The advent and evolution of QSAR at Pomona College

We are pushed willy-nilly into this incredibly complex universe at a particular point in time, in n-dimensional space, for an almost instantaneous blick around and then pass into oblivion. First, consider the usual three dimensions. A single human is about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times smaller than the earth it momentarily inhabits, but the earth is so insignificant. It is a speck circling the sun that is 2,000,000 times larger. However, the sun is an ordinary star embedded with 100,000,000,000 stars in our galaxy. But our galaxy is only one of around 50,000,000,000 galaxies. Only very slowly during the past 500 years have people begun to develop some feeling for the fact that they and the earth are not the center of the universe. Fifty years ago, there were astronomers who thought that the earth, with man, was possibly unique in the universe. Today most have little doubt that life something like ours occurs elsewhere. However, even communicating with a very near star, say 20 light years away, would be virtually impossible. An exchange of messages would require 40 years! It is about 10–15 billion light years to the edge of the universe. Almost everything is beyond our reach for the foreseeable future, but that does not mean it is of no importance (a light year is about 5,000,000,000,000 miles). Now considering a fourth dimension, time, we shrink still further in significance. Life on earth has been evolving for over a billion years, but only in the last few 1,000 years have we begun to leave some kind of written record. It is highly likely that the earth will survive another billion or more years. What will the history of the last (primitive) few 1,000 years mean in 500,000 years, or 10,000,000 years! The accumulation of data in the form of history (even at the present very slow rate) will be gargantuan. This leads to a fifth dimension that is overwhelming. Already we are adrift in a huge cloud of information from the past brief moment of recorded history. For example, the Library of Congress acquired its 100,000,000th item in 1992. The collection at that time contained about 15,000,000 books, 39,000,000 manuscripts, 13,000,000 photographs, 4,000,000 maps, 3,500,000 pieces of music and 500,000 motion pictures. How many of these books can a person consider in say, 50 years? One might read 5,000 books, but which ones? What the many older libraries of Europe and Asia contain is incredible. Of course much of our reading is squandered on escape literature, such as mysteries, light headed novels, cheap newspapers, etc. From my own point of view, I am aghast at what is happening in the single area of chemistry. With most of the world not yet participating, the abstracts of over 2,000 articles and patents appear daily! If you miss 10 days, you fall behind over 20,000 reports. Libraries are finally beginning to realize that they cannot continue to collect such huge volumes of work on paper. Just in time, the Internet, on which anyone or everyone can have one or more web sites and on which unlimited information can be stored, has arrived. People are now publishing their own novels and scientific papers on the Web. It has been said that within a few years, a billion computers around the world will be connected via the Internet and the Web. The distillation of honest and relevant information out of this babble remains a work in progress. How much of it has already been lost or buried? C. Hansch (&) Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA e-mail: cselassie@pomona.edu