian students looking for opportunities to further their education and experience abroad. Indeed, Germany has been increasingly attractive to Canadian students with its combination of high-quality science and an interesting culture.

The Chemical Institute of Canada (CIC) has grown over the last 100 years to include chemists, engineers, and chemical technologists. The chemistry branch, the Canadian Society for Chemistry (CSC), is known to hold excellent, yet not excessively large annual conferences. These meetings traverse the country, and this year, the meeting will be held in Toronto (May 28–June 1, 2017) with Robert Batey, Chair of Chemistry at the University of Toronto, serving as Conference Chair. The centenary event promises to be the largest ever, with over 3000 abstracts submitted for presentations. With participants from across Canada and around the world, the program will be diverse and high-quality.

This issue of Angewandte Chemie commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Society for Chemistry. It contains contributions from Canadian and German chemists covering a broad and diverse array of subject areas. We are proud to reflect on the accomplishments of the Canadian chemical community and are excited about what the future holds.

Greeting from Wolfram Koch “Tradition is not a worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”

This famous quote, attributed to the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler among others, is a most fitting and appropriate motto for this year of remarkable anniversaries for chemical societies. The Royal Australian Chemical Institute proudly looks back on 100 years of successful service to chemistry in Australia, the Deutsche Chemische Gesellschaft, the first predecessor organization of today's Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh; German Chemical Society), was founded 150 years ago in 1867, and the Canadian Society for Chemistry (CSC) celebrates its centennial together with the 100th Canadian Chemistry Conference. All these occasions mark a combined 350 years of tradition in excellence and reinforce the importance of chemical societies as representatives and supporters of their members and the chemical sciences! This issue of Angewandte Chemie, the flagship journal of the GDCh, is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the CSC and the 100th Canadian Chemistry Conference, and celebrates the fruitful and successful interaction between the chemical communities and their respective learned societies in Canada and Germany. The contributions in the following pages give ample evidence of the outstanding quality of chemical research in our two countries and of the ever-flourishing collaborations between Canadian and German chemists. On behalf of the GDCh I congratulate our Canadian sister society on 100 years of fostering and advancing chemistry and its practitioners, and on not only preserving but continuously nurturing the fire of chemistry in Canada and elsewhere!