Happy birthday MRS

Of all the regular meetings that I used to attend as a Nature editor, the one I enjoyed most was the annual Fall meeting of the US Materials Research Society. Partly because it was in Boston, but also because it was always full of diverse and interesting stuff, as well as being of a just about manageable scale. So I have a fondness for the MRS and was glad to be asked to write a series of portraits of areas in materials science for the MRS Bulletin to mark the society’s 40th anniversary. The result is a piece too long to set down here, but the kind folks at MRS Bulletin seem to have made the article freely available online here.