ENCHighlights

f r om
Here is the story of the ENC over 50 years, as told by those who know most about it the individuals who have chaired these conferences. At the suggestion of Chuck Wade [Chair 1991], I asked each chairperson to write a page or so about his/her ENC program highlights and themes; issues and anecdotes; the nature of the world when the conference was held; in short, anything appropriate. The accounts are interesting, insightful and often humorous. Unfortunately, three past chairs have died, a few could not be reached, and several were unable or unwilling to write anything just now. Bob Lichter and Ruth Stark each wrote an article, and I have provided some comments for the remainder. An Appendix gives a summary of the dates and locations of the ENCs, attendance figures and numbers of posters, along with the names of after-dinner speakers. Ted Becker
1st - 1960
Chair: Local Arrangements: Bill Ritchey Bill Ritchey
Cleveland
NMR Spectroscopists Meeting

The Standard Oil Company (Ohio) acquired a state-of-the-art NMR Spectrometer in October 1959 for about $60,000. It operated at 60 MHz, having an electro magnet that developed 1.4 T and weighed one ton. It was the sixth (?) 60 MHz spectrometer that Varian delivered and it was a DP-60, indicating the capability to observe either high resolution or wide line signals. High resolution was the mode that most spectroscopists were interested in and practically speaking, the H nucleus was the only element observed. Why? Well, the standard for measuring signal-to-noise was a 20% solution of ethyl benzene and a properly functioning instrument yielded a s:n of 6:1. All other nuclei were much less sensitive. Compare that with a modern 750 MHz system that is speced to give a s:n of 6,000:1 with 0.1% ethyl benzene. Instrument instability was severe, resulting in low spectral out-put and a high level of frustration. The DP-60 had no field-frequency control or spectral line intensity integration and many of the spectra were not reproducible. There were no other 60 MHz spectrometers in Ohio and its estimated that the total number of NMR spectrometers in the U.S. was around 50, largely 30 and 40 MHz spectrometers. It was not easy to talk with people who could give good advice. After a number of phone calls and visits to six or seven NMR labs, we learned that we all had similar problems. Not only were the problems similar, but the order of importance was also similar, the most important problem being instrument stability and instrument maintenance. So in planning the meeting agenda it was apparent that the prime focus should be on instrument stability. Several at Varian recommended that we invite a young and very capable engineer, Wayne Lockhart, who would be the ideal person. Wayne was agreeable and we scheduled him for three hours. Spectral output was our next priority and Dr. George Slomp of Upjohn agreed to lead that discussion and share his experiences on the subject. We also thought it desirable for attendees to share innovations that they developed and Prof. Paul Bender of the University of Wisconsin would lead that discussion and also describe his motorized magnet trimmer Fortunately Varian was in the final stages of developing an electric field shim and this would be demonstrated to the attendees. Add a few organizational comments at the beginning and end of the meeting and that was our proposed agenda. So with one change in the proposed agenda, which was to reduce a little the time allotted to Wayne and to have George and Pauls discussions sequentially rather than concurrent, that was our agenda on June 24, 1960. There were 43 in attendance. In our final discussion we decided to meet again the next year and possibly a few more times and to keep our focus on experimental aspects of NMR. Most attendees thought the meeting was a real success and that next year we should not limit invitations to NMR Spectroscopists residing in the Northeast Quadrant of the U.S. but to welcome anyone interested in attending. I dont think any of us at that time thought that we would still be meeting annually 50 years later and that attendance would be around 1,500.
2nd - 1961
Chair: Local Arrangements:
Pittsburgh
George Slomp Barry Shapiro
Second Conference on Experimental Aspects of NMR Spectroscopy

At the meeting of NMR spectroscopists in Cleveland in 1960, there was unanimous agreement that another such meeting would be useful, and that its format should be expanded to two days. George Slomp, who had led part of the discussion in 1960, agreed to organize a meeting in 1961, and Barry Shapiro suggested that Aksel Bothner-Bys group at the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh might host the meeting. Thus began an annual pilgrimage to Pittsburgh that lasted ten years. George is now retired from Upjohn and living in Michigan. He provided some thoughts and background information but was not able to write this article; at our last contact, he was overwhelmed with snow! With the advance planning and publicity, this conference attracted 118 participants well up from the 43 who had gathered in Cleveland, but still a small group that comfortably fit into a conference room to encourage informal discussion. The program focused on very practical aspects of NMR, with sessions on Adjustment of Field Shape and Homogeneity; Low Temperature Methods; Field/Frequency Control; Dispersion Mode Spectra; and Spin Decoupling. Much of the time was devoted to the results of two surveys one on Typical Spectrometer Performance, the other on Standards and Referencing. There were no pre-printed abstracts of talks. Instead, some speakers brought hand-outs showing spectra, block diagrams of instruments, etc. George Slomp and Barry Shapiro scheduled the two days with ample time for coffee breaks, a long lunch period, and evenings free for leisurely dinners all designed to permit attendees to share their views and experiences outside the formal sessions. This set the tone for the ambiance that still exists and that makes the ENC such a successful and beloved conference. The important interaction with and support by vendors began then also. NMR Specialties, a firm near Pittsburgh that manufactured small instruments and accessories [e.g., pulse programmers and spin decouplers] provided coffee and a marvelous assortment of doughnuts for coffee breaks during the entire ten years that the ENC met in Pittsburgh. Until 1963, patent protection of nuclear induction made Varian the only company that could market NMR spectrometers in the US, so ENC participants were users of Varian equipment. The ENC was scheduled in late February immediately before the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy [now PITTCON] because Varian could send many of its scientists and engineers from Palo Alto. A symbiotic relationship rapidly developed we wanted their expertise to deal with day-to-day problems, and they wanted feedback from users. The 1961 Conference was highlighted by a Varian reception and dinner, after which a curtain opened to unveil the A-60 the first commercial instrument with field/frequency control. Ted Becker
3rd - 1962
Chair: Local Arrangements: David Grant Gus Friedel
Pittsburgh
Third Conference on Experimental Aspects of NMR Spectroscopy [T.C.O.E.A.O.N.M.R.S.]

How Sweet It Was! My reflections on the early ENC Conferences (which were held for a decade
in Pittsburgh) include three dominant memories: First, the format of the conference was more of a panel discussion than that of a formal lecture. The speakers comments and audience discussion and remarks were merged into short debates and idea sharing. These sessions, although heated at times, never seemed to interfere with an expanding camaraderie. The size of the group undoubtedly illuminated the need for formality. Second, the meetings solidified a rapidly growing community of NMR spectroscopists into a cohesive group of friends, unified by the taxing experimental challenges that all faced in these early days. When one discusses the problems of swinging metal restroom doors on the other side of the wall from the magnet lab, one knows the field is its initial stages. The group was small enough that discussion continued often late into night at Samrenys, the Ranch, or some other restaurant in the vicinity of Mellon Institute. My third recollection deals with the inclement weather in Pittsburgh during the last few days of February and first few days of March, typical times for the early meetings of the ENC. To fly out of Pittsburgh always seemed to pose a problem like sleeping on the airport floor for an early morning delayed flight, etc. Such was the case on Saturday, March 2nd 1961, the concluding day of the second conference chaired by George Slomp. All flights had been cancelled for the evening of that day, and I had to be in Columbus that night. I expressed my congratulations to George for an excellent program, and to be pleasant indicated that I would be happy to assist in any way possible to keep the tradition now started for future years. This forced a bus trip during the business session requiring that I leave around 3-4 PM and travel through West Virginia and into Ohio. There were numerous delays, but we finally arrived around 10 pm, long overdue and fatigued by the ordeal. Upon my return to Utah the next week I was chagrined to find out the hazard of leaving the meeting early was to be elected to chair the meeting the following year. Apparently, everyone wanted the group to continue meeting, but only if someone else would do the work. Fortunately, Gus Friedel, at the US Bureau of Mines near Pittsburgh, and the resonators at Mellon Institute provided outstanding support as the arrangements committee,
and many stepped forward to chair a variety of sessions and other duties. The vendors aided with expenses. For these early meetings, there were no formal abstracts, but many individuals brought printed hand-out material, often many pages with great detail. For the 1962 conference with the lengthy name and abbreviation given above -- these notes, now available in the conference archives on the web site and the DVD, give a reasonably complete summary of the proceedings. The talks by James Shoolery on absorption mode 13C spectroscopy and slave recorders stand out to this writer as truly seminal work of great timeliness in the third annual conference. Jim was truly the chemists advocate for NMR methods in these early days and his data are typical of his unique signature on the field. Equally impressive presentations were also made by other contributors, but space limitations prevent a detailed review of the 40-50 talks. However, the titles of the eight sessions, each chaired by an authority in the field, give a good idea of the scope of the conference: Paul Bender: New Experimental Applications and Techniques Paul R. Shafer: New Instrumentation Stan L. Manatt: Spin-Spin Decoupling Tom Beukelman: Spectrometers of the A-60 Type (Field Frequency Lock) Wayne Lockhart: Instrument Trouble Shooting David W. McCall: Relaxation Phenomena and Measurements Charles W. Wilson, III: Wide Line N.M.R. Instrumentation & Operation George Slomp: Interpretation, Storing and Cataloguing of High Resolution N.M.R. Spectral Data
4th - 1963
Pittsburgh
Charles W. Wilson III Aksel Bothner-By
4th Omnibus Conference on the Experimental Aspects of Nuclear-magnetic-resonance Spectroscopy [4th OCEANS]
Perhaps there may one day be a few people who are curious to discover just what it was that caused various NMR enthusiasts from all over the USA to travel to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in February. This note is meant for them. The Fourth Omnibus Conference on the Experimental Aspects of Nuclear-magnetic-resonance Spectroscopy (4th OCEANS) was held at Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh for 3 days --- Thursday, Friday & Saturday, February 28 through March 2, 1963. So far as I know, no national group of lawyers or medical doctors, or even economists or psychologists or librarians, would opt for a conference in Pittsburgh in mid-Winter. Why not, say, San Diego, or Miami, or Hawaii? Well, NMR experimentalists then were a mostly young and innocent bunch, and likely worked for organizations that had rather limited funds that they were willing to spend for travel to NMR spectroscopy meetings. Plus Mellon Institute made their nice Pittsburgh facilities available at no cost, and the Hotel Webster Hall was conveniently just across the street from Mellon Institute. ...... Besides, most of our NMR attendees spent so much time actually listening to the scheduled papers (which ran from 8:15am until 5:00pm and beyond, even on a Saturday) that few of us really paid much attention to the weather outside. The year 1963 was in what might be called the Late Iron Age of NMR Spectroscopy. Early NMR workers used massive electromagnets, consisting of an iron yoke plus copper wire and copper cooling coils, typically weighing a ton or more, that afforded proton NMR spectra at up to 30 MHz or so. Later, similar commercially available iron-magnet NMR spectrometers from Varian Associates permitted 40 MHz and then 60 MHz proton NMR spectra. Eventually, commercially available 90 and 100 MHz proton spectrometers became available --- but that was about as highfrequency as one could go using Iron magnets. ........ It was clear that, for many NMR applications, such as proton High Resolution studies of organic compounds, higher static magnetic fields would yield clearer and more easily understood NMR spectra. To get such higher magnetic fields, one needed to go to superconducting magnets. This happened only somewhat later. ....... Furthermore, in 1963, NMR spectrometers were mainly being constructed using old-time vacuum tubes rather than transistors, etc. Computers for NMR applications were still in their infancy. The exceptional value of NMR spectroscopy was increasingly being appreciated by academic and industrial chemists, but in 1963 many fine instrumental developments were yet to arrive for NMR spectroscopists. The committee of 5 persons designated to arrange this Fourth NMR conference in 1963 decided early on that we wanted to attract as many as possible of the leading NMR spectroscopists in the USA and abroad. We immediately went about recruiting as Session Chairmen many of the most productive and interesting NMR people then working in the field. I think we did a pretty good job. One of our choices, Paul Lauterbur, later won a Nobel Prize for his remarkably innovative NMR work.
These Session Chairmen then played an important role in lining up the invited speakers (usually the longer papers) for their sessions. Shorter, contributed papers --- usually 10 minutes --- were also solicited by a general invitation to NMR spectroscopists. We didn't want to exclude anybody that had something worthwhile to say. We also wished to attract as many NMR people as possible to attend this conference, and worked diligently to spread the word about it. Numbers were to be one measure of our success. We seem to have done a pretty good job. According to figures supplied me by Ted Becker, the analogous NMR Conference #3 in 1962 had an attendance of 140, while our NMR Conference #4 in 1963 had 297. (Our attendance was also greater than any of the next six such NMR Conferences attained.) Everybody seemed to have a pleasant time in Pittsburgh at these NMR conferences. It was always fun (and often very helpful) to chat with people from all over the country about their NMR work. Picking up useful working hints, shortcuts, tricks of the trade. A lot of this was done in the breaks between sessions during our 3 days of meetings, supplementing the questions possible after each paper. ......... We also enjoyed good-eating --- most of us being young, hungry, and on an expense account. Barry Shapiro acquainted several car-loads of us with a suburban Pittsburgh restaurant called "The Ranch" which served HUGE, tender, delicious T-bone steaks. It became a tradition for many of us to feast at "The Ranch" on the first night of every Pittsburgh NMR conference we attended. .......... Bill Ritchey, who initiated and hosted the first of these NMR conferences at his SOHIO lab in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, was of Lebanese descent. He knew a nice Lebanese restaurant in Pittsburgh that he led several car-loads of us to during each NMR conference, usually on the second night. Many delicious, exotic dishes. Most of us had no idea what exactly we were eating, or what it was called, but we loved it. Bill Ritchey did all the ordering for us, and we munched on lots of good stuff. Looking back on the 50 years that these NMR conferences have been held, the transient nature of things is evident. The first chairman of these events, Bill Ritchey, is still going strong, but his corporate employer (SOHIO) morphed into BP --- and Bill moved his talents into a university. I was employed by Union Carbide in 1963 --- but a couple of years later I left for life at a university, and later Union Carbide was acquired by Dow Chemical. Mellon Institute later transitioned into Carnegie Mellon University, and these meetings moved from Pittsburgh. Sic transit gloria mundi! Final comment: I thought "4th OCEANS" was a conference name that provided a certain pizzazz. Not everybody did. There was no "5th OCEANS". .......... This was the inclination of the NMR Conference #5 chairman for 1964, Paul Lauterbur. One doesn't argue successfully with a future Nobel Prize winner. So I guess I was wrong.
5th - 1964
Pittsburgh
Paul Lauterbur Aksel Bothner-By
Fifth Experimental NMR Conference [5th ENC]

Paul Lauterbur was a logical choice to chair the conference in 1964. Long before he had thought of NMR imaging, he had done pioneering NMR studies of 13C, 29Si and other nuclei at Mellon Institute, the site of the conference. He had recently moved to a faculty position at Stony Brook. Following a succession of lengthy names and acronyms, this was the first to be called simply Experimental NMR Conference, with the now longrespected initials ENC. By 1964 the conference had become well known among NMR practitioners. This was the first to include talks by scientists from outside North America, with speakers and attendees from Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Italy and the UK. The program packed a broad range of topics into the two days in February. Many of the talks continued the traditional format of individuals sharing their experience in improving the operation of mostly high resolution NMR instruments two sessions on Instrument Maintenance, Repair, Modification and Operation. Included here was a presentation by Richard Ernst and Wes Anderson on Signal Enhancement by Use of Optimum Performance Parameters an analysis of how best to modify slow passage conditions for repetitive scanning and time averaging of cw spectra. It would be another year before alternative methods appeared for multiline spectra, but other talks in 1964 described new pulse programmers for transient studies of spin echoes and chemical exchange. The concept of breaking the iron barrier and developing superconducting magnets for NMR was an important subject at this ENC. Three talks outlined the requirements for homogeneity and ways of achieving it, and one by Harry Weaver described the realization of the concept in the first 200 MHz NMR prototype instrument. Partially aligned molecules were discussed long before we heard of protein alignment by electric field [Waugh, McLauchlan, Hahn] and by liquid crystals [Philips, Englert]. Double resonance and computer analysis of spectra [including LAOCOON II] were also on the agenda. The attendees were expected to want more than good talks, so Aksel Bothner-By, the local arrangements chairman, provided a Guide to Restaurants in the Pittsburgh Area, based on:
Quality Revolting bad indifferent good very good fantastic Light stygian dim subdued well-lit bright glaring Noise level tomb-like quiet normal bustle noisy din
Almost 20 restaurants were rated on these factors and such other important matters as the cost of a martini [generally about 75 cents] and the amount of butter served. NMR has certainly advanced, but this restaurant rating scheme seems to be just as valid now as 45 years ago! Ted Becker
6th - 1965
Pittsburgh
Charles Reilly Aksel Bothner-By
Charlie Reilly, then of Shell Development Company, Emeryville, CA, was a very important contributor to early ENCs. Unfortunately, we have not been able to track him down, so here are some of my recollections of the 1965 ENC. NMR was now becoming so broad in scope that the ENC ran three full days. With the limitation of the size of the Mellon Institute auditorium, the organizers cautioned in advance: It now appears that it will probably be necessary to limit attendance. In the end, everyone was accommodated for a very good program. Multiple resonance was a major topic with several ramifications selective homonuclear 1H decoupling and tickling in complex spectra and 1H decoupling for study of 13C. Analysis of complex spectra continued to be of major interest, and problems in the operation of the new superconducting magnets required attention. An evening was devoted to best approaches to teaching NMR. Computers were beginning to beckon. Abe Savitsky, an infrared spectroscopist at Perkin-Elmer, was brought in to discuss the intriguing subject of Curves and Computers. He showed how digitized spectra could be processed to improves resolution, signal/noise, integration, etc. Two sessions were devoted to ways of improving signal/noise, always a major concern in NMR. One novel approach was presented by a young fellow from Varian: Sensitivity Improvement by Fourier Transform Techniques. Richard Ernsts talk was not fully appreciated by many attendees, who were used to obtaining spectra by sequential scanning and remembered Fourier transforms only as something from college math courses. It was more familiar to those then beginning to obtain IR spectra with interferometers and FT data processing. It would take quite a while with substantial improvements in on-line computers before Fourier transform methods completely transformed the way NMR spectra were obtained. It is amusing to note that a single room at the Webster Hall Hotel, just across the street from Mellon Institute, had a special rate of $10 per night. If you wanted a more elegant hotel, the Pittsburgh Hilton cost $13-16, and for those on a tight budget there was always the YMCA at $5.15. The registration fee for the conference was $7.00. In line with the precedent set in 1961, Varian sponsored a cocktail party one evening, and NMR Specialties, located near Pittsburgh, provided coffee and good, fresh doughnuts before the first session each morning and during the frequent and lengthy coffee breaks. Ted Becker
7th - 1966
Pittsburgh
Aksel Bothner-By Salvatore Castellano
After several years handling all the local arrangements and creating the environment that made ENCs so successful, Aksel Bothner-By took over the organization of the whole program in 1966. Aksel remains interested in the ENC, but it was not convenient for him to write a summary of the 7th ENC. There was considerable interest in less receptive nuclei, which ranged from 13C at natural abundance to nuclei of very low magnetogyric ratio. In The HR-100 Spectra Almost Everything, Paul Lauterbur showed how a proton-only instrument could be adapted to study many types of nuclei. There were talks on 119Sn NMR and on coupling constants involving a range of heavy atoms. Rex Richards described the major enhancement in signal accompanying dynamic nuclear polarization. The most far-reaching improvement in studying 13C came from Richard Ernsts talk on Complete Heteronuclear Spin Decoupling with Random Noise. He showed that noise-modulation caused rapid spin flips that collapsed doublets in analogy to rapid chemical exchange. For two decades, noise decoupling became the method for obtaining easily interpretable spectra of 13C. 15N and other nuclei, being supplanted only in the 1980s when better understanding of spin behavior led to the multiple pulse sequences used today. Improved methods for spectral scanning were discussed, ranging from home-made modifications of instruments such as the HA-100 to a custom-designed 60 MHz spectrometer based on digital control to sweep a frequency synthesizer a major innovation for that time. Most ENC attendees studied liquids, but Raymond Andrew came from Nottingham to describe magic angle spinning NMR in Solid Phosphorus Compounds by the Rapidly Rotating Specimen Method. Meanwhile, John Baldeschwieler described ion cyclotron resonance in the gas phase, showing that a treatment similar to Bloch equations described ICR lineshapes resulting from ion-molecule collisions. Presentation of new pulse techniques and instruments needed for their study were becoming more prominent at the ENC, with innovative applications of old ideas, such as forced transitory precession, Carr-Purcell sequences, rotary echoes and nuclear Overhauser effects. Other papers provided new insights into the theoretical underpinning of relaxation processes and measurements. The theory of complex NMR spectra and methods for analyzing such spectra continued to be explored in a number of papers. The Swalen-Reilly NMRIT method was proposed as an alternative to the already established LAOCOON approach. Staples, such as ways of teaching NMR, and better techniques for variable temperature studies, rounded out a very productive program. Ted Becker
8th - 1967
Pittsburgh
Jake Stothers Aksel Bothner-By

Upon receiving the invitation from Ted Becker to offer some thoughts on the 8th ENC for which I acted as chairman, my initial reaction was one of wonderment about how I might recall specific details of the conference forty-two years ago. It had been suggested that one might mention a bit about the speakers, the program and major NMR advances at that time. After some reflection, however, coupled with the absence of any personal reminder notes, I had the notion that some lasting, general impressions of the early ENC meetings might be of interest.
A number of features rendered the early ENCs distinctly different from other conferences to lend a certain character to the proceedings. From the first meeting with 41 present, attendance increased to an average of about 260 over the 1963-69 period. The emphasis on experimental methods and techniques, the relaxed scheduling (two one-hour sessions separated by a 45 minute coffee break, morning and afternoon, with the possibility of an evening session), coupled with the presence of many of the leading practitioners of the NMR arts, provided all attendees ample opportunity for informal discussions. Hardly surprisingly, in some cases, these led to later collaborative activities. In the early years, there were few attendees from abroad but, as knowledge of the quality of the ENC meetings spread, this number increased, thereby broadening the interactions available to all. The term NMR arts seems appropriate since certain skills required development to obtain optimal experimental results in those days preceding the general availability of superconducting magnets and computer control. Terms such as super-stabilizer, for example, have long disappeared from use (and, perhaps, even understanding). Each ENC meeting addressed primary areas under development at the time. The 8th ENC meeting included sessions on computer-spectrometer interfacing, multiple resonance, pulse techniques, improving signal detection, less receptive nuclei, oriented molecules, some biological applications, as well as an evening session on Instructional approaches, from both industrial and academic viewpoints. Undoubtedly, the folks behind the scenes at the Mellon Institute were major contributors to the success of these meetings, making sure everything ran smoothly even when there was an occasional, unforeseen problem. Not to be overlooked was Aksels trusty, informative guide to several dining establishments. I was surprised to receive the invitation to act as Chairman for the 8th ENC, but I felt honored to be asked. Do you suppose it was because 1967 was Canadas centennial year and someone thought there should be a token Canadian? In any event, Aksel and his colleagues did most all of the chores, for which I was very grateful.
9th - 1968
Pittsburgh
Paul (Dick) Shafer Salvatore Castellano
Paul R. (Dick) Shafer chaired the 9th ENC. According to the Dartmouth web site, he died in 1994, and an undergraduate teaching award has been named in his memory. The ENC found a happy site at Mellon Institute in 1961 and was always held at the end of February, just before the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy, which attracted major instrument companies. In 1968, a hotel strike in Pittsburgh caused PITTCON to move to Cleveland, where it remained for many years. The 9th ENC concluded at noon on Saturday to enable participants to travel to Cleveland. In retrospect, the big news from this ENC was that the value of pulses and Fourier transform methods was becoming apparent, and mini-computers were being interfaced to NMR spectrometers. Six talks described various types of on-line computers, including the PDP-8, IBM 1800 and 620I, as well as others. Computer memory was very limited, programming was difficult and interfaces were primitive, but progress was being made. Pulses were being used in many spin echo applications and in studies of diffusion, where Ed Stejskal described the advantages of a pulsed magnetic field gradient. However, the greatest innovation was the use of carefully designed pulse cycles to study solids. John Waughs talk High Resolution NMR in Solids? introduced the idea of a fictitious average Hamiltonian under the experimenters control. With this concept, he described a four-pulse cycle [later, but not in this paper, termed WAHUHA] that caused line narrowing in a few instances up to three orders of magnitude. This was the first ENC where a conscious effort was made to introduce attendees to the dramatic advances being made in the use of NMR in biological systems. Oleg Jardtezky organized a session that dealt with such diverse topics as base pairing and base stacking in nucleic acids; enzyme binding sites; paramagnetic shifts in heme proteins; 13C NMR in peptides; and relaxation of anesthetics binding to cell membranes. Other areas of emphasis were the rapidly developing study of molecules dissolved in nematic solvents and the beginning of serious double resonance investigations. Frank Anet described the use of the nuclear Overhauser effect as a practical tool for organic structure elucidation, and Ray Freeman described a double resonance adaption of hole-burning with a resolution of 1 millihertz.
Ted Becker
10th - 1969
Pittsburgh
Ted Becker Aksel Bothner-By

At the registration mixer for the ENC in 1967, I was chatting with someone while enjoying a gin and tonic, when Barry Shapiro came up and asked whether he could interrupt to have me talk with a few people. I soon found myself in the presence of Jake Stothers, Barry, Aksel Bothner-By and others who comprised the power structure of the ENC. Aksel suggested that I might be interested in chairing the 1969 conference. He pointed out that he would do most of the work at Mellon, I would have lots of help from session chairmen and others, and that I did not have to do anything for over a year! So I agreed, but I became a little concerned the following day when Aksel handed me a 3x5 card with one carefully written word:
Of course, it worked out just fine. The session chairmen and I put together a program that covered the major issues in NMR. Computer continued to be a buzzword. Several new programs to deal with magnetic equivalence were described in the session Computers in the Analysis of High Resolution NMR Spectra, while the session Online Computers in NMR dealt with interfaces, computer control, an FT accessory for the Varian HR-220, and new digital spectrometers for liquids and solids. On the other hand, Freeman and Hill showed how to measure relaxation of individual lines without a computer, using instead a non-selective inversion pulse and a selective detection system. In addition to the Varian HR-220, a number of supercon magnets were being assembled in various labs. Dadok, Anet and Richards each described their versions. Dynamic nuclear polarization was explored from many angles induced optically, chemically, thermally and by free radical reactions. New multiple pulse methods for solids permitted the measurement of chemical shift anisotropies, so that emerging area was explored by Haeberlen, Lauterbur, VanderHart and Hindermann. NMR study of molecules oriented in nematic solvents was an active research area, giving rise to five talks. With noise modulated and single frequency decoupling and FT methods, study of 13C in natural abundance was popular, and advanced techniques for such study were covered in a number of talks. Other applications of double resonance and various methods for facile measurement of relaxation times also continued to be of great interest. In the early ENCs, all speakers from North America were expected to pay their own travel and registration fee. However, we could usually provide travel expenses for a very few foreign scientists, courtesy of various Government grants. When I asked leading figures for advice on topics and speakers, Ray Freeman alerted me to Endel Lippmaa, of Estonia, whose work was then almost unknown in the West. I invited Lippmaa as one of four European speakers, and began months of correspondence. It was not hard then to obtain a visa to enter the US, but it was very difficult and time-consuming to get an exit visa from the Soviet Union. Lippmaa was scheduled to give two talks, but a few days before the ENC I received a cable [that was the e-mail of the day!] IMPOSSIBLE TO ATTEND CONFERENCE THANK YOU FOR THE INVITATION He finally got to the ENC in 1977.
11th - 1970
Pittsburgh
Tom Flautt Salvatore Castellano
The conference was held in April this year, a much better choice than the traditional February date, which usually meant cold, snowy weather. The major topics were New Pulse and Fourier Transform Techniques, Superconducting Spectrometers, and Computer-Spectrometer Interfacing and Software. New Pulse and Fourier Transform Techniques. In the first talk of the conference, Richard Ernst reported on his work to improve the sensitivity of NMR by using stochastic excitation. I remember this paper for its clear mathematical explanation of the difference between spectroscopy using a single frequency and multiple frequency excitation produced by random pulses, which results in improved Signal/Noise. This work is mentioned in Ernsts Nobel Prize Biography: We developed at that time also stochastic resonance as an alternative to pulse FT spectroscopy employing binary pseudo-random noise sequences for broadband excitation, correlating input and output noise. Similar work was done simultaneously by Prof. Reinhold Kaiser at the University of New Brunswick. Kaiser gave the second talk where he presented the results mentioned above. Other papers on Wednesday discussed other ways of optimizing pulse and FT techniques. Of particular interest were techniques which made obtaining 13C spectra more routine, because of the increase in S/N. Super Conducting Spectrometers Three groups reported on in-house developed spectrometers. Speakers from Dow, Mellon Institute and UCLA detailed challenges in getting good field homogeneity, field/frequency control, and use of multiple frequencies to detect 1H, 2H, 11B, 13C, and 31 P spectra. The fields were high enough to detect 1H spectra in the range of 220-250 MHz, about twice what was commonly obtained at that time with electromagnets. Computer-Spectrometer Interfacing and Software. The interfacing was made possible by the availability of minicomputers such as: Hewlett Packard 2115*, DEC PDP-8, and IBM 1800. The most common application of the minicomputers was to control the field/frequency and to sum repeated spectra for increased S/N. The software application used an IBM 360 to analyze complex protein spectra taken at 220 MHz, using a curve fitting program. *I looked up the memory of this computerit had a maximum of 32K 16 bit words! Imagine what could have been done with a PC. Other Topics New developments in the study of oriented molecules-- Liquid crystal solvents allowed dipole-dipole interactions to be measured and sometimes molecular conformation. Resolution enhancement in Solids by Magnetic Dilution Water Mobility by NMR in a number of biological and gel-like systems. Quadrupole effects in NMR and Pure Quadrupole Detection JEOL announced a table top spectrometer which detected 1H at 100 MHz, with automatic field/frequency control. It was JEOLs 100 MHz answer to the Varian A60, which had been developed in 1961.
12th - 1971
Gainesville
Bob Lundin Wallace Brey
Bob Lundin chaired the 12th ENC, but he preferred not to write about the conference deferring to Wallace Brey, who handled local arrangements for this first ENC to be held outside Pittsburgh in ten years. Here is Wallaces account of just how that change in location occurred: The early ENC's in Pittsburgh were all scheduled for the weekends before or after the Pittsburgh Conference. However, the hotel workers in Pittsburgh went on strike and that meeting was moved to Cleveland. I can remember standing beside some members of the ENC Committee during a break in the 10th ENC, looking out the window at the falling snow when someone asked, Why do we continue to come to Pittsburgh in weather like this when the other meeting [PITTCON] is not here anymore? I rather rashly commented that Florida would be a better choice, and I was surprised to find next day that the committee decided to take me up on this suggestion. So I became the Local Arrangements Chairman for the 12th ENC, which was held on the campus of the University of Florida. Fortunately, I had willing and able student, post-doc, faculty and secretarial assistants, particularly the help of Roy King and Kate Scott, to make the job easier. A serious problem was presented by one speaker who continued to talk on and on past the time when our reservation of the auditorium ended. To avoid having him mobbed by the inrush of students waiting to see a movie, I had to physically take the microphone from him. An interesting aspect of the Gainesville meeting concerns the University of Florida NMR instrumentation. We had ordered an XL-100 instrument from Varian, and the console and 15-inch magnet had been delivered previously, but there were still some parts missing. When the folks at Varian realized the ENC was to be in Gainesville, they shipped the missing parts, which included some of the RF plug-ins, parts of the decoupler system and the final version of the probe. To make certain everything was properly installed, they also sent an engineer who had done much of the design work. The weekend before the meeting, he and Roy King had to drive to Jacksonville airport to find the missing parts, which had somehow become stalled there. How many demos of the XL followed, I do not know, but Bruker was at a slight disadvantage, for their engineers could only talk about their new 90 MHz systems. The principal themes of this conference were: New commercial instruments for multi-nuclear operation: Varian XL-100; Bruker HFX-90; JEOL PS-100 Advances in FT methods [not yet implemented in commercial instruments] Superconducting magnets 13C NMR, which dominated the conference. Fully half of the talks involved 13C studies with commercial and supercon instruments; use of FT methods; relaxation measurements and mechanisms Wallace Brey Local Arrangements Chairman
13th - 1972
Asilomar
Barry Shapiro Bob Lundin
Barry Shapiro chaired the 13th ENC. We have exchanged e-mail, and I had a long telephone conversation with him at his home in Bellingham, WA. He gave me some information and photos but insisted that I write this article. Barry was responsible for arranging the two most popular sites of the ENC. He was at the first NMR spectroscopists meeting in Cleveland in 1960 and suggested that Mellon Institute might welcome this incipient conference in 1961. It did, and the ENC stayed for ten years. In 1970, Barry was asked to chair the 1972 ENC, and he began thinking about a site. It had already been decided that the ENC would meet in Gainesville in 1971, and the initial idea was that it could return to Pittsburgh in 1972. But during a sabbatical at Stanford, Barry had learned of the Asilomar conference grounds a place that few of the ENC attendees had ever heard of. Barry presented a glowing picture and pointed out that an ENC to accommodate scientists in the western US was long overdue. Feedback from a questionnaire resulted in a decision to meet at Asilomar at the end of April 1972. Of course, Asilomar turned out to be everything that Barry said and more. The 50th ENC is the twentieth to be held at Asilomar. So, how was Barry rewarded for his initiative? He arrived a day early to finalize arrangements, promptly fell down a staircase and broke his leg! He pointed out that it occurred in the aptly named BREAKERS. Asilomar is not the best place to run a conference with ones leg in a cast. But Lee the charming and dutiful spouse soon arrived in a rental car and served as chauffeur and aide in transporting the Chairman among the many buildings. The schedule of the conference was designed to showcase the natural beauty of the site, with two of three afternoons free. The penalty was talks until 10 pm, even after the cocktail party and banquet on Wednesday. The six talks that evening were serious including Erwin Hahn, Alex Pines [Proton-Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy], and Al Redfield among the speakers. Asilomar provided the space and ambience to permit vendor exhibit areas now hospitality suites and initiate a continuing tradition and partnership. In 1972 there were six vendors: Varian, JEOL, Bruker, Wilmad, Nicolet, and Perkin-Elmer. In the midst of all this, there was time for a very good technical program. Three sessions were devoted to advances in NMR in studies of biological molecules, one of them limited to 13C in macromolecules. NMR practitioners had discovered lanthanide induced shifts, and Jack Roberts chaired two sessions devoted to the use of such shift reagents. Other talks reported investigations using paramagnetic metal ions, including shiftless relaxation agents. Pulse Fourier transform methods were highlighted in many talks, both for 1H and for a plethora of nuclei other than hydrogen, and as a means of measuring both 1H and 13C relaxation in a variety of molecules. In a post-deadline paper, Joe Dadok unveiled Correlation NMR Spectroscopy a Bridge between FT and CW NMR Techniques? Ted Becker
14th - 1973
Chair: Local Arrangements: Tom Farrar Mel Hanna
Boulder
The 14th ENC was held in Boulder, Colorado in early April 1973. It is hard to believe that 36 years have passed since the time of that meeting. That meeting was memorable for several reasons. At that meeting several of us met to incorporate the ENC meeting. We decided to incorporate in the state of New Jersey, where I then lived, so I could become the resident agent. One of the reasons for incorporating was that the attendance at the meeting was growing larger every year and the amount of money being handled by our treasurer, Ernest Lustig, was also growing rapidly. Prior to that meeting Ernest handled all of the finances through his own private bank account. He was nervous about his financial liability in the event of problems. So at that meeting we officially became a New Jersey corporation. Since the meeting was held in Boulder, Colorado (home of the University of Colorado), many of us had hoped to spend some time in Rocky Mountain National Park. In early April, however, most of the roads in the park were not open because of heavy snow. The meeting was a very exciting one because superconducting magnets were just becoming available. One entire session was devoted to recent advances in high field NMR. Sir Rex Richards presented an excellent paper on the first results for 270 MHz proton NMR studies at the Oxford Enzyme Institute using an Oxford Instruments magnet and a modified Bruker console. Several other papers were presented on recently assembled NMR instruments. Most of these instruments featured a combination of a magnet, a data acquisition system and a spectrometer, each often made by a different manufacturer. These new high field results were very exciting since most NMR spectra in 1973 were taken with instruments using electromagnets with a proton NMR frequency of 100 MHz. Solid state experiments were in their infancy and a number of novel sensitivity enhancement schemes were described such as the Proton-Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy method presented by John Waugh from MIT. In addition to Fourier Transform NMR (FTNMR) a number of other methods were also being developed at that time including correlation NMR and Hadamard NMR studies. With the advent of faster, cheaper computers and much cheaper computer memory, these methods lost their advantages and were not further developed. Fortunately, a recently published book Pulse and Fourier Transform NMR was now available to neophytes who were looking forward to entering this exciting new field of high field FT-NMR.
15th - 1974
Raleigh
Wallace Brey Charles Moreland
I had the privilege of being designated chair of the 15th ENC to be at NC State in Raleigh. The biggest part of the work for that meeting was done very effectively by Charles Moreland, the Local Arrangements Chair, who incidentally, had been my student at Florida several years earlier. The meeting featured the usual excellent talks by Rex Richards, Ray Freeman and Richard Ernst, but there were no special themes. There are several striking memories I have of particular incidents at early ENC's of which I will mention two that were signposts for the development of NMR. At an early Pittsburgh meeting, one speaker from DuPont described the excellent results they were obtaining on their pioneering superconducting system, which had been custom-built by Varian. At the following coffee break, I overheard one of the audience say: You'll never get a system like that in my laboratory. They blow up and kill people. The second incident I recall is the breathless entrance to the meeting auditorium of Paul Lauterbur with an armfull of Xerox copies of the first NMR images he had obtained, showing sections through some fruits and vegetables. Paul Luterburs talk at the 1974 ENC had important consequences. He showed an image of a mouse, obtained with the back-projection method that he had pioneered then the only way to obtain NMR images. For that period, the image was not too bad, but there was a large white spot in the center an artifact of the back projection method. Richard Ernst was excited by Lauterburs talk and the concept of imaging but realized that he could overcome the artifact. As he said later, I immediately recognized that time domain experiments with switched magnetic field gradients in complete analogy to 2D spectroscopy would be the method of choice. This led to directly to 2D Fourier imaging, which is now the basis of almost all medical MRI.
16th - 1975
Asilomar
Jerry Swalen Bob Lundin
As a suggestion Chuck Wade proposed to have Chairmen of each meeting give a summary of their meeting. Ted Becker was kind enough to send me the abstracts for the 16th ENC in 1975 to review. This was so helpful because it had been 34 years since the conference, which was undergoing something of a transition. Relaxation measurements on proton systems gave way to measurements by carbon-13 systems. A number of cross relaxations systems were studied as well as spin polarizations experiments. Broad line systems were studied -- e.g., polymers as well as molecules on surfaces. Lanthanide shift reagents were developed. All sorts of biomolecules were studied by NMR. The use of computers was just beginning. Paul Lauterbur developed Zeugmatography (1973) and today it is used as MRI in most hospitals. In 1975, Waldo Hinshaw described a novel approach in Scanned Sensitive Point Zeugmatography. Among the very many other eminent NMR speakers, the legendary Erwin Hahn talked about Deuteronomy new methods for measurement of deuterium nuclear quadrupole coupling at natural abundance in organic compounds. Rex Richards described 31P NMR studies in intact muscle and adrenal glands at 31P frequencies up to 129 MHz. This was the second ENC to be held at Asilomar. Attendees appreciated the ambiance and natural beauty of the site, and vendors recognized the opportunities to expand the number of hospitality suites and to develop individual styles for these sites across the broad Asilomar campus. The large instrument companies could show the latest spectra and sometimes bring spectrometers, magnets or accessories. Sample tubes and isotopes were illustrated with samples and brochures. In 1975, Myra Gordon set up the Merck Isotopes suite, which quickly became the pace-setter for a pleasant and gracious environment where attendees could drink, munch and chat until the wee hours.
17th - 1976
Pittsburgh
George Levy Aksel Bothner-By
George Levy, well known for his early work and his book on 13C NMR, chaired the 17th ENC. Georges later work moved away from NMR into data processing, and he moved to Infomatrix Inc., a data consulting firm, in 1994 and subsequently disappeared from our radar. So, I will provide a few comments about this ENC. In 1976, the ENC returned to its former home for ten years the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh. This time it was held on April 25-29, not the late February period that characterized most of the earlier ENCs. The weather was much better! The Webster Hall Hotel, across the street from Mellon, still housed most participants, but it also now housed 12 hospitality suites. As I recall, excellent doughnuts were still featured at coffee breaks. Aksel Bothner-By did his usual superb job in local arrangements. The 17th ENC marked the first real poster session. In 1975 there had been an informal poster session during one of the free afternoons, but with no program or abstracts. In 1976 there were 29 posters during a two-hour session that also featured sherry. The year 1976 celebrated the bicentennial of American independence, and in the run-up to July 4, the word bicentennial was used in ads and titles everywhere. The ENC was no exception. There were two Bicentennial Sessions, neither of which seemed to have any relevance to history or independence. Ray Freeman gave Bicentennial Lecture 1, a description of the new DANTE pulse technique and some applications. His abstract also included what was probably the first of his clever adaptations of cartoons this one from a 1950 issue of Punch. The program included sessions on excitation techniques 2D pulse FT, rapid scan correlation methods, chirp pulses, and ways to minimize water signals. The last was becoming increasingly important as biological applications became more prominent, taking up most of two half days at this ENC. Methods for improving sensitivity continued to be a priority, particularly as more attention was given to a wide range of nuclei both subjects covered at this conference. Advances in supercon magnets were covered in several talks. The rapidly developing field of high resolution NMR is solids was featured in a half-day session chaired by John Waugh [amusingly misprinted in the program as J. S. Wangle]. This included analyses of multiple pulse methods to narrow 1H lines, as well as several 13C studies. Schaefer and Stejskal reported on 13C cross polarization studies of polymers in which they had now added magic angle spinning to remove effects of chemical shift anisotropy the beginning of a powerful method that would be widely exploited. Ted Becker
18th - 1977
Asilomar
Paul Ellis Lois Durham
The 18th Experimental NMR Conference seems a long time ago, in fact 31 years ago. The science, as usual, was outstanding and as I recall the weather was also nice. I was on sabbatical leave from the University of South Carolina at that time in Professor John Waughs lab at MIT when I organized the scientific portion of the conference. I recall John complaining that his phone bill for the lab was the highest it had ever been. What I remember most of all were a couple of firsts with respect to some of the speakers. The ENC for several years had tried to have Professor Endel Lippmaa from Estonia as an invited speaker. During the cold war it was always a tentative as to whether an invited speaker from Soviet-dominated countries would be allowed to visit the US. After several failed attempts he was allowed to travel that year and one of first stops he made was the Waugh lab. During his visit at Johns lab he met and visited with another Estonian Matti Maricq. Professor Lippmaa presented a seminar in Johns office and then we went out to a memorable dinner that evening. We met again at Asilomar and he gave an outstanding presentation at the meeting. Another first was an abstract submission by the well known gentlemans scientist Professor F. S. de Bouragas. His abstract described a miraculous spectrometer, which seemed to violate the 3rd law of thermodynamics (a rough French version of which is presented within references given in the abstract). Unfortunately, Professor de Bouragas was unable to attend the meeting and his talk had to be cancelled to the disappointment of several members of the audience, one of whom even wore a tie for the presentation. Talk about being old fashioned! The hospitality suites were also excellent, but I dont remember many of the details of the discussions that occurred at the suites; must be old age. In some respects it was easy to put together the program. But what made the ENC really successful was the local arrangements people who made it all work. Now we employ a service to make all of this happen. However, in those days (for the west coast) it was Lois Durham and Woody Conover. So with that I simply close by wishing the ENC a happy 50th birthday and with the hope of many more to come.
19th - 1978
Blacksburg
LeRoy Johnson Harry Dorn
The 19th ENC: April 1978, it was a long time ago, but some things still stand out. I recall the day in 1976 at the 17th ENC when I was asked if I would be willing to have my name entered as a candidate for chair of the 19th ENC. Without enough thought, I said, sure. Later that day I was informed that I was elected. My first job was to find a place in the Eastern USA that could accommodate our expected roughly 500 registrants. Of course, it should be as nice as Asilomar, great facilities, cheap, easy to get to, and have an energetic local arrangements chairman. Covering most of those requirements, I luckily found (I dont remember how) Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, VA. Harry Dorn of VPI agreed to be local arrangements chair and he did a great job. My next job was to select session topics for the meeting and solicit session chairs. I looked at past ENC programs and thought about what was new in experimental NMR. The field at that time was just beginning to explore applications in 2D FT NMR. We had a splendid session chaired by Bob Vold with outstanding talks by Ray Freeman and by Richard Ernst, who would later win the 1991 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for NMR methodology. Imaging by NMR, especially of large objects such as humans, was just getting started. There had been no imaging sessions at previous ENC meetings. There were short talks by Paul Lauterbur on imaging (then called zeugmatography) at the 14th and 15th ENCs, there was a talk on imaging by Waldo Hinshaw in a session on New Experimental Techniques which I chaired at the 16th ENC, and there was a poster presentation by Paul Lauterbur at the 18th ENC. I asked Ted Becker to chair an imaging session and he did a great job recruiting both Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield, who later shared the 2003 Nobel Prize in Medicine for NMR imaging. They gave excellent talks. Not knowing enough about past history, I also asked Ted to consider a talk by Raymond Damadian. He agreed to ask him unfortunately, Damadian accepted. Sadly, it turned out to be a campaign talk for his invention of NMR imaging. We had two fine poster sessions, which were organized by Woody Conover. Of course, much of the exchange of information on ENC related topics took place in the hospitality suites, which are always generously provided by our beloved vendors. All in all, it was a great experience for which I owe a debt of gratitude to all the session chairs, speakers, and poster presenters. I enjoyed very much working with all of our ENC committee members.
20th - 1979
Asilomar
Ken Williamson Bob Lundin
The 1979 ENC was held at Asilomar as it had been in 1975 and 1977, thus beginning the pattern of meeting here on odd-numbered years. Dr. Myra Gordon was the Treasurer. A Mount Holyoke graduate, she was best known at these meetings for the Merck suite in Acacia and her great collection of single malt scotches. Aksel Bothner-By, who introduced me to NMR in 1955 when he was teaching at Harvard, was the Secretary. It was Bob Lundin, the Local Arrangements Chairman, who was, as I recall, instrumental in arranging for Felix Bloch to speak to us about Reminiscences on the Discovery of NMR, only the 2nd after-dinner speaker we had had. He received the Nobel Prize in 1952. You will recognize the names of those on the committee 30 years ago: Harry Dorn, Bob Griffin, Howard Hill, Leroy Johnson, Bob Lichter, Gary Maciel, Alex Pines, Dave VanderHart, and Nino Yannoni. Some of our speakers were Dan Traficante, Jake Schaefer, Bob Griffin, Gary Maciel, Mike Barfield, Waldo Hinshaw, Laurie Hall, Chris Dobson, Eric Oldfield, Jim Prestegard, Paul Ellis, Lloyd Jackman. Wokaun gave a paper co-authored by Richard Ernst, who was not in attendance that year, on twodimensional Fourier techniques. They indicated the technique gave promise for the elucidation of complex exchange networks, as indeed it did. Ray Freeman followed with a paper entitled Some Early Baroque Pulse Sequences. To quote his abstract Early exploratory work appears to confirm the hypothesis of Murphy that the number of possible pulse sequences greatly outweighs the number with useful practical applications. It was always a treat to enjoy the dry wit and Punch drawings of a Freeman paper. Paul Lauterbur presented a poster on 31P zeugmatography, the catchy name he gave what we now know as NMR imaging. Raymond Andrew gave a paper on the zeugmatography of a human hand and wrist. His 128 X 128 picture elements with an 8 cm diameter aperture did not hint to me of whole body imaging, but the year before Ray Damadian proved to us with photos from the student newspaper that he had built the first whole body imaging system, probably the most amazing paper I ever heard at an ENC. Also in 1978, Peter Mansfield described the beginnings of echo-planar imaging. In 1979, Kurt Wthrich, not in attendance, was a co-author of a poster back in the days when wine and cheese was served at the poster sessions. John Pople, an early ENC attendee in Pittsburgh, Mansfield, Ernst, Lauterbur, and Wthrich were all Nobel laureates, as was Ed Purcell, who gave the after-dinner talk in 1984 at the 25th ENC. Less than 3 months before our meeting, in San Francisco George Moscone, the mayor, and Harvey Milk of the board of supervisors had been assassinated. Diane Feinstein then took over as mayor. The ENC was an all-volunteer organization in 1979. My wife, Louise, made room assignments here. She was highly amused, if not shocked, at some of the pairings. We were a wild bunch!
21st - 1980
Tallahassee
Gary Maciel George Levy

Twenty-nine years ago!!! As with all of the ENCs I have attended during the past 47 years, the 21st was scientifically very stimulating. Although, as far as I know, there were no already awarded Nobel Prizes represented at the 21st ENC, three of the speakers (Richard Ernst, Paul Lauterbur and Kurt Wthrich) and one co-author on a poster (Peter Mansfield) subsequently received the Nobel Prize (or a share of it) for work that was closely related to the research described at our conference (and there were one or two additional speakers who perhaps could, or should, have shared a Prize). Thats rather impressive evidence for the high quality of the presentations!
Many other major figures in NMR made presentations. These included: a) Dave VanderHart, who talked about resolution limits in CP-MAS 13C NMR; b) Jake Schaefer, who talked about separated-local-field experiments in the 13C MAS context; c) Wiebren Veeman, who presented early 13C CP-MAS results on biological solids; d) Stan Opella, who also gave a good preview of possibilities for high-resolution solid-state NMR in the study of biological macromolecules; e) Colin Fyfe, who presented a CP-MAS probe design that introduced possibilities for low-temperature measurements, with f) in a separate talk, an application described by Nino Yannoni to the characterization of carbonium ions; g) Ray Freeman, who presented some new selective pulse sequences (as well as his usual supply of witty and relevant cartoons); h) Gitte Vold, whose presentation described approaches for multiple quantum coherences; i) Geoffrey Bodenhausen, who examined indirect detection; j) John Waugh, who examined the best ways to accomplish proton decoupling; k) Gareth Morris, who described INEPT; l) Myer Bloom, m) Hans Spiess, n) Bob Griffin and o) Alex Vega, all of whom described various aspects or applications of 2 H NMR in solids; p) Frank Anet, who examined fundamental aspects (e.g., rotational diffusion) of small molecules in solution; q) Henry Resing, who presented pioneering NMR studied of adsorbed species; r) David Hoult, who described technical developments in NMR imaging, as well as high-resolution probe design for biological samples; s) Joe Dadok, who described his and Aksel Bothner-Bys experience with a 600 MHz spectrometer (the highest-field high-resolution system in the world at that time, as far as I know); and t) George Levy, u) Paul Ellis and v) Don Alderman (with Dave Grant), all of whom made presentations describing advancements in probe design. As is customary at ENCs, there were numerous posters of note. Several posters (not from commercial vendors) focused on data processing (hardware and software). Of interest is how the perspective has changed so dramatically regarding magnetic field strength. Several abstracts of the 1980 ENC refer to 270 MHz 400 MHz (1H frequency) as high field or very high field; today, it is hard to find a spectrometer vendor willing to sell a spectrometer below 400 MHz! Another feature of the 21st ENC, which had already become characteristic of the ENC, was the vendor hospitality suites (sometimes demonstrating live spectrometers). Especially noteworthy was the suite organized and charmingly operated by Myra Gordon, then affiliated with Merck Sharp and Dohme of Canada (a corporate entity that apparently no longer exists in that form). Indeed, numerous vendors of NMR equipment and supplies of 1980 no longer exist in the same corporate forms. They are missed!!
22nd - 1981
Chair: Local Arrangements: Gerd Lamar Woody Conover
Asilomar
My clearest memory of the 22nd ENC was the time spent at Myra's Merck suite, the place to be for getting together with friends under a relaxed atmosphere late in the evening. Myra was the ultimate host and her brandy goblets generously filled with Courvoisier (and a big handful of M&Ms, as well as the ambiance in her suite) is indelibly etched on my mind (but I could be confusing this with one of several other ENCs at Asilomar . . .). To me, the Merck suite had an added attraction, in that I discovered that I actually graduated from the same High School and sat in the same Home Room, with Myra Gordon! That Merck hospitality suite tradition was ultimately terminated to the great loss to the entire ENC community. It is a shame that only a fraction of today's numerous attendees were able to experience this novel phenomenon. Those who did experience it have much for which to be thankful! 1981 exhibited several similarities to 2009 in the political/economic climate of the nation. The country in 1981 was in a recession and inflation was rampant. A typical bank CD offered 14% but this was compromised by ~16% interest on a mortgage. There was political strife with the Middle East, with the staff of the U.S. Embassy completing a year as hostages in Tehran. Additionally, a new President was just inaugurated who represented a very substantial change in philosophy from that of his predecessor. Some of the positive outcomes in 1981 were the release of the embassy hostages in Tehran and, at least, in my opinion, the popularization of "Jelly Belly" beans. The enacted policies in the 80's of trickle-down economics, unfortunately, did very little for the majority of the population. My hope is that more enlightened resolutions to our present political/economic woes are pending. The 22nd ENC represented a minor milestone in that it was the first to have over 500 participants. To current ENC attendees with over 1,000 participants, this may seem quaint. However, the increase in ENC attendance, spurred by the remarkable, and to some degree unanticipated advancement of NMR theory/experiment and its broad applications, which started in the 80's and continue unabated to the present, has led to a loss of some of the intimacy of the early ENCs. As Chair, it was once possible to greet every participant at the registration desk. The registration fee was ~$10, but all manpower for the registration, audio-visual services for the talks, and poster setups were provided by the graduate students/postdocs, generally from Bay Area research groups. The scientific program consisted of 7 sessions of lectures, 2 poster sessions and a panel discussion that covered a variety of new and/or improved NMR methods and their applications to chemical and biological systems. The 28 elapsed years have dimmed my recollections of the lecture/session content (and inspection of the abstracts has not helped), with three notable exceptions. Both Richard Ernst and Ray Freeman provided outstanding Plenary lectures on the principles of multiple quantum spectroscopy and two-dimensional NMR, respectively. The longer duration than normal lecture times allowed both Richard and Ray to present excellent overviews of the intricacies and great potential of modern NMR. Of course, the latter lecture was peppered with the witty and appropriate classic cartoons that have become characteristic of Ray's inspired presentations. The third event was the intensive and informative panel discussion of the integration of general, multipurpose computers into the NMR laboratory. Up to this time, each vendor provided a different dedicated computer and software that were incompatible with each other.
23rd - 1982
Madison
Nino Yannoni Tom Farrar
The 1982 ENC started on Monday, April 25 and ended Thursday, April 29 at noon. Every detail for the meeting, from finances to attendance, was decided by the ENC Committee. There was no external organization like the one now so ably run by Judith Sjoberg. Bob Lichter (treasurer), Bob Bryant (secretary) and Tom Farrar (local arrangements) were key players in running that ENC. Tom Farrar had an especially stressful job since he not only arranged accommodations and details for the meeting, but that year acted as a gatekeeper, to ensure that attendance did not exceed the committees guidelines. A major concern was that the ENC was getting too big and might lose some of its flavor if this growth continued. There was discussion about limiting attendance, a touchy business at best - committee meetings were tense. A note from Bob Bryant recalls that While we lamented the loss of small meeting intimacy, we decided that the field was growing so that the meeting should grow to support it. Of course we still were careful to emphasize that this was a meeting about experimental approaches, new methods, etc., not about results obtained with tried and true methods. One reason for the attendance crunch was that a plethora of techniques born in the mid-70s had grown at a furious pace: high-resolution in the solid state, multi-dimensional and multiple quantum spectroscopy and imaging. Advances in the use of composite pulse sequences were new and led to tension over who had done what first. Myras suite, a.k.a. the Merck, Sharpe and Dohme of Canada, Ltd. hospitality suite, was running at full speed, and was the place to see and be seen. It had been for many years the most popular place to hang out in the evening. There were no organized evening events apart from the dinner and speaker on Wednesday night and we were indeed fortunate to have the eloquent Charles Slichter as our after-dinner speaker. The ice cream suite instituted by IBM Instruments in the late 70s was just getting going. Tom Farrar, who chaired the 1973 ENC, noted that by 1982, the growth of the ENC meeting was amazing. In addition to the number of people attending, the number of corporate sponsors had also increased, from twelve in 1973 to twenty-five in 1982; many of those sponsors are no longer in the NMR business. A comment sent by Bob Lichter pretty much sums up how I personally feel about the ENC as an institution: More generally, I owe a lot to the ENC. Besides learning a great deal, I got connected with some great people, who were helpful especially at the early stages of my career, and were fun besides. People actually took me seriously, even before I had enough confidence to do so myself. Those connections opened some doors for me as well. Personally, I am looking forward to reconnecting at this ENC with some of the very people who did those same things for me see you there! I cannot close without mentioning two good friends, Gitte Vold, from UC San Diego, who chaired the 1983 and 1998 ENCs, and who died in 1999, as her career was really taking off, and Bob Vaughan, from Cal Tech, who died in a plane crash in 1979 and who was one of the earliest to apply solid-state NMR methods to materials science.
24th - 1983
Asilomar
Gitte Vold Lynne Batchelder
This report should have been written by Regitze (Gitte) Vold, Chair of the 24th ENC. Regrettably, Gitte died in a tragic accident in April 1999, not yet having reached her 62nd birthday. Those of us who knew her not only were very much influenced by her many scientific accomplishments but also were affected by her generosity, her openness, and her recurrent good cheer. She continues to be missed. Reviewing the 24th ENC program brought back memories long dormant. Twenty-seven companies supported the conference, and others had hospitality suites. Many had participated since the first ENC, and an Gitte Vold, July 2, impressive number still take part. The oral and poster presentations as usual 1937-April 11, 1999 brought out the newest experimental developments of the day. Multidimensional NMR spectroscopy was just emerging as a practical technique, broadband decoupling techniques and applications were moving into adolescence, and solid-state techniques were beginning to yield practical outcomes. Themes included NMR Techniques for Polymers and Other Large Systems, Spin Dynamics and Coherence Transfer, Two-Dimensional Techniques, NMR in Solids, and the usual array of laboratory-modified probes, pulse sequences, and data analyses. Indeed, the interplay between spectroscopists in their laboratories, who were constantly improving experimental techniques, and the vendors, who relied on these efforts for their own products, converged here. What remains impressive is how much was accomplished using techniques that today seem primitive, perhaps even quaint. Clearly, this reflects the insight and ingenuity of the scientists of the day, many of whom continue to be leaders a quarter century later. Indeed, the strongest impressions after 25 years are not of the science but of the people, an extraordinarily open group of women and men who were also fun to be with. Highlights, as usual, were the hospitality suites and the Wednesday banquet. The former, of course, were where much of the work was done, fueled by food, wine and beer, and topped off with brandy, M&Ms, and charades. The banquet at the 24th ENC was especially memorable because of the reminiscences of a true pioneer, the marvelously witty Erwin Hahn, who peppered his presentation with jokes that were so bad they were great! (Are you a Christian Scientist? No, Im a Jewish scientist. Semiotics before the term was invented!).
Erwin Hahn
To paraphrase George Burns, ENC attendees have enjoyed the first 50 years and are looking forward to the second. Bob Lichter Treasurer, 24th ENC
25th - 1984
Chair: Local Arrangements: Frank Anet Ed Brame
Wilmington
I was pleased and honored to be elected as the chair of this historic ENC, which marked a quarter of a century for this conference. It was therefore appropriate that Bill Ritchey, the chair and driving force for the first ENC, gave the opening talk and outlined the truly immense changes that had occurred in the field of NMR during the previous 25 years. I will not even try to list all the developments that took place in that period, but they included the development of high field NMR through the use of superconducting magnets, the application of pulse Fourier transform methods, the incorporation of computers in the instrumentation for control and analysis of data, the development of multidimensional NMR, the ability to easily obtain high-resolution (especially 13C) spectra from solids, and the entirely new field of MRI imaging, which became in due course the tail that wagged the dog. By the way, my own association with the ENC started with the second conference and I thus had the pleasure of watching these changes come into being. I was fortunate that Ed Brame, Jr. was an excellent Local Arrangements Chair. I still remember that I was with Ed and several others examining the meeting room the evening previous to the start of presentations, when we noticed that overzealous Radisson hotel personnel had placed ash trays at every sitting position in the meeting hall. It took us a little while to remove the several hundred ash trays! Times have fortunately changed, and smoking is no longer tolerated, at least indoors. Professor F. Bloch had given a talk after the banquet for the 20th ENC held in Asilomar, so I thought that it was appropriate that Professor E. M. Purcell should be invited to give the talk after the banquet for the 25th ENC. These workers did their research on opposite coast of the US and used slightly different experimental techniques. Both, of course, shared the Nobel Prize for the discovery of NMR in the condensed phase. The talk went very well and Professor Purcell described the details of his discovery. This involved finding a signal for the proton resonance in a massive amount of paraffin (by normal NMR standards) after allowing the sample to stand in the magnet overnight, since nothing much was known about relaxation times. Actually, the T1 relaxation time was a small fraction of a second, as was found later, so waiting overnight was real overkill! Professor Purcell gave his talk suffering from a cold. He had tried to reach me to ask that his talk be cancelled, but he was unable to contact me at the conference and decided to just go ahead and give the talk. I was most grateful for his generosity, as his absence would have left a hole in the program. Nancy True gave a talk on gas phase NMR to study conformational kinetics, which was of particular chemical interest to me because of my work in solution dynamic NMR. On looking back, this ENC was similar to those around that time and involved gradual advances in many areas. Overall, the 25th ENC had an eclectic mix of old and new, with 731 attendees a record at the time and almost 100 posters, as this medium of communication continued to gain favor. A total of 28 vendors again provided a great deal of support for the conference operations.
26th - 1985
Asilomar
Mark Henrichs Michael Maddox
Mark Henrichs, then of Eastman Kodak, chaired the 26th ENC. We have not been able to locate him, so I will provide a few comments. The 1985 ENC was the seventh to be held at Asilomar. By that time the schedule had evolved into an established order, and the locale was familiar to most participants. The ENC was increasingly popular so popular, in fact, that Marks introductory note cautioned that This year we reach the maximum size that can be accommodated at Asilomar. Changes in the structure of the meeting were being considered, and participants were asked to respond to a questionnaire on options for the future. Changes were made, including simulcasting lectures to the chapel from 1987 on, and the day of reckoning was postponed. This ENC had 19 hospitality suites, and overall 31 firms were thanked for financial support. There were over 900 attendees and 163 posters distributed into afternoon sessions on Monday and Wednesday. That permitted Tuesday afternoon to be free for relaxing and sightseeing. The buzzword for this ENC seems to have been Dynamic. Several talks covered NMR studies of molecular dynamics from tenths of a picosecond to the limit of the investigators patience in solids, of macromolecules in solution, and in polymer chains. Others described aspects of spin dynamics in new 1D and 2D pulse methods and in multiple quantum NMR in solids. Two talks dealt with dynamic nuclear polarization in relation to optical excitation. And Ray Freemans account of the problems of dynamic range in NMR were illustrated in the accompanying cartoon. The increasing importance of NMR in studying solids was apparent at this ENC, with talks on 1H multiple pulse MAS and 13C CPMAS, as well as presentations on metal and non-metallic surfaces investigated by 129Xe, 1H, 13C and 195Pt NMR. Ted Becker
27th - 1986
Baltimore
Bob Bryant Linda Sweeting
In 1986 the Refrigerator danced and sang as Chicago had won the super bowl. We were recovering from the Challenger disaster. Ronald Reagan was a year into his second term and ordered the bombing of Libya on the third day of the ENC in Baltimore while we argued about spins. This was the last ENC organized without professional help, and we recorded 1024 participants almost all of whom turned out to hear E. Raymond Andrew talk at the banquet. Clinical MRI was in place but the installed base was well under 1000 units; the ENC was a gathering that still mixed imagers and spectroscopists. Jim Hyde talked about coils and Bill Edelstein talked about antennas, while Jasper Jackson shocked people with a prototype instrument to do NMR down an oil well, now common practice. John Waugh was working at milliKelvin, Alex Pines was trying to convince us that there were useful things to do with no field at all and Warren Warren searched for the perfect pulse shape. 2D NMR was still making its way so we had a session on facts and artifacts, which Richard Ernst addressed even though I am sure he wished to introduce more exciting ideas. Protein structure determination was not yet a focus, but solids NMR was breaking lots of new ground. Work at high field (600 MHz) involved a trip to Carnegie Mellon. There were three and a half days of fun and like almost every ENC, this one summarized a year of significant transition in experimental NMR.
28th - 1987
Asilomar
Lynn Jelinski Lynne Batchelder
A summary of the 28th ENC, presented as a virtual interview: Ted Becker: The 28th in 1987 had some curious aspects. For example, why did the technical program begin on Sunday night? In all the previous years it had started on Monday morning. Lynn Jelinski: I was afraid youd ask about that. The early start was to fix a faux pas on my part. Somehow we neglected to invite Richard Ernst to speak until all of the slots were full. Ted: Having him speak was a good idea; Richard went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1991 for his pioneering work in high resolution NMR. Lynn: It turns out that three future Nobel Prize winners attended the 28th ENC. Kurt Wthrich would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2002 for his contributions for the determination of the 3D structure of biological macromolecules in solution, and Paul Lauterbur in Physiology or Medicine for his pioneering work on MRI. Active participation by all three future Nobel Prize winners underscores the high profile and value of the ENC as a vehicle for communicating new developments in NMR. Ted: What were some of the firsts of the 28th ENC? Things that an attendee might not have noticed? Lynn: It was the first year that the ENC employed a professional conference organizer, with somewhat mixed results. That was before Judith, of course. We also introduced the Monterey cypress logo, which I clipped from a California tourism magazine and Xeroxed onto the cover of the program. (Ed Stejskal hand-lettered the cover in his famous calligraphy.) Ive been worried ever since 1987 that someone would nab me for copyright infringement. Im delighted to see that the ENCs logo today still retains the spirit of our first logo.
28th ENC Ted: The symbolism is powerful as we celebrate the 50th ENC. As I recall, you wrote: The Monterey cypress, an evergreen that thrives on the Monterey Peninsula, , symbolizes a special
location where people in a never-dormant field return year after year to discuss the newest developments in NMR. Lynn: You can tell that I was heavily influenced by the Jiri Jonas, Herb Gutowsky monograph, NMR, an Evergreen. Ted: There must be some other interesting behind-the-scenes vignettes youd like to share about the 28th ENC. Lynn: Lets see there were a couple of exciting things. The fire alarm went off during one of the talks. Even though we guessed that it was a false alarm, we couldnt take a chance and evacuated anyway. Then there was the quip I overhead the first night after what turned out to be an unintentional (on my part) parade of women leading off the ENC. It began with me welcoming everyone to the 28th ENC, Lynne Batchelder serving as the all-important local arrangements coordinator, Linda Sweeting chairing the first technical session, and Mary Baum running the brief oral summaries of the posters. I overheard someone say, Oh, my goodness. What happened to the men? Ted: Those were changing times. What about the historical context of the conference? Lynn: Its hard to believe that 1987 was before widespread use of e-mail, and that PowerPoint 1.0 was introduced in April of that year. But some things were prophetic for our current times. For example, one of the sessions dealt with NMR for the Detection of Explosives, and 1987 would be the year of Black Monday, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 22.6% of its value in one day. Ted: Do you have any parting comments as we celebrate the 50th ENC? Lynn: I am heartened to see that the ENC continues to attract really talented people driven to make new contributions to NMR. I can recall my first ENC (the 19th, in Blacksburg, in 1978) where one of the talks was entitled 2D or not 2D? Hard to imagine, isnt it? The preponderance of new people at the 50th ENC and the strong history of past programs underlie that fact that NMR truly is an evergreen.
29th - 1988
Rochester
Stanley Opella Nick Zumbulyadis

There was some concern about the northern location selected for the 29th ENC. Fortunately, Rochester New York lived up to its reputation as the Flower City by having unseasonably warm weather in April of 1988. Notably, this was the first ENC organized by Judith Sjoberg and her Science Managers company, and this relationship has had a profound effect on all subsequent ENCs by ensuring that the meeting arrangements are of the same high quality as the scientific presentations. Also, this meeting led to the ENC being included on the New York Times list of key meetings on the scientific speaker's circuit.
Twenty years have passed since the 29th ENC, and this is the first time that I have looked at the scientific program since the meeting was held. I am struck by the prescience of so many of the presentations. There were entire sessions devoted to magic angle sample spinning, ordered biological systems, and dynamic nuclear polarization, in addition to those in the more general areas of pulse sequence development, materials and biological imaging, and things that now would be referred to as exotica. The magic angle sample spinning session introduced a number of advances that have transformed this field of research. It started with a talk on NMR strategies and high-speed MAS by Gary Maciel, which could be given today until you notice that the abstract mentions speeds inching toward 30 kHz. The experimental NMR methods discussed in the talks Measurements of two-dimensional NMR powder patterns in rotating solids (Takehiko Terao), 13C-15N Rotational Echo Double Resonance (Jake Schaefer), and Rotational Resonance in solid state NMR (Bob Griffin) are still being refined and combined to provide the pulse sequences applied in contemporary studies of polycrystalline proteins. In the session on ordered biological systems, two of the talks were particularly notable for where they have led. In the talk Multinuclear experiments for the determination of oligosaccharide structure in liquid crystal phases, Jim Prestegard described how orientational information could be obtained from weakly aligned biomolecules through measurements of what would become residual dipolar couplings, now an essential element of nearly all protein NMR studies in solution. And Tim Cross used his talk Dynamics of Gramicidin A transmembrane channel by solid state 15N NMR to introduce the interplay of structure and dynamics that dominate current solid-state NMR studies of aligned membrane proteins. The Program for the 29th ENC reflected the input of the NMR community and discussions and compromises among the members of the Executive Committee. At the time of the meeting, I thought it went well, and the participants I heard from were complimentary. I didn't reflect on the quality of the meeting during the intervening twenty years. Now, my reaction is one of astonishment. The scientific presentations were so far ahead of their time, that it took a while for them to have their impact. The credit for the success of the 29th ENC belongs solely with the practitioners of experimental NMR spectroscopy who showcased their ideas and results in Rochester.
30th - 1989
Asilomar
Allen Garroway Charles Wade
It was a great pleasure for me to chair the 30th ENC and to put together the scientific program with the insights of the chair-elect Ed Stejskal, the ENC Executive Committee and the Session Chairs. One goal that year was to bring in some NMR practitioners who were outsiders to the ENC. Two come to mind: Nobelist (1996) Doug Osheroff with a talk on NMR of the magnetic properties of helium-3 and Zvi Paltiel on well-logging by NMR, a technique that has evolved over the past twenty years into a large-scale commercial operation. Also of interest to me was the work on SQUID detection of magnetic resonance signals, with talks by Erwin Hahn and Alex Pines. Looking over the 50th ENC program, I note there are topics and speakers common to the 30th ENC. Thats not so bad: some problems take a long time and require staying power. However, many of the mechanics of the meeting have evolved more rapidly than the topics. When we organized the 30th ENC, email was just beginning to catch on, with the powerful 6 MHz 286 PCs of the era. So most communications were still done by fax. I recall shoving 200 poster abstracts through our fax machine to Ed Stejskal. Most of them were readable on the other end. 1989 was also a time before cell phones. But we had improved on the previous ENC communications technology in which runners were dispatched across the Asilomar campus with messages, e.g. has anyone seen the donuts? At the 30th ENC we rented walkie-talkies for the meeting organizers. I well recall the head of the ENC conference office, Judith Sjoberg, with a massive Motorola in a black leather holster that would bring joy to any outlaw biker. Of course, there were events outside the meeting that shaped us. It was only a few months before, in December 1988, that Pan American Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland. Most airline travelers had that tragedy in mind when they flew to the ENC. PA 103 delivered a sharp reminder that not everyone shares our values; not everyone is our friend. I send my best wishes to the present ENC community and join you in looking forward to the next 50 years (well, at least the next 25).
31st - 1990
Asilomar
Ed Stejskal Laima Baltusis
My first act as Chair was to send a letter to all the members of the Executive Committee. I got a reply from Geoffrey Bodenhausen saying that that was too slow (especially for someone in Europe) and suggesting I use FAX. At the time there was no available FAX in the Department of Chemistry at NCSU. The only one available was in the University Computing Center. Accordingly, I would get my ideas together during the day and then trot over to the Computing Center so that they could send 16 FAXs overnight. I ran up quite a bill. I followed the standard pattern of the day. The 31st ENC was projected to be the largest to-date and I didnt want to do anything too revolutionary. I chose the topics for the sessions and then asked one of the members of the Executive Committee to head and organize that session. The one exception to that rule was that Colin Fyfe shared the last session with Joe Ackerman. I had promised Mary Baum that I would try to get more women chosen as speakers. As I recall, I got together a list of possible female speakers and she went over it and endorsed some and vetoed others. I had really wanted to get Peggy Etter to talk, but she was too ill to travel. As it turned out, we didnt get too many female speakers, but we did get some. The previous years banquet had been something of a debacle. Things werent too bad in the main room, but I understand that in the overflow rooms it was a bit of a shambles. I attributed that to the fact that many people had started drinking during the afternoon poster session, continued with the cocktail hour and went on with the wine at dinner. Accordingly I eliminated the alcohol from the afternoon poster session and moved the banquet to the Monterey Aquarium (no speaker and reduced access to alcohol). It didnt occur to me to move the second poster session to the morning, as was done later. I recall that one of the vendors specifically asked me to post a sign stating that the alcohol-free idea was my idea and not his. I figured that if anyone was going to reduce the amount of alcohol consumed credibly it would take a boozer (yours truly).
32nd - 1991
Chair: Local Arrangements: Charles Wade William Hutton
St. Louis
The 32nd ENC was held at the Adams Mark Hotel in St. Louis. The hotel was an excellent venue for the ENC. All the sessions and all the vendor lounges fit easily into the hotel, a rather new structure just across the street from the Arch. In addition, space was such that the posters could be up the entire week. Nearby were inexpensive hotels which the students utilized and a night life area, The Landing, which many attendees frequented. The Adams Mark was also the site of the 34th ENC. The attendance, about 1150, was affected by the Gulf War (first Gulf War?) which was prompted by Iraqs invasion of Kuwait. Buildup for the Gulf War began in August 1990, air attacks began in January, the height of the conflict was February 24-27, 1991 and the hostilities ended April 6. The uncertainties created by this had a strong impact on travel planning and on registrations. Thirty vendors were present, and 15 companies made donations to fund 20 student travel stipends. The conference format had a single session for all 40 presentations. Two morning poster sessions were held with a total of 264 posters. Of note in the presentations were several in areas that expanded considerably over the next decade: an overview of the use of gradients in high resolution NMR (P. van Zijl); several papers on enhanced data processing in multidimensional NMR (M. Rance, S. Smith, E. Olejniczak); and a session on microimaging of materials and biological systems (W. Kuhn, R. Kimmich, L. Jelinski, R. Armstrong, E. MacFarland). I served on the ENC board for 8 years, beginning in 1985. In the mid-1980s ENC underwent tremendous growth in number of participants and had a few growing pains. Handling the conference with volunteers was sometimes an exercise in crisis management. By the early 1990s it was a smoothly functioning conference, in part due to changes made in the late 1980s: improving the organizational skills by hiring a full time professional meeting planning company (Judith Sjobergs which is still involved) and improving the audiovisual capabilities. Al Garroway, Joe Dumais, and Dean Willingham were big contributors to the audio visual improvements, and Dean is still involved. The 32nd ENC proceeded smoothly due to those improvements. ENC remains a superb conference, a unique combination of scientific presentations and vendor involvement with a steady flow of new ideas and young scientists.
33rd - 1992
Asilomar
Andy Byrd Laima Baltusis
The ENC is undoubtedly one of the foremost conferences that involve or relate to magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Since its beginning in 1960 with a small group of practitioners, it has grown to be the place where new developments were presented and discussed, where dramatic advancements in the applications to chemistry, biology, imaging and even quantum computing are found in their earliest incarnations, where new instrumentation was revealed and whose conception flowed from the combination of research that was the foundation of the ENC, encompassing solution-state, solid-state, and the spin physics of NMR spectroscopy. Having the honor to be one of the 49 scientists who have chaired this conference (note that Gitte Vold was Chair twice!) is one of the personal highlights of my career. My first ENC was in 1975, in Asilomar, and it was transformative. The opportunity to meet the leaders in the field, including the young Richard Ernst and Ray Freeman, and form the beginnings of friendships with colleagues that have become leaders in diverse aspects of our field was unique and powerful. As many of my colleagues will write, we always came to the ENC no matter what application area of NMR we pursued. We watched the meeting grow, and we became involved in the organization and planning for the meeting. When I was selected to Chair the 33rd ENC, the field was exploding in the area of biological NMR with uniform isotopic labeling and 3D/4D NMR, we were seeing the initial applications of PFGs to solution NMR, solid state NMR was exploring REDOR and Rotational Resonance as precursors to the coming manipulation of dipolar coupling/recoupling that mirrored previous developments in solution NMR manipulating J-couplings. It was common for the Executive Committee to discuss the expanding diversity of the field and how to cover it with the single session concept that had stood so well for the NMR community. It was an important and valuable tenet of the meeting, since it fostered the cross-fertilization of ideas and expertise between liquid-state, solid-state, and imaging experts. Nevertheless, the ENC needed to match the growth of the field and to embrace it. At the 33rd ENC, we took two significant steps in the format of the meeting. It was the first ENC to have parallel sessions. Al Garroway had initiated the remote viewing technology in the Chapel in 1989, and it was the perfect opportunity to experiment with parallel sessions. This approach allowed us to expand the program while still retaining the 3.5 day meeting, closing at noon on Thursday. The concept remained controversial, since parallel sessions were only held again in Boston (1995) before becoming a standard feature in 2002 with the 43rd ENC in Asilomar, when the meeting had already lengthened to 4.5 days. The second major step was the first use of the TENT to hold poster sessions. The ENC was growing fast and busting at the seams for Asilomar. After a number of attempts, we finally obtained approval from Asilomar management to allow us to use a tent for the poster sessions. This allowed us to increase the number of posters by > 50% to 370. This was both exciting and terrifyingas we prepared for the meeting, the reality of rain and wind made us wonder whether we would survive this decision! Despite having several flowing streams
coursing through the tent, it was successful and led the way for ever increasing numbers of posters and participation by many young scientists, which is one of the strongest elements of the ENC. We also celebrated with exuberance the recent awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (October 1991) to Richard Ernst. As a community, we were well aware of Richards pioneering work, as he had presented the developments at ENCs, and it was a delight to share in some small way his achievements and the recognition of our field. Few have been so giving to a research community as Richard Ernst, and it was an honor to share in congratulating him at the 33rd ENC. 1992 was a momentous year for me, since, during the preparation for the ENC, I moved my lab to the NCI and 4 weeks before the ENC my daughter was born. I was very grateful for the chance to have served as Chair of the 33rd ENC, but when 12:00 pm arrived on Thursday, April 11th, the exhaustion of the meeting and sleeplessness of the first month of fatherhood made it difficult to appreciate. Through all of these trials, the excellent assistance of Judith Sjoberg, Conference Manager, was essential and formed the basis of a warm friendship that allowed me to convince her to also help organize ICMRBS meetings. As time passed, it sunk in what an exquisite opportunity the community gave me, thank you!
34th - 1993
St. Louis
Mary Baum Judith Sjoberg
Perhaps the most vibrant memory I have of the 34th ENC in St. Louis was that those of us who were involved in its organization were fortunate enough to arrive on the Friday before the conference started. A darned good thing, as a whopper of a noreaster was brewing, poised to wend its way up the east coast starting Saturday night and ending Monday morning. Sir Al Garroway phoned me on Saturday morning Hi Mary, this is Al. Were expecting flight delays in DC, so Ill be a little late, arriving later this evening, then again Saturday evening Hi Mary, this is Al. The airports closed for the night, but Ill get out as soon as I can on Sunday, then again on Sunday morning Hi Mary, this is Al. Weve got a state of emergency in DC, nobody is permitted to travel anywhere until further notice, then again on Monday Hi Mary, this is Al. Ive got a flight booked for tomorrow morning. He arrived on Tuesday. Snowfall on the east coast ranged from 15 to 36 inches from that storm, and in all, we had over 250 attendees whose arrival was delayed by more than a day. Miraculously, none of our speakers were delayed! There was to have been a riverboat cruise in lieu of the banquet, but it was cancelled with very short notice when the riverboat company decided to convert all of its cruise boats to casinos. That left us with no banquet speaker, so we ended up doing a brief slide presentation of photos that had been taken at the conference. In 1993, 26 students received travel stipends to attend the ENC. They have gone on to research positions in national laboratories, faculty positions at colleges and universities, and at least one is running a spa and developing a line of cosmetics! In terms of the science that was presented, the proliferation of acronyms was evident: TOCSY, HOSE, MACROSEARCH, COSY, NOESY, ROESY, REDOR, TEDOR, CPMAS, CRAMPS, HOHAHA, DECODER (this fallen spectroscopist has to ask whether many of them survive to this day). We saw one of the first fMRI images of a human brain; we heard about the hybridization of atomic force microscopy with NMR; we learned that spider silk is stronger than steel; we saw images taken using a superconducting probe; we probed the structures of proteins, DNA, enzymes, and their small-molecule partners; and we presented innumerable examples of new hardware, new techniques, and outstanding research. I am now Associate Dean of the Faculty at Princeton University and no longer doing NMR, but Heres to 50 years of the ENC long may it continue!
35th - 1994
Asilomar
Bernhard Blmich Judith Sjoberg
The time of preparation of the 1994 ENC must have been more busy than any other time in my life: in 1993 had started my position as professor of macromolecular chemistry at RWTH Aachen University, travelled between family in Mainz and work in Aachen, started building a house, prepared a whole set of new lectures to teach macromolecular chemistry and prepared the ENC. But thanks to the already established expertise of Judith Sjoberg and her team, the ENC work went smoothly, although for the first time, the ENC chair was not from the US. That brought along some peculiarities with the umlaut in my name which is stubbornly being ignored in the Anglo-Saxon civilization. I was not going to accept that and indeed managed to get the proper spelling of my name in the ENC letterhead. It helped that Judiths name at some dark European times also had an umlaut. We had great fun and many jokes with umlauts in those days. So when Judith called one day after the election of Hellmut Eckert for chair elect and asked if Hellmut is spelled with an Umlaut, I was convinced that this was one more joke on Umlauts, and my answer was of course. Lo and behold, the official letterhead of the 35th ENC has not only the correct spelling of my name with the umlaut, but also Hellmut Eckerts name spelled wrongly with an umlaut as Hellmt. Those two dots may not mean a lot in the US, but for Helmut and myself they do make a difference. That leaked to Ray Freeman and some others, and subsequently there was extended correspondence between Ray Freemn, a certain Jean Delayre (this is John Delayre from Tecmag) and Peter Blmler and Bernhard Blmich. Here is a quote from a letter sent from Cambridge to Jean Delayre with the letterhead reading Umlautfabriken G.m.b.H. Dalmatia, Germany and signed by Heinz Seibenundfnsig (Oberst): We are pleased to hr of your interest in plazing an order for our handcrafted umlauten. Unfortunately you haf not correctly spezified your requirements! We manufacture umlauten in Times Roman, Helvetica, Palatino, Palamino, Wagnerian, Neonazi, Gtterdmmmerung, Nietzchian, and Gothic. Please note that Hnnecker has been discontinued...... It is a great group, our NMR community!
Peter Blmler, Manfred Wilhelm, Brad Chmelka, and Bernhard Blmich (left to right) near Aachen reminiscing the 35th ENC with a Heinz-57 ketchup bottle, Asilomar pine sprouts in the flower pot and smoking import-restricted cigars of Alex Pines banned to an existence in umlautridden, provincial Europe.
36th - 1995
Boston
Hellmut Eckert Judith Sjoberg
The 1995 NMR had as its special theme 50 years of NMR spectroscopy, and it took the conference to the city of Boston, one of the NMR birthplaces. We were particularly gratified by the fact that three of the authors of the two original publications announcing NMR in condensed matter, Professors Purcell and Pound (from Harvard), and Dr. Packard (from Stanford), accepted our invitation, and in the opening ceremony they were honored for their ultimate responsibility for the existence of this conference. Professor Pound, who admitted that this happened to be the very first ENC he ever attended, then gave an inspiring opening lecture on the discovery of NMR, which really captured the excitement of those pioneering days. Purcell and Pound, along with Professors Bloembergen and Ramsey, also joined us for the banquet, where all of us enjoyed Ted Becker`s after dinner talk sharing many historical anecdotes from the early days of NMR. One of the outstanding attractions, organized by Shaw Huang (Harvard) was an Historical Exhibit, showcasing pioneering NMR equipment of all kinds, such as ancient rf amplifier tubes, water-cooled magnet coils, and various NMR and NQR probes. In addition, the exhibit contained many historical photographs and copies from numerous original laboratory notebooks from the discovery days. With more than 1600 participants and 559 posters, the 1995 ENC had been the largest one ever, and I speculate (although I dont know for sure) that this record might still be unbroken. When I mentioned the attendance figure in a conversation with one of the invited speakers (a theoretical chemist who had never been to an ENC before), his reaction was pure amazement: 1600 people all here for just one experiment?? Unbelievable! Due to the enormous interest the conference generated in the community, we decided to complement the plenary sessions with numerous sets of technical sessions held in parallel. The reviews on this experiment were mixed, however, as it proved difficult to avoid topical overlap, and the forthcoming ENCs returned to their usual format without parallel sessions. We also introduced a new special session devoted exclusively to competitively selected student speakers, which was widely appreciated. While many of the invited lectures presented important progress in their fields, the most important technique innovation introduced at the Boston conference, in my view, was Lucio Frydman`s multiple-quantum correlation experiment for obtaining high-resolution MAS NMR spectra of quadrupolar nuclei (poster 340). As this method allows an easy elimination of second-order quadrupolar broadening effects using commercially available equipment it continues to have a tremendous impact on the further development of the field. From a personal perspective, these were interesting times indeed, as the month in which the 1995 ENC was held, coincided precisely with my transition from UC Santa Barbara to the University of Mnster. And the responsibility and challenge of making this ENC a special one turned out to be an enormously gratifying experience! It was a great privilege to work with the enthusiastic and dedicated team members of the ENC Executive Committee and to benefit from Judith Sjoberg`s planning genius, the generosity and cooperation of the vendors, as well as the dedicated professionalism of all the Boston Marriott hotel staff. Most importantly, however, I believe we succeeded in maintaining the high scientific standard of the conference, in increasing the exchange interaction between theory, new techniques and new applications and in consolidating the important role of the ENC in the NMR community.
37th - 1996
Asilomar
Geoffrey Bodenhausen Judith Sjoberg
ENC 1996 was scheduled to be the last ever to be held in Asilomar. Indeed, the Executive Committee, intimidated by the relentless growth of the number of participants, had decided the year before that we should move to another site equipped with modern amenities. We had explored alternative sites for ENC 1998, including, at John Delayres suggestion, a luxurious hotel in Houston. Accompanied by Judith Sjoberg, a delegation had duly visited the place, to check out the lecture halls, poster areas, etc., The hotel management had put me up in their Presidential Suite, which must have comprised at least half a dozen rooms, about twice the size of my current apartment in Paris. Impressed by their reception, we booked virtually the entire hotel for 1998, and I signed a contract in the name of the Executive Committee, with a penalty clause that would have absorbed the entire assets of ENC had we defaulted. This clause was to become effective a few days after ENC 1996. At ENC 1996, the conference bags carried the nostalgic message Farewell Asilomar, and many talks were dedicated to fond memories of this memorable site which was soon doomed to oblivion. As it happened, the Committee was faced with an unexpected rebellion of the attendees. Laurie Hall delivered a fiery speech where he eloquently invoked the role of friendship in science, and how important the unique ambiance of Asilomar had been for the spirit of our community. So we booked Asilomar again for 1998, and chickened out of the Houston contract at the last minute. I rarely received so many angry phone calls in my life. My principal contribution to the program was my idea to invite Albert Overhauser for an after-dinner speech. At that time, I had written at least 50 papers on his famous effect, and I was curious to meet him for dinner just before his speech. As it happens, he was so tense that our conversation was rather stilted, and I forgot to tell him that I had been making a living for years on his idea. Once he had stepped on the podium, he quickly flashed a few equations that I had never seen before, and rapidly concluded that was all there was to say about his famous NOE. To this day, I have not been able to reconstruct what he really meant to say. I guess this is typical for the life of a scientist: you go to a meeting, hear many boring talks, and when there is, at last, a lecture that youve really been looking forward to hear, you miss the key point. Perhaps because of a lack of mathematical background, insufficient prior knowledge, incomprehensible jargon, or some other shortcoming. Whatever the reasons may be, the fact remains that conferences can be frustrating. I have a more personal recollection to share with aficionados of Asilomar. I had been elected Chair two years earlier, in March 1994, also at Asilomar. A few weeks earlier, I had taken the decision to quit my position at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland to take up a job at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, coupled with a faculty position at Florida State University in
Tallahassee. This had not been an easy decision, particularly with respect to my daughters, who were not so thrilled about the choice of leaving Switzerland. (As it happened, they soon made peace with life in the US, and one of them is now living in Chicago.) While I was waiting for the outcome of the election on Asilomars grounds, watching some deer frolicking about, I pondered how painful it might turn out to be for me, as soon-to-be-immigrant to the US, if I failed to get elected. So when the news of my election came through, it gave me a much-appreciated feeling that I was going to be welcome in the US. Apart from Overhauser, I have hardly any recollections of the scientific program. I remember that Herv Desvaux, at that time a visiting scientist at the NHMFL, on leave from the French Atomic Energy Commissariat, gave a group seminar after our return to Tallahassee, curtly stating that there had been nothing new this year. Yet, my dear collection of massive ENC folders (from those wonderful days where real paper was still used, before most proceedings were downgraded to mere virtual records!) shows a strong complement of gifted lecturers: Ernst, Freeman, Bax, Kay, Frydman, Navon, Prestegard, Halle, Otting, Shaka, Keeler, Markley, Massiot, Sebald, Tycko, McDermott, Schaefer, Griffin, Mehring, Callaghan, van Gunsteren, Brschweiler, Brnger, van Zijl, Haase, Kupce, Howard Hill, Frank Laukien, and many others. ENC 1996 cannot have been such a bad vintage!
38th - 1997
Orlando
Jim Roberts Judith Sjoberg
The pre-conference visit to the Clarion Plaza Hotel was actually fun. After all, the facility appeared to have almost everything the ENC required in an East Coast hotel site: a large ballroom for plenary sessions, a second ballroom so posters could remain available the entire week, enough vendor suite space with the added bonus that all vendors were on one floor, a nearby less expensive hotel, facile air connections to Orlando, alternative entertainment venues for families and non-conferees (Sea World, Universal Studios, and a little place called Walt Disney World), enough rooms, a pool (but no beach), and several restaurants both in the hotel and in the immediate vicinity. The ENC returned to Orlando in both 1999 and 2001. Part of the fun on the site visit was driving to the coast to see a night launch of a satellite from the Cape. Many of the program sessions were similar to those of the previous few years, with traditional areas of liquids, solids, biomedical NMR, polymers, biological macromolecules, instrumentation, and exotica. The more unusual sessions included Alternative Ways of Doing Magnetic Resonance, Intermediate State (not liquid or solid), and a Student Session. I remember poring over the poster abstracts until the early hours of several mornings, trying to pick out several abstracts to send to session chairs so they could select a few for promoted talks. The speakers were a mix of ENC regular contributors and newcomers the session chairs made a number of excellent suggestions for speakers. If the conference was successful at sampling the state of the field at that time, it was largely due to the session chairs and members of the Executive Committee. The banquet speaker on Wednesday night was Wallace Brey, the long-time editor of the Journal of Magnetic Resonance. His talk, "Some Experiences during 27 Years as JMR Editor," reflected the history of NMR as well. As chair of the conference, it seemed like there was always some issue that needed attention. The opening reception on Sunday night was held around the pool. I distinctly remember not leaving the hotel again until late Thursday night for the traditional beach walk with a group of special friends that meet at the ENC. That year the late night stroll was held around the pool by necessity. I cant wait to get back to Asilomar to walk on a real beach again!
39th - 1998
Asilomar
Gitte Vold Judith Sjoberg
In the spring of 1998, Monica and Bill were all the rage on the U.S. political scene (and subsequent inspiration for the IMPEACH-MBC and CIGAR-HMBC sequences used to elucidate proton-deficient molecular frameworks). Peace was declared in Northern Ireland, but Israel, Iraq, and the U.N. were in the midst of a tense standoff. Justice was also proclaimed with the arrest of former Chilean tyrant Augusto Pinochet and the imprisonment of the Unibomber. And far away from all of that, both literally and figuratively, nearly 1500 NMR spectroscopists were fully engaged with TROSY, bicelles, quantum computing, and the like. The 39th ENC, marking the return to Asilomar, was chaired by the late Regitze (Gitte) Vold, who was the first among four women to hold this position, and the only person to chair the meeting twice (see the 24th ENC). Scientifically, transverse relaxation-optimized spectroscopy (TROSY), in conjunction with deuterium labeling, promised to extend solution-state structural studies to proteins and micelleencapsulated aggregates as large as 300 kDa and intensified the push toward GHz NMR spectrometers. Spin relaxation was also exploited for relaxographic tissue images and fMRI contrast methods based on intermolecular zero quantum coherence; to probe both hot-spot locations and motional rates that influence protein folding and activity. Meanwhile, the versatility of bilayered micelles (bicelles) was evident both in solution and solid state: in dilute form they yielded residual dipolar couplings to refine 3D protein and nucleic acid structures, while as membranemimetic media they facilitated studies of peptide structure using solid-state spectroscopy. A new wave of MAS-based experiments hit the solid-state NMR beachhead long-distance measurements for spin pairs in proteins, determinations of selective 13C-13C distance constraints and torsion angles in uniformly labeled peptides, 129Xe optical pumping to enhance observation of silica surface species. Beyond the mainstream focus on molecules large and small, materials natural and engineered, there were enticements off the beaten track: strange fields (stray-field gradients and acrobatic cycled fields), small samples (microcoils and nanoprobes), and quantum computers (curiosities or future useful tools?). It was also in 1998 that Gitte announced the new Laukien Award for experimental NMR research to enable beneficial new applications, sponsored by a founding family of Bruker BioSpin. This was the year in which the Executive Committee began serious consideration of electronic abstract submission; it was when the new Asilomar management endeavored to protect the grounds from our poster tent intrusions, to ban hard liquor, and to supply bartenders to the vendor suites (or sometimes not). This ENC featured an unofficial womens luncheon, a pre-dawn beach walk, and a variety of notable(?) acronyms: TROSY, RDC, MAOSS, CRAZED, STRAFI, HORROR, QPASS, RIACT, GAUDI, STUD+ Stripe-COSY, BASHD-ROESY, HoMQC, TIG-BIRD, SIMPLE, MOUSE, ODESSA, SHREWD, DECRA, FAIR, MAH, TOESY, MSHOT-3, DCOR, CLEANEXPM, BOOMERANG, ALBATROSS, RUFIS, MESSI, and more. To the next 50 years of spinning spins, Ruth E. Stark Treasurer, 39th ENC
40th - 1999
Orlando
Jerry Ackerman Judith Sjoberg

The 40th ENC took place in bright, sunny Orlando, Florida, February 28 March 5, 1999, just before the turn of the millennium. The great concern weighing on our nation's collective psyche was Y2K: would power plants fail and planes fall out of the sky because it hadn't occurred to Bill Gates to use four characters for the year field in MS-DOS 1.0 twenty years earlier? Of course, we were to wake up on January 1, 2000 to find that nothing had happened on that front, but a lot was happening in Orlando in 1999.
The most notable aspect of that conference was the inauguration of the Gnther Laukien Prize, a $15,000 cash award generously contributed by Bruker to honor the memory of the company's co-founder and guiding light. The award was to be given to recognize and reward new cutting-edge experimental NMR research with a very high probability of enabling beneficial new applications. Richard Ernst agreed to chair the Laukien committee, and we worked hard over about half a year to choose a deserving awardee. The committee selected for the first Laukien Prize the group of scientists who created TROSY (Transverse Relaxation-Optimized Spectroscopy), Konstantin Pervushin, Roland Riek, Gerhard Wider and Kurt Wthrich. TROSY enabled multidimensional spectroscopy to be extended to biomolecules of considerably larger mass. At the opening session on Monday morning the award was presented by Christian Griesinger. Kurt gave a short introduction, immediately following which Konstantin delivered the first Laukien Prize lecture in the Biopolymer Structure session chaired by Geoffrey Bodenhausen. The ENC has a history of recognizing scientific leaders early in their development. Kurt would go on to share the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution. Richard Ernst (Nobel 1991, Chemistry) and Paul Lauterbur (Nobel 2003, Medicine) were long familiar to ENC attendees. The banquet speaker that year was Aksel Bothner-By. Aksel gave a highly entertaining talk entitled 40 Years in Show Business about his long history of contributions to our field. He talked about his pioneering 600 MHz magnet, and even got a thousand audience members to sing along with him the tune he composed especially for the occasion, Theres No Business Like Our Business. If the committee decides this year that ENC needs an official anthem, look no further. That year we heard about NMR at high (compressed knee cartilage) and really high (diamond anvil) pressure, NMR in low (hyperpolarized gases) and really high (900 MHz) fields, NMR scanning people in airports and 8T magnets, NQR scanning for land mines, NMR scanning bones, cells, tumors, plaques, fluids and gases in people, and NMR with really small (microcoils) and really bigmeaning complexcoils (receive arrays)and of course lots of NMR in solutions and solids. There were about 64 talks and 436 posters over five daysall in all a wonderful meeting.
41st - 2000
Asilomar
Christian Griesinger Judith Sjoberg
I remember that organizing the ENC in 2000 was a big challenge for me since I had decided half a year before the major wave of organizational work to move from University of Frankfurt to Max Planck Institute in Gttingen which meant a lot of work at my old place and also a lot of work at the new place. Judith Soberg was extremely pleasant to work with since she kept reminding me of deadlines and things that I needed to do while making sure that everything she could do was done perfectly. The session chairs selected mainly but not exclusively from the committee were in charge of putting together their session speakers in agreement with me which turned out to be of great value, since obviously no single person can be expert in all fields of NMR science. In that time window, I remember one morning during a conference early in January of 2000 at the TATA institute in Mumbai where I spent approximately 6 hours doing emails for the conference in the chilliest and stormiest (because of the air conditioning) computer room I remember. I ended up sitting with winter jacket and thick sweater almost with gloves but that was impossible because I needed to type while it was 35C outside of the computer room. Lucio Frydman, the chair of the 50th ENC, received the Laukien prize in 2000 which was a very easy decision to make by the committee for his developments in Multiple Quantum MAS. Further highlights of the conference were the use of dipolar couplings in solution for the measurement of domain orientations in multidomain proteins by Lewis Kay who won the Laukien prize in 2004, not the least for isotope labelling of proteins such that dipolar couplings could be measured in the optimal way on large proteins. Further applications employed DNA, oligosaccharides and paramagnetically tagged proteins to observe dipolar couplings and pseudocontact shifts in otherwise diamagnetic proteins. The field had been started by Ad Bax, Aksel Bothner-by and James Prestegard who were awarded the Laukien prize in 2002. In further sessions, topics that have become main stream in the meantime were present: Hyperpolarization by noble gases for enhanced MRI and solid state DNP presented by Robert R. Griffin, who was awarded the Laukien prize in 2007, were highlights at the time. Another session on this topic: Nuclei meets electron emphasized this topic. A full session was devoted to real time kinetics observed by NMR after photoactivation or using mixing devices which is a very challenging and therefore slowly growing field. Sessions on long term favorites investigated by NMR spectroscopy in a unique way such as protein and RNA dynamics were represented with special emphasis on the interpretation of cross-hydrogen bond J-couplings that lead to the Laukien award to Stephan Grzesiek in 2005 as well as on cross correlations and concerted motions.
A field that has grown tremendously over the past years was also represented at this conference, namely the structural and dynamical interpretation of chemical shifts which are so easy to measure but much harder to interpret than scalar or dipolar couplings or cross relaxation effects. Other topics present at this conference which have grown since then tremendously were the structural investigation of amyloids with solid state NMR, the investigation of membrane proteins by solid state NMR and the study of dynamics with solid state NMR. Another topic that has been picked up by many groups around the world since then is the use of paramagnetic relaxation enhancement to determine structures of difficult proteins. Gerhard Wagner presented a talk in this direction showing that spin labelling and distance measurements allow to obtain structures when only few NOEs are available. This method is now in use not only for membrane proteins and intrinsically unfolded proteins in solution NMR but also in solid state NMR with the same purpose. John Waugh gave a very witty after dinner lecture that was inspiring for the whole audience.
42nd - 2001
Chair: Local Arrangements: Art Palmer Judith Sjoberg
Orlando
I joined Peter Wrights laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute as a postdoctoral scientist in 1989, knowing virtually nothing about high-field biological magnetic resonance. By the time of the 33rd ENC in 1992, I had learned enough to attend the ENC and present my first poster, entitled Dynamics of Methyl Groups in Proteins as Characterized by ProtonDetected Heteronuclear NMR Spectroscopy (I note that my poster titles have not changed so much in the ensuing 17 years). At the 33rd ENC, I began to meet the many scientists who I knew only from the literature and who subsequently have become friends and colleagues. At the 33rd ENC, I would not have guessed that I eventually would have the honor to chair the 42nd ENC, the last conference held in Orlando, FL, in 2001. I was fortunate to have served on the Executive Committee for the previous two years and had learned a great deal about chairing the meeting by working with Jerry Ackerman, Chair of the 40th ENC, and Christian Griesinger, Chair of the 41st ENC. As Chair, I received tremendous assistance from Chair-elect Bob Griffin and the other members of the Executive Committee. The excellence of the scientific program was due directly to the wisdom of the Executive Committee. After months of preparation, the 42nd ENC, between handing out badges at Registration on Sunday afternoon to passing the Chairmanship to Bob Griffin at the Banquet Thursday evening, seemingly passed in an instant and soon I was saying goodbyes and see you next year on Friday afternoon. Without doubt, the highlight of the Conference for me was meeting Professor Erwin Hahn, who gave the After Dinner Address, entitled Oddities and Serendipities in the History of NMR and the Spin. My career in NMR spectroscopy has been built upon spin-echo sequences, so I have a special memory of talking with the discoverer of the effect at length late one night. The scientific highlight of the Conference was the award of the third Laukien Prize to Peter Boesiger, Klaas Prmann, Markus Weiger for Sensitivity-Encoded Magnetic Resonance Imaging, the first Laukien Prize awarded for advances in MRI. I am proudest of the 56 student travel stipends that were awarded at the 42nd ENC. As far as I can tell, that number set a short-lived record that gratifyingly has been surpassed at subsequent ENCs through the generous support of many companies, the National Institutes of Health, and Suraj Manrao. Looking back at the list of student travel recipients, I am struck by how many of these then-students are already establishing their independent careers in magnetic resonance. Their accomplishments are the real legacy of the 42nd ENC. After the 42nd ENC ended, I spent the following week recovering in central Florida while attending Cleveland Indians spring training games with my father, who had driven down from Cleveland, OH. This vacation started a tradition in which he and I attend spring training either before or after the ENC, whenever the Conference takes place near the teams training site. As luck would have it, the Cleveland Indians have relocated to Arizona this year, so I will arrive at the 50th ENC sunburned from watching preparations for the upcoming season. Forgive me if I lapse into a reverie at some point during the 50th ENC, remembering that special time in my career when I was Chair of this wonderful meeting, or perhaps I only will be dreaming of a World Series title for my long-suffering team.
43rd - 2002
Asilomar
Bob Griffin Judith Sjoberg

The 43rd ENC in April 2002 was the first ENC following the catastrophic events of 9/11. The meeting survived the tumultuous times, but there were several challenges and questions that arose that would normally not have been a concern.
First, was the serious possibility that we might encounter a reoccurrence of 9/11 and that ENC, Inc. would have to pay for hotel reservations, meals, etc. that were not used and this could bankrupt the organization. In addition, air travel dropped precipitously immediately after the event and it was not clear that it would recover by the spring of 2002. Thus, we were very concerned that we would have a quorum of attendees, which could again place the meeting in a precarious financial position. Second, we had another problem that led to an even greater concern -- the life of one of the invited speakers was threatened by an unhappy colleague! In particular, some months prior to the meeting I received an e-mail that stated if that speaker appeared on stage he would be shot! The message implied that the sender was in the Asilomar area checking out the location of the facilities, and in fact we traced the source of the message to an internet shop in Monterey. If this threat occurred pre-9/11, it would have been treated seriously; but, in the atmosphere post 9/11 it generated an urgent response. In the end, Asilomar and the ENC had an extra security detail on hand at the meeting, checking badges at the door of the Merrill Hall, etc. Fortunately the unhappy individual did not appear. Maybe no one noticed except Judith and me? Third, that year I had invited Anatole Abragam to be the after dinner speaker. Anatole is a legendary figure in magnetic resonance and was always extremely entertaining at the Gordon Research Conferences where he often spoke. Thus, I was surprised that no one had invited him previously to speak at the ENC. In any event he had booked his trip, planned his talk and was looking forward to the meeting, including a visit in Berkeley on the way to Asilomar. Unfortunately, he developed a serious back problem and was unable to travel. As a result, we recruited an equally famous replacement Maurice Goldman to present the after dinner speech. I recall introducing Maurice as a very colorful speaker -- he usually would wear an orange coat for these presentations! Finally there were the vendors and their usual set of problems -- we were not doing nearly enough for them! One in particular wanted an unusually generous deal for his suite. As a consequence I spent two, maybe three, months negotiating the price per square foot for vendor space! Such are the things that transpire in the background when you are chair of the ENC. Despite these problems, we did manage to assemble a nice program covering solids, liquids and imaging, and the meeting took place on schedule and without mishap. Prior to 2002 the ENC rarely had parallel sessions, which placed the program committee in a quandary -- either you filled the program with luminaries of the field or with young faculty, students and postdocs whose research is
in its initial stages. In order to better accommodate both, we switched to a parallel session format with plenary sessions as well as parallel sessions devoted to more specialized topics. This format or modifications of it have persisted since 2002. The ENC is a very important meeting TO the field of NMR. It is probably the only one of the multitude of scientific gatherings in the field that is truly essential. It brings together the entire spectrum of scientific participants in an environment that is matched by few places on earth. It was a real pleasure to serve as chair in 2002.
44th - 2003
Savannah
Peter van Zijl Judith Sjoberg
As a chemist turned MR imager, I have had long experience with the ENC and was pleased to chair the conference in 2003. This was the first time in a period of eight years that the east coast ENC was not held in Florida, which was in response to the complaint that Orlando was really too cheesy for serious NMR scientists. The weather in Savannah was nice, and the program had several exciting features. Kurt Wthrich had just received his Nobel Prize and a special session was organized to celebrate this event, featuring many of his old students and postdocs. This was followed by a wonderful dinner, where Kurt displayed his expertise of wine. The Laukien award was bestowed upon Jake Schaefer for his technical developments in solid-state NMR. The ENC is characterized by the presence of many loyal attendees, all of whom care greatly about the meeting. In this respect it is important to mention that 2003 was the first year when Suraj Manrao, whom we all know and, amazingly, who remembers all of our names, put his own money forward to support students and young post-docs to attend the meeting by establishing the awards that now bear his name. We are all grateful to Suraj. Finally, the venue provided some interesting complexities. Many attendees had hotels in the city on the other side of the river and the last ferry left at midnight, much earlier than typical ENC bedtime. This not only overloaded the small ferry, but also caused complaints from both vendors (customers gone) and scientists (no free drinks in the city). However, this did not spoil the great atmosphere of the meeting with much new science and topped off after Thursdays dinner by speaker Ray Freeman, highlighting his view of how things came about.
45th - 2004
Asilomar
Warren Warren Judith Sjoberg

The 45th ENC occurred at a time of great excitement in the magnetic resonance community, as magnetic resonance received its second consecutive Nobel recognition just prior to the meeting (this time, the award was to Lauterbur and Mansfield for magnetic resonance imaging). But it was also a time of great stress for ENC as an organization, and became an opportunity to make substantial changes, most of which have persisted to this day.
Savannah (the meeting site for the 44th ENC) has its charms, but also serious limitations there are good reasons why we have not gone back there. Only one hotel was near the conference center, and the rest required taxi or ferryboat transport. Vendors in particular were dissatisfied with these arrangements (the meeting nightlife was unusually quiet, and traffic in the vendor suites was significantly down). We had raffled prizes for visiting the vendor suites, but participants had to answer specific questions about the products on display, and the vendors felt they were spending most of their time playing a trivia game with visitors. Many were considering not returning to Asilomar the next year. These concerns were certainly viewed as important: the vendors have traditionally played a major role at this meeting (far exceeding their financial contributions, which are considerable), and their role is a large component of what has made ENC special over the years. More generally, the ENC program had settled into a very predictable format over the preceding decade. The time was right to shake things up, and the Executive Committee did exactly that. ENC joined the computer age, with online abstract submission and abstracts on CDs (in color, and with figures) instead of the older thick binders of text-only abstracts. This made an enormous difference in the abstract selection process the committee could now see who really had new and exciting data. We introduced tutorial talks, usually given by outgoing members of the Executive Committee. With strong vendor participation, we got Asilomar to make changes that reduces their costs and administrative burden. We switched the prize raffle form to one that simply had to be stamped at every suite, and got about 400 forms back by the end of the meeting. We introduced a post-deadline paper format, with speaker slots set aside for outstanding entries. We moved the banquet to the Monterey Aquarium, where it will return this year. But surely the highlight, for those who attended, was the opportunity to hear Richard Ernst introduce Paul Lauterbur, who addressed the group by videotape. He was already too ill to travel much, but his ten-minute presentation put both ENC and magnetic resonance into an extraordinary historical context. Many of us came into the 45th ENC wondering if it had already gone on too long. We left with a feeling that this was a vibrant meeting for a dynamic community a feeling that surely persists today.
46th - 2005
Providence
Christina Redfield Judith Sjoberg

The 46th ENC was held at the Rhode Island Conference Center in Providence, a new east-coast site for the ENC. The lectures, poster sessions and hospitality suites were all housed within the Conference Center and people staying at the Westin Hotel never had to venture outdoors. I thought this was an excellent venue for the ENC; there was easy access from all parts of the USA and Europe, Providence has great restaurants and there was even a large shopping mall connected to the Conference Center for the shopaholics in the NMR community!
The meeting started on Monday morning with the Laukien Prize Lecture. The prize for 2005 was awarded to Stephan Grzesiek in recognition of his surprising discovery of multiple classes of J couplings across hydrogen bonds in biological macromolecules, their structural usage, and the development of suitable pulse sequences for measurement of these interactions. In putting together the scientific program, the Executive Committee arranged several sessions which focussed on addressing a particular problem rather than a specific area of NMR. The presentations in the sessions on 'Ligand Binding and Interactions', 'Membrane Proteins' and 'Protein Folding and Misfolded Proteins' included both solution and solid-state NMR approaches to tackling these problems. We continued the Tutorial Session introduced at the 45th ENC at Asilomar in 2004. The tutorial talks, aimed at graduate students and non-specialists, covered topics ranging from RDCs in biomolecular structure determination to radiation damping and dipolar effects to phase transients and rf imperfections in solid state NMR; there was something for everyone. The conference dinner on Thursday evening was a traditional New England clambake; Im not sure how traditional it was since we werent at the beach. Britton Chance, Emeritus Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, gave the after-dinner talk on MRI and NIRI Meet in Magnet for Better or for Worse. The 46th ENC was attended by over 1100 people. We were able to award student travel stipends to over 70 students thanks to the continued generosity of numerous sponsors including Suraj Manrao. The meeting was a success thanks to the hard work of the Executive Committee, the Chair-elect Kurt Zilm, and Judith Sjoberg and her team. I have an e-mail archive of over 1500 messages sent and received in the course of organising the meeting. I have to admit that April 10-15th 2005 is a bit of a blur to me since I spent a lot of my time worrying about missing speakers and empty poster boards instead of enjoying the high-quality talks. I hope that those of you who attended the meeting enjoyed it.
47th - 2006
Asilomar
Kurt Zilm Judith Sjoberg
"My" ENC was in 2006, and although only three short years ago I had to go back and reread the program to decide what was most memorable about the experience. In doing so I realized that my most vivid ENC memories were actually from earlier in my career my first poster, my own first ENC talk, watching Damadian being escorted out of Merrill Hall after trying to give a rebuttal talk in the guise of asking a question. The program at the 2006 ENC was enormously broad, reflecting the continued rapid pace of innovation in our field. Membrane proteins were a hot topic, with solution and solids NMR both making remarkable contributions. Advances in cold probe technology were reviving direct detection of 13C and 15N in macromolecular NMR; alternatives to the Fourier transform were recognized with the Laukien prize; and it was demonstrated that spin noise could be used in NMR imaging. As chair, I remember being very worried about the budget, and the enormous relief I felt when the conference actually did better than break even. And even though some of our senior statesmen are known for insisting on not using PowerPoint, I believe that my ENC was the first where every talk was given using a computer no dual slide projectors, overheads, or document cameras. Lastly I remember how easy it was to decide on the future ENC sites that year. When the committee realized the next site to pick would be for the 50th ENC, it was obvious that we would have repeat visits to Asilomar in 2008 and 2009.
48th - 2007
Daytona Beach
Truman Brown Judith Sjoberg

The 48th ENC was held at the Hilton Oceanfront Hotel in Daytona Beach from April 22nd to 27th, 2007. The weather was very cooperative, allowing everyone to take advantage of the fact the hotel was right on the beach as advertised. Of course, one has this opportunity at Asilomar, but the Atlantic off Daytona Beach is much more cooperative than the Pacific off Asilomar. We enjoyed ourselves so much that the Executive Committee decided to return at the next opportunity, which will be 2010.
There were 19 regular sessions and 4 poster sessions at which approximately 500 posters were presented. We had our normal entertaining banquet and after dinner speaker in Prof. Peter Atkins from Oxford University, who reminisced about his experiences at Oxford in the early days of ESR and his subsequent writing career. The Laukien Prize was won by Prof. Robert G. Griffin from MIT for his successful development of high-field dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) for sensitivity enhancement in solidstate NMR with magic-angle spinning. One unfortunate last minute addition to the program was a memorial session for Paul Lauterbur who passed away less than a month before the meeting on March 29th, 2007. I was able to squeeze in a session, inviting both his wife, Prof. Joan Dawson of the University of Illinois and several of his students and postdocs so as to acknowledge his great contribution to NMR, both in the physical chemistry area and, of course, imaging. We were able to continue our support of students to attend the ENC with partial travel grants through the considerable generosity of the Suraj P. Manrao Science Foundation, a grant from the NIH, and our regular corporate sponsors Cambridge Isotope Laboratories, Doty Scientific, Inc., Isotec, New Era Enterprises, Revolution NMR LLC, Spectra Stable Isotopes, Triangle Analytical, Inc. and Varian, Inc. In total this support allowed us to bring 66 students to the meeting.
49th - 2008
Asilomar
Angela Gronenborn Judith Sjoberg
Asilomar has always been my favorite location for the ENC and I was fortunate to chair this conference in 2008. A highlight of the meeting was Malcolm Levitts Gnther Laukien Prize lecture on Optimized pulses and pulse sequences for liquid and solid state NMR. The composite pulse concept has had a revolutionary influence for devising novel NMR experiments and has impacted solution and solid state methods equally over the past 30 years. This type of work reflects perfectly the spirit embodied by the ENC embracing all of NMR, whether solution, solid-state, imaging, in-vivo or other exotic methods. The overall science was too plentiful to give justice to all the high points. A heavy dose of paramagnetics was injected and dynamics kept us all nimble. In addition to the scientific talks and poster sessions we tried something new that year - two evening workshops: The first one presented 'NMR at Principally Undergraduate Institutions' and allowed faculty that teach at these institutions to exchange ideas and strategies for introducing undergraduate students to NMR. This session was organized by the recently formed Collegiate Magnetic Resonance Consortium in response to the growth of NMR intensive laboratories in liberal arts undergraduate environments. The second was a workshop at which a lively discussion about the benefits as well as the trials and tribulations of 'Sparse Data Acquisition in Multidimensional NMR' were aired. A.J. Shaka challenged the participants to consider and present circumstances where the various approaches might fail. Not everyone was ready to expound failures, though. And, we had our first ENC ice sculpture, in keeping with the chilly temperatures!
50th - 2009
Asilomar
Lucio Frydman Judith Sjoberg
'Let not him who puts on his armor boast like him who takes it off', 1 Kings 20:11
This last write-up in the ENC chairs series differs from the ones that preceded it, in that it concerns something that is yet to happen. Therefore unlike previous chairs, who having already taken off their armor can rightfully boast about the magnificent edifice they have helped build over the decades, my only boast can be of having tried to make this ENC an event to remember. And so while I wait with hope and some anxiety for my own turn to pass the breastplate to the coming chair, let me use this page to pay homage to the people that have helped to make this Jubilee ENC a reality. I joined the ENC Executive Committee (the ExComm) in 2002 after being canvassed for this task by Bob Griffin, and I attended the meeting regularly thereafter for several consecutive years. Still in 2007, I decided that the recent arrival of my daughter Maya was a strong enough motive to skip an ENC even if it took place in beautiful Daytona. And thus it came to happen that on 4/24/07, under the disquieting subject title HI, the chair of the 48th ENC Truman Brown emailed me a message from Daytona whose implications were inversely proportional to its length: Just to let you know that you are the Chair for 2009. Congratulations. Details on other stuff to follow. Truman. Why and how the ExComm, in all its wisdom, decided to choose a chair sitting ten time In April 2007 with little Maya who in spite of her kitty disguise, may been responsible at least zones away from the site planned for the 50th ENC cutepart for the choice ofhave 50th ENCs chairperson in the that is hard for me to tell. Yet I cannot but speculate that this choice somehow reflects the unparalleled openness that underlies the American academic system, and which has been a component of this Conference ever since its inception. And hence started the great privilege of being involved in preparing the 50th ENC. Much of these responsibilities involved setting up the scientific and technical program, which we trust to have compiled to the high standards placed by previous ENCs. This may appear as a daunting mission, but fortunately it isnt the task of a single person: much of the ENCs unique vitality comes from the vigorous exchanges within the ExComm, which according to my statistics average over 500 emails per year during the last seven years. These exchanges focus first-and-foremost on where and how to find the best and brightest that is happening in the NMR world. They are characterized by a great frankness, and pose a collective intellectual exercise in which it is a pleasure to partake. Good ideas and logistical support also came from ScienceManagers, the company that under Judith Sjobergs leadership has been instrumental in putting together ENCs year after year throughout North America. Last but not least, one of the most inspiring aspects of chairing this meeting has been the chance it has given me to appreciate the unique role that ENC has played in and beyond the world of magnetic resonance over the last half-century. In this respect it is a pleasure to acknowledge the relentless efforts that great people like Ted Becker, Ray Freeman, Alex Pines and the rest of the 50th Anniversary Task Force, have invested in making these celebratory aspects a reality. To all this fantastic group of people that partook in this exciting multi-dimensional adventure and foremost to you the attendee, on which the success of every ENC has and will always hinge goes this token of sincere appreciation.
ENC DATA
No. Year Location Dates Chair Local Chair Attendance Posters
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50
1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Cleveland, OH Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Gainesville, FL Asilomar Boulder, CO Raleigh, NC Asilomar Pittsburgh, PA Asilomar Blacksburg, VA Asilomar Tallahassee, FL Asilomar Madison, WI Asilomar Wilmington, DE Asilomar Baltimore
Asilomar
Rochester, NY Asilomar Asilomar St. Louis, MO Asilomar St. Louis, MO Asilomar Boston, MA Asilomar Orlando, FL Asilomar Orlando, FL Asilomar Orlando, FL Asilomar Savannah, GA Asilomar Providence, RI Asilomar Daytona Beach, FL Asilomar Asilomar
June 24 Feb 24-25 March 2-3 Feb 28-March 2 Feb 28-March 1 Feb 25-27 Feb 24-26 March 2-4 Feb 29-March 3 Feb 27-March 1 April 21-24 Feb 17-20 April 30-May 4 April 15-18 April 28-May 1 April 20-24 April 25-29 April 11-15 April 16-20 Feb 19-23 March 16-20 April 5-9 April 25-29 April 10-14 April 8-12 April 21-25 April 13-17 April 5-9 April 17-21 April 2-6 April 1-5 April 7-11 March 29-Apr 2 March 14-18 April 10-15 March 26-30 March 17-22 March 23-27 March 22-27 Feb 28-March 5 April 9-14 March 11-16 April 14-19 March 30-Apr 4 April 18-23 April 10-15 April 23-28 April 22-27 March 9-14 March 29-Apr 3
Bill Ritchey George Slomp David Grant Charlie Wilson Paul Lauterbur Charles Reilly Aksel Bothner-By Jake Stothers Paul Shafer Ted Becker Tom Flautt Bob Lundin Barry Shapiro Tom Farrar Wallace Brey Jerry Swalen George Levy Paul Ellis LeRoy Johnson Ken Williamson Gary Maciel Gerd Lamar Nino Yannoni Gitte Vold Frank Anet P. Mark Henrichs Bob Bryant Lynn Jelinski Stan Opella Al Garroway Ed Stejskal Chuck Wade Andy Byrd Mary Baum Bernhard Blumich Hellmut Eckert Geoffrey Bodenhausen Jim Roberts Gitte Vold Jerry Ackerman Christian Greisinger Art Palmer Bob Griffin Peter van Zijl Warren Warren Christina Redfield Kurt Zilm Truman Brown Angela Gronenborn Lucio Frydman
Bill Ritchey Barry Shapiro Gus Friedel Aksel Bothner-By Aksel Bothner-By Aksel Bothner-By Tore Castellano Aksel Bothner-By Tore Castellano Aksel Bothner-By Tore Castellano Wallace Brey Bob Lundin Mel Hanna Charles Moreland Bob Lundin Aksel Bothner-By Lois Durham Harry Dorn Bob Lundin George Levy Woody Conover Tom Farrar Lynne Batchelder Ed Brame Mike Maddox Linda Sweeting Lynne Batchelder Nick Zumbulyadis Charles Wade Laima Baltusis Bill Hutton Laima Baltusis Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg Judith Sjoberg
43 118 140 297 241 221 247 271 241 283 286 247 286 275 298 388 385 315 483 455 427 558 473
731 958 1024 1008 864
1170 1212 1150 1304 1068 1456 1600 1452 1148 1488 1137 1425 1063 1343 1021 1345 1041 1319 1039 1164
29 50 45 58 70 95 102 97 98 163 162 125 206 204 240 264 371 289 489 559 620 422 596 436 609 511 539 552 449 515 434 392 480
AFTER DINNER SPEAKERS

No. Year Location Speaker Title / Comment
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45
1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004
Cleveland, OH Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Pittsburgh, PA Gainesville, FL Asilomar Boulder, CO Raleigh, NC Asilomar Pittsburgh, PA Asilomar Blacksburg, VA Asilomar Tallahassee, FL Asilomar Madison, WI Asilomar Wilmington, DE Asilomar Baltimore
Asilomar
Max Gergel
President, Columbia Organic Chemicals and raconteur
Felix Bloch R. Kivelson Charles P. Slichter Erwin L. Hahn Edward M. Purcell George Pake E. Raymond Andrew H. S. Gutowsky Robert Hunt G. J. Martin Ted Becker S. Knapp Bill Phillips Wes Anderson Ted Becker Albert Overhauser Wallace Brey Rex Richards Aksel Bothner-By John Waugh Erwin Hahn Maurice Goldman Ray Freeman Paul Bottomley Bill Edelstein Paul Lauterbur Britton Chance Alex Pines Peter Atkins Dennis Torchia
Reminiscences on the discovery of NMR "Magnetic Resonance, Thermal Luminescence and the Vase of Euphronious" "My Memories of NMR in the Old Days" Perspectives on the discovery of NMR
Rochester, NY Asilomar Asilomar St. Louis, MO Asilomar St. Louis, MO Asilomar Boston, MA Asilomar Orlando, FL Asilomar Orlando, FL Asilomar Orlando, FL Asilomar Savannah, GA Asilomar
" no sign of slackening" "The Future of Conventional and Electronic Imaging" "NMR of Wines" "Thirty Years of ENC's" Dinner at Monterey Aquarium "Scientific Contributions of the Lewis and Clark Expedition" "Technology Policy in the Bush Administration" "Early NMR Experiences and Experiments" "50 Years of NMR: Some Insights and Anecdotes" "Dynamic Nuclear Polarization: A Reminiscence"
"Some Experiences during 27 Years as JMR Editor"
46 47 48 49 50
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009
Providence, RI Asilomar Daytona Beach, FL Asilomar Asilomar
"40 Years in Show Business" "Fifty Years of Riding the NMR Wave" "Oddities and Serendipities in the History of NMR and the Spin" "Thermodynamic Games with Nuclear Magnets" "Two French Mathematicians Who Transformed NMR" "Of MRI, the Exile of Nuclei, and Thirty Years Wars" "MRI from Scotland to Schenectady" Videotaped Remarks "MRI and NIRI Meet in Magnet for Better or for Worse" "ENCore. Sixty Years of Magnetic Moments" "An Oxford Career, Not Forgetting Magnetic Resonance" "Forty Years a Postdoc and Still Spinning" Visit to Monterey Aquarium

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NMR Spectroscopists Meeting

George Slomp Barry Shapiro

Second Conference on Experimental Aspects of NMR Spectroscopy

Third Conference on Experimental Aspects of NMR Spectroscopy [T.C.O.E.A.O.N.M.R.S.]

Charles W. Wilson III Aksel Bothner-By

Paul Lauterbur Aksel Bothner-By

Fifth Experimental NMR Conference [5th ENC]

Charles Reilly Aksel Bothner-By

Aksel Bothner-By Salvatore Castellano

Jake Stothers Aksel Bothner-By

Paul (Dick) Shafer Salvatore Castellano

Ted Becker Aksel Bothner-By

Tom Flautt Salvatore Castellano

Bob Lundin Wallace Brey

Barry Shapiro Bob Lundin

Wallace Brey Charles Moreland

Jerry Swalen Bob Lundin

George Levy Aksel Bothner-By

Paul Ellis Lois Durham

LeRoy Johnson Harry Dorn

Ken Williamson Bob Lundin

Gary Maciel George Levy

Nino Yannoni Tom Farrar

Gitte Vold Lynne Batchelder

Mark Henrichs Michael Maddox

Bob Bryant Linda Sweeting

Lynn Jelinski Lynne Batchelder

Stanley Opella Nick Zumbulyadis

Allen Garroway Charles Wade

Ed Stejskal Laima Baltusis

Andy Byrd Laima Baltusis

Mary Baum Judith Sjoberg

Bernhard Blmich Judith Sjoberg

Hellmut Eckert Judith Sjoberg

Geoffrey Bodenhausen Judith Sjoberg

Jim Roberts Judith Sjoberg

Gitte Vold Judith Sjoberg

Jerry Ackerman Judith Sjoberg

Christian Griesinger Judith Sjoberg

Bob Griffin Judith Sjoberg

Peter van Zijl Judith Sjoberg

Warren Warren Judith Sjoberg

Christina Redfield Judith Sjoberg

Kurt Zilm Judith Sjoberg

Truman Brown Judith Sjoberg

Angela Gronenborn Judith Sjoberg

Lucio Frydman Judith Sjoberg

AFTER DINNER SPEAKERS

President, Columbia Organic Chemicals and raconteur

2005 2006 2007 2008 2009

Providence, RI Asilomar Daytona Beach, FL Asilomar Asilomar

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