Chicago—The ACS150 JACS Symposium Series event at the American Chemical Society Fall 2026 meeting gathered Nobel laureates Jack Szostak, M. Stanley Whittingham, Carolyn Bertozzi, and Stefan Hall for talks on their influential scientific advances. (ACS publishes C&EN but is not involved in editorial decisions.)
In the middle of the program after Whittingham’s talk, Bertozzi, who is also an ACS Priestley Medalist, was joined by fellow medalists Paul Alivisatos, Cato Laurencin, and Tobin Marks for a panel discussion. It provided a look into what four scientists who have received the society’s highest honor think about the evolving role of the chemical sciences.
What makes these award-winning scientists hopeful about the future of chemistry highlights why such a conversation on a stage at one of the world’s largest scientific gatherings is worth having.
“They’re fun. They’re little puzzles, and there’s great reward in solving each piece along the way.”
Chemistry is the science central to solving big challenges
“I encounter so many young chemists who both want to make a real difference in creating new knowledge, and they want to have a real impact on the world around them,” Alivisatos said. “This is a generation that seems to have both of those—they want to do both.”
Bertozzi echoed that point and gave examples of the impact. “I think . . . the big problems of the world boil down to problems in chemistry, whether it has to do with the climate, or energy, or medicine.”
And the future doesn’t just include early-career chemists. Marks made sure to acknowledge middle and high school teachers. The “unsung heroes are the program managers at the various agencies who are constantly struggling to keep things going,” he said. He also acknowledged journalists, “and how important that it is that [journalists] see the vision that [chemists] see.”
“I think the . . . big problems of the world boil down to problems in chemistry, whether it has to do with the climate, or energy, or medicine.”
Chemistry finds us early, and we need to strengthen that inspiration when it does
Every medalist on the stage had a moment they remembered that inspired them to think about science—and that moment found them early and was reinforced by parent figures and teachers over time. For Bertozzi it was tubes of glue in a bucket in a house her parents were building. “I remember thinking, why do we need so much glue? . . . There was a glue for the wallpaper, there was grout for the tiles, there was cement for the wall outside, and epoxies. . . .” As her dad explained the materials, Bertozzi said it dawned on her that “our whole house is held together by glue, and that was chemistry.”
Laurencin recalls being exposed early by his mother, who was a family-medicine doctor in inner-city Philadelphia. The first floor of their house was her office, and “she had a laboratory in the back,” he said. “She did experiments and really showed me the merger between medicine and science and how it takes place.”
Marks remembers the very public buzz around Sputnik in the late 1950s. “I actually started building rockets, so I had to learn that zinc dust and sulfur was a very good propellant for that,” he explained. For each of them, the fascination with science—and learning—has continued.
Society thrives when science thrives
Whether it’s climate change, public health, or sustainability, science has a role to play, which means that “increasingly we see that policy and science issues are going to intersect,” Alivisatos said. What chemistry has going for it is that it has a reputation for being rigorous. Scientific rigor and policy humility—recognizing and adapting to the complexity of governance and regulation—can play key roles in a thriving society, he said.
Making sure that science is reproducible and precise and has strong foundations goes a long way in building trust with society. “And any discipline that loses that—it is really a long struggle to recover it,” Alivisatos said. He also warned against creating a situation in which people feel that science can achieve extraordinary things but isn’t addressing real-world problems. “If that gap becomes too large, then we’ll lose trust as well,” he said.
Noting how much young people are inspired to solve major challenges, Alivisatos advised striking a balance: don’t pull away from policy issues, he said, but don’t let the issues or their solutions be determined solely by science. Rather, he said, science should lead the way to better choices.
Addressing big challenges takes big dreams and small, beautiful problems
With so many problems to solve, it’s not surprising that people may think science is underleveraged or underused in some areas.
Laurencin pointed to a public health emergency of international concern this year: Ebola. “It’s really amazing that we’re in a world in the 21st century where we can lose millions of people overnight with a pandemic,” he said, adding that medicinal chemistry has much more potential.
Marks said he would love to better understand how the human brain functions and its true potential—maybe even how it could work hybridized with digital electronics. But an important qualifier is that the driving force for unlocking any potential should be “to elevate the standard of living for all the world’s citizens,” he said.
The opposite of underuse is overuse. Remarking on the moment artificial intelligence and machine learning are having, Alivisatos said that if implemented smartly and ethically, “that set of tools is suddenly going to create an inflection point in so many areas all at once.”
With science’s many underused areas and challenges in mind, Alivisatos shared a tip for how to approach solving long-term problems with short-term innovation goals. Alluding to Whittingham’s earlier lecture on unlocking the key science to advanced rechargeable batteries, he pointed out that Whittingham had a long-term dream but “understood that the long-term dream breaks down into like hundreds of individual, beautiful problems.”
Especially if you’re starting out in a science career, pick something—infectious disease, energy storage, taking apart artificial materials—”whatever it is, have that dream, really have it. Then you have to have the ability to break it down into pieces and love each piece,” Alivisatos said. “They’re fun. They’re little puzzles, and there’s great reward in solving each piece along the way.”
Chemists of the future are interdisciplinary and collaborative
The world’s big problems are interdisciplinary, which makes solving them collaborative by nature.
Laurencin’s field of expertise—regenerative engineering—is an example of interdisciplinary problems converging into a new field. And his field shapes his philosophy on interdisciplinary collaboration. “We believe that the deep integration of different, disparate areas is the key,” he said. “Deep knowledge of not one place, or one and then just some knowledge of others, but deep knowledge of two or three different areas that are there.” This takes looking at the giant textbook of chemistry and asking “What’s important?” to help narrow it down. Then, Laurencin added, “let’s take what’s important in these different areas, let’s integrate these together to create new science and new ways to think of thinking.”
Laurencin’s approach helps alleviate some of Alivisatos’s concerns about ensuring we don’t tend toward superficial as tools and technologies allow us to become faster and move into new subjects faster. Alivisato seconds the position that the chemists of the future will have the ability to go really deep but also to possess “a mindset that allows them to be flexible and to work with other people.”
And while planning to be intentionally collaborative will be important, Marks said, “we have to not forget serendipity, and be in marvel at it, rather than saying, ‘Boy, that’s not according to the milestone plan that some bureaucrat devised.’ ” That view will open us up to collaborations that some might never be able to imagine.
Even with barriers to overcome, young scientists can take us into a future we’re excited about
All the panelists hope that those collaborations get the chance to be imagined, but they acknowledge the obstacles that future scientists can hit at every age. “I hope that the barriers of a decaying public school infrastructure don’t get in the way” of young scientists, Bertozzi said. Investing in good teachers and making sure they have the resources they need will allow students “to see the beauty of science, and then eventually chemistry.” Marks said he watches early-career faculty struggle with a system that seems increasingly more bureaucratic, “so mentoring—I think that’s the responsibility of the more senior scientists to . . . help them navigate through those barriers.” And many young and older students and faculty must still overcome racism and other prejudices, Laurencin said. “As a scientist, you can practice antiracism.”
Building and keeping the trust in science that Alivisatos mentioned is also a challenge. “I like this generation,” Alivisatos said, hinting that he believes in young scientists.
“I love how emboldened they seem,” Bertozzi said, adding that she loves watching young chemists, often students, have ideas and spin those ideas into companies right out of undergraduate programs. “I find that kind of enthusiasm and energy and confidence to be really inspiring,” she said. She also sees young chemists wanting to engage with the natural world, “and chemists, we’re all about that. We’re all about making things and envisioning things and creating things and bringing them to life and bringing them to people.”
From what Alivisatos has observed, young chemists are an idealistic group that wants to both contribute in the deepest way to knowledge and to have that contribution make people’s lives better. “That combination: the rigor and the desire to make things better, and some humility on the issues of policy,” he said, “those combinations will help us to get through what’s a pretty tough period.”
