Chaired by J. Murray Gibson (AT&T Bell Laboratories), S. Thomas Picraux (Sandia National Laboratories), and Barry E. Scheetz (Pennsylvania State University), the 1987 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston shattered several attendance records as it offered an unprecedented collection of leading-edge technical symposia and short courses. Activities began before the start of the technical symposia with a one-day short course on Conventional and High Temperature Superconductors on Sunday, November 29. The 20 technical symposia ran from Monday through Friday, November 30-December 4, and short courses continued through Saturday, December 5.

Rounding out the schedule were several additional events: the popular lunchtime Symposium X on Frontiers of Materials Research, a forum on Education in Materials Science and Engineering with an address by National Science Foundation director Erich Bloch, a workshop on Specimen Preparation for Transmission Electron Microscopy of Materials, the Plenary Address by William C. DeVries on “Medical and Materials Issues of the Total Artificial Heart” (to be published in an upcoming issue of the BULLETIN), and the Von Hippel Award lecture on “Orientation Mapping” given by the award's 1987 recipient, Sir Charles Frank (see p. 24 in this issue).

Total meeting attendance passed 3,500, making 1987 another year of record growth for MRS. Similarly, the number of short courses and shortcourse students rose over previous years, and the increasingly popular equipment exhibit overflowed to additional booths outside the main exhibit hall. One exhibit featured its own speaker, Yorick, a talking skeleton, from the Division of Mechanics and Materials Science, U.S. Food and Drug Administration Center for Devices and Radiological Health.