Kettle Repair, Egyptian Faience, and Serendipity
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Coming In June… Reconstituting the MRS Leadership Proposed revisions to MRS Constitution require approval of entire membership via paper ballot. “ We believe that, among all the other changes, the proposed Constitution is clearer and simpler than its predecessor, so it should be easier to read and understand. It is intended to ensure that MRS will continue to be strategic, responsive, and world-leading in all of its ventures, even as it grows and as its environment changes.”
Alex King
2002 MRS President
Ballots will be mailed in early June. Voting deadline is July 12. For details, see Letter from the President, page 347. POSTERMINARIES
Kettle Repair, Egyptian Faience, and Serendipity I was thumbing through my weekly subscription to Science News (January 19, 2002, issue) when the subtitle “Imitating Ancient Materials Reveals Lost Manufacturing Secrets” drew me in. The first paragraph referenced Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the second both the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The third paragraph referenced the MRS meeting in Boston and I realized I was three paragraphs into a two-and-a-half-page feature article on highlights from the Materials Issues in Art and Archaeology Symposium. Twoand-a-half pages of coverage in Science News! I smiled to myself because I knew serendipity had come full circle. In 1987, David Clark, C.T. Liu, and I had the pleasure of being invited to be the spring meeting chairs for the 1988 meeting to be held in Reno, Nevada—before the spring meeting was moved to San Francisco. MRS meeting chairs are given great latitude in organizing meetings. They generally “inherit” a subset of symposia that may change titles or emphasis, but more or less are variations on a continuing theme from the year before. Meeting chairs get “advice” from numerous sources. Of these, the Program Committee and Vice-President have both an official capacity and responsibility to offer suggestions. Our “marching orders” in 1987 were to try and bring into the Reno meeting some truly new symposia. I’ve sat through many Program Committee meetings over the years and remember long evenings of lively debates about symposia topics that had been MRS “staples, but wasn’t it about time they 424
were retired?” Another frequent conversation focuses on whether or not certain topics are the purview of other societies. Having never been active in the upper echelons of traditional discipline-oriented societies, I never gave these protracted discussions much heed. Only later at my pick-up basketball club did I start to appreciate with just how much freedom MRS meeting chairs were being empowered. One of the guys I play basketball with regularly in Princeton is Roque (Rocky) Calvo, executive director of The Electrochemical Society. He and I had many conversations about MRS during the 1980s as “we” grew from a fledgling society to an organization breaking all previous scientific society growth records. To make a long story short, big societies with large subdiscipline mini-societ
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