James E. Boggs
How the Austin Symposium Came About
The first Austin Symposium was held as a one-time meeting with a very specific purpose. In the middle 1960s, James E. Boggs was engaged in experimental microwave spectroscopy and Harold Hanson was building a machine for gas-phase electron diffraction in the physics department. Both were concerned about the lack of communication between practitioners of these methods, which were used to achieve similar results but often regarded each other with skepticism.
Boggs and Hanson set up a session called the Austin Symposium on Gas Phase Molecular Structure at the meeting of the American Crystallographic Association in Austin on March 2-3, 1966. They invited prominent scientists from both fields and encouraged them to listen to one another. The meeting succeeded in attendance and in the quality of the scientific interaction that followed.
Even though the organizers did not initially plan to repeat the meeting, one concept from that first symposium shaped all future meetings: the importance of listening rather than only talking. The symposium has maintained a single shared program, avoiding parallel sessions so participants with different interests can learn from one another.
The success of the first meeting led to a biennial rhythm. The organizers chose early March partly because Austin might already feel spring-like while many northern colleagues were tired of winter. The second meeting also established the international character of the series, with nearly equal participation from American, European, and Asian speakers.
The third symposium in 1970 became a three-day meeting and introduced invited speakers. By 1986, posters were added to relieve the pressure on the oral program and to give more participants a chance to present their work. Posters remain an important part of the meeting.
The symposium's scientific content evolved steadily. Gas-phase structure remained important, but quantum chemistry, combined experimental and theoretical analysis, molecular dynamics, time-dependent measurements, and novel experimental setups gradually broadened the meeting's scope.
Several banquet talks became memorable parts of symposium lore, including Kozo Kuchitsu's 1980 lecture on the training of a molecular scientist in eastern and western traditions, and Ian Mills's 1992 playful account of a fictional French scientist named M. Litre.
Much of the symposium's success has come from the long-term friendships and collaborations it initiated. One dramatic example involved Harry Kroto, Bob Curl, and Rick Smalley. Connections made through the symposium helped lead to the carbon-cluster experiments that resulted in the discovery of fullerenes and, ultimately, Nobel prizes for Kroto, Curl, and Smalley.
Boggs hoped the symposium would maintain its atmosphere as a meeting of friends, brought together not to boast of achievements, but to learn from colleagues using different methods and theoretical constructs in pursuit of a deeper understanding of molecular structure and dynamics.