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COVER STORY Global Top 50

F or the fourth year in a row, Germany's chemical giant BASF leads the ranking by Chemical & Engineering News of Top 50 chemical producers worldwide. The remainder of 1999's first four producers also duplicated their rankings from the previous year: DuPont in the number-two slot, followed by Germany's Bayer and Dow Chemical. Rounding out the top five, however, is ExxonMobil, last year listed simply as Exxon, which has jumped three notches following the combining of its chemical businesses with those of merger partner Mobil Oil. At number six for 1999 is the U.K/s ICI, which has transformed itself from a petrochemical producer to a specialty chemicals company through its acquisition of the specialties businesses of Unilever. And filling o1ut the top 10 are Shell Chemicals, Anglo-Dutch Akzo Nobel, and two mega-merger results: Germany's Degussa-Hiils and the chemical operations of BP Amoco. Degussa-Hiils thus ensures that there remains a Big Three ...

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Earth Day Redux

Thirty years ago this month, as a young reporter at Chemical & Engineering News , I was assigned to write the lead News of the Week story on the very first Earth Day—April 22,1970. Here's the lead of that 1970 C&EN story: Millions of people were expected to participate in protests against their polluted heritage as the much heralded and politically popular environmental movement picked up steam last week and culminated Wednesday in Earth Day. Across the nation, politicians eagerly preached the perils of pollution at Earth Day rallies, environmentalists warned of impending doom, industry spokesmen informed community groups of policies, colleges and universities sponsored teach-ins on various aspects of ecology, and civic groups focused their attention on local pollution problems. Well, perhaps there was a bit too much alliteration in this youthful effort, but I'm still proud to have written that story about Earth Day, which in some ways marked the birth of the modern ...

Thinking Outside The Box

It is rare and special honor for Chemical & Engineering News to pay tribute in our cover story to Arnold Beckman, great innovator, chemist, businessman, and philanthropist. This week's C&EN is dated April 10, the 100th birthday of this remarkable scientist. The event is being celebrated by symposium at California Institute of Technology, the publication of biography from the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF), and gala dinner in his honor at Caltech, where he spent many years as professor and where he invented the device that revolutionized scientific instrumentation—the pH meter. C&EN Associate Editor Elizabeth Wilson portrays man who is truly beloved by all who have crossed his path. CHF President Arnold Thackray calls him a prince of man—an opinion widely shared by friends and colleagues. There are so many things to find appealing in this man, who was born in tiny town in Illinois and went ...

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A Promise To Readers

Last week's proposed merger between America Online and Time Warner to create a media behemoth raises disturbing questions for those involved in the information dissemination business, including those of us at Chemical & Engineering News. The AOL-Time Warner deal combines the company that brought the Internet to the masses with a traditional media publishing, television, and entertainment giant. The Washington Post called it a megamarriage of necessity.... The Internet needs content to survive; controllers of magazines, books, music, and television have been vying to capture a larger audience via personal computers. In the world of bigger is better, such a marriage of the new media with the old media makes a lot of sense. The businesses of AOL and Time Warner barely overlap, so many experts expect there to be few, if any, antitrust concerns. For the firms' stockholders—not to mention the Wall Street companies that will reap millions of dollars on tying the knot—this ...

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Chemistry's top five achievements in 1999?

To get the material we need for our articles, we here at Chemical & Engineering News are highly dependent on the willingness of the members of the chemical community to interrupt their own work to help us. So we think it's only fair to be responsive when someone contacts us looking for information. Yet I have to admit I was put off by a call I received last month. What were the top five chemistry stories in 1999? the caller asked. His boss needed an answer in an hour, he said. The caller seemed to think C&EN keeps a running list of the top achievements of the year. It's true that every week we make decisions about which doings of the chemical enterprise are most important to bring to our readers' attention. But thaf s not the same as ranking accomplishments over some arbitrarily determined time period. And a window of one year seems much ...

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When You're A C&EN Reader...

A research chemist with a small specialty company in Oregon. The president of a multi-billion-dollar chemicals operation based in New Jersey. A synthetic organic chemist at a large midwestern pharmaceutical company. A professor at a university in Texas. A consulting chemist in North Carolina. What do these men and women have in common? Each of these chemists got their first jobs—one of them just last year, another nearly 50 years ago—from reading a job advertisement in Chemical & Engineering News . In fact, they all told me that they began reading C&EN as chemistry undergraduates—for the job ads. Now, as employers themselves, they advertise for chemists in C&EN—in print and online. Needless to say, it did my heart good to learn that these longtime members of the American Chemical Society and devoted readers value C&EN's classified section. But I was even more pleased when they volunteered that they're still reading C&EN ...

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