Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Pity poor Russia, the other quondam republics of the Soviet Union, the most talented and the most deprived part of the scientific community and also Mikhail Gorbachev (who may yet recover, but not quickly).
Our cultural heritage is being destroyed faster today than at any time in the past. An undertstanding of the basic processes causing deterioration of ancient artefacts is urgently needed.
Next week's American Chemical Society meeting to be held in New York City will feature an automated peptide synthesizer based on a proprietary dry-activation FMOC chemistry, a mass analyser for molecular weight determination from picomole amounts, and an NMR software module.