ABOUT MOLECULES FOR THE MEDIA

Molecules for the Media is a series of press workshops and a multimedia resource for the press and the public.  The goal of Molecules for the Media is to stimulate coverage of chemistry in the news media and to promote an understanding of chemistry as it relates to contemporary scientific issues. 

• The press workshops, which will be held twice per year, will be broadcast on
  UCSD-TV locally and UC-TV nationally.
  
  
• The topics of the first four workshops are: atmospheric chemistry, the role of individual molecules in disease, nanotechnology and biofuels.
  
  
• The workshops will be archived in streaming video to the Molecules for the Media website.  The website will also provide background information and further links and resources around the topic of each workshop.
  
  
• Curriculum units for high school students will be developed based on each workshop and will be available in the curriculum library.

The Molecules for the Media content was developed by the Division of Physical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.

The Molecules for the Media press workshops and website were made possible through a grant from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, which was established “to advance the science of chemistry, chemical engineering and related sciences as a means of improving human relations and circumstances around the world.”

 “…Chemistry must be given deserved recognition for its overall beneficial effects on our lives. How many people know that the high efficiency of agriculture was made possible by development of artificial fertilizers through the Haber-Bosch process? Does the younger generation realize that their desktop and laptop computers would not exist without the development of semiconductors, silicon chips, or liquid crystals? Cures for diseases are frequently attributed to medical researchers and not to the chemists who developed the compounds. Penicillin, for example, would be a rare drug indeed if economic mass production had not been made possible by chemists and other scientists…” Attila E. Pavlath, former president of the American Chemical Society, in his President’s Message, January, 2001