The International Year of Chemistry (IYC) came to a close on 1 December in Brussels, Belgium, with a bang as Iupac president Nicole Moreau made the most of the media spotlight to announce that the names for elements 114 and 116 had been given provisional approval. 

The event, which attracted more than 800 people from 70 countries, was a time for reflecting on what had been achieved over the year and how much more there was still to do in raising awareness of the role that chemistry plays in everyone's lives. Many of the speakers made much of the fact that tough times are ahead, as we face unprecedented global challenges in energy, food, water and many other areas. But there was real optimism that the next generation of young chemists was up to the job.

A group of 'young leaders', selected from a range of organisations, mostly in industry, gave us a taste of that optimism by taking us on a trip to the future to present their vision of how chemists currently at school would make the world a better place by 2050. They envisaged a world where biochips could rapidly sequence genomes to tailor disease therapies to the patient, where plant-based purification systems provided enough clean water for everyone and zero carbon eco-cities are the order of the day. 

Moreau sounded one note of criticism of the IYC, saying too often chemists were talking to other chemists, rather than to politicians, journalists and the public. Others said that the legacy of the IYC will be a better informed public with an appreciation of how dependent the world is on chemistry. 

Another of the messages that resonated throughout the event was happiness. Young leader Rui Vogt Alves da Cruz, senior R&D manager at Dow, drove home how important it was for people to have fulfilled lives and how chemistry could give them this chance. Nobel laureate Ada Yonath, who won the 2009 chemistry prize for her work on the structure of the ribosome, echoed their words and said that it was important to go to work with a smile on your face and her scientific career had given her just this chance. And Ellen Kullman, chief executive of DuPont, talked about how her happiness had been enhanced by a career that gave her an opportunity to indulge her love of puzzle solving.

At the end of the day the speakers all seemed to be in agreement: IYC is not the end, it is just the beginning. As da Cruz puts it: 'We have to continue education, and as I mentioned it will take years for all those seeds we are planting now to give us more science students.' 

Patrick Walter