Maybe the best part of being at an IUPAC meeting is the diversity of science on offer. Today I’ve seen talks on structural biology, the Chemical Weapons Convention, preserving historically important artworks and writings – and even found time for some good old organic synthesis.

Once I finally got into the sessions, that is. I arrived at the conference venue this morning in plenty of time for Kurt Wüthrich’s 9am plenary lecture, to find the doors padlocked closed until after 9. And trying to find your way to the part of the building where delegates can get WiFi, a 10 minute walk from the congress, is another challenge. You could do with a coffee after all that – but don’t hold your breath during the ‘coffee break’.

However, Wüthrich’s talk, on using NMR to solve protein structures, made it worth the pain. Think 2D NMR gives a lot of information on a chemical structure? Well imagine what 7D (and a quick computer) can tell you. Being able to relate atoms seven chemical bonds apart means you can tell which amino acid residues are next to each other. So with two days of instrument time and then half a day’s computer time to automatically analyse and assign the spectra, Wüthrich and colleagues had the structure of a flexible, unfolded, 148-amino-acid-long outer membrane protein called OmpX. And NMR can give you all sorts of information on the structure’s dynamics, in biologically relevant solvents, that X ray crystallography misses.

Back to the debate on ethics and research, the sessions on ‘Chemistry Protecting Natural Environment’ kicked off with talks on the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Ralff Trapp highlighted that the CWC, which bans chemical weapons worldwide, does affect chemists in their daily work, although few realise it. For example, many nerve agents are close structural relations of some pesticides – but any toxic chemical is a potential chemical weapon, said Trapp. An ongoing IUPAC project to develop an ethical code for chemists will hopefully clarify some of these issues.