This month's cover depicts the history of ion selective electrodes up to the 1980s, as reported at the seventh James L. Waters Symposium, held at Pittcon in March 1996. Included are a variety of electrode designs, the cover page of Arnold Beckman's patent for a vacuum-tube pH meter, and a time line showing developments and the people who made them. In our special section on the Waters Symposium, Frant (page 159) describes development and commercialization of ion selective electrodes. On page 167 Ruzicka reports on a golden age of the seventies and on the interactions among industrial and academic chemists during that time. Light describes industrial applications of ion selective electrodes beginning on page 171, and Young's paper shows how ion selective electrode developments led to improvements in blood chemistry analyzers (page 177).

This month's issue contains a plethora of papers on new courses and curricula. In the Chemical Education Today section there are four. On page 147 Lavallee asks what modifications are needed in graduate education to address the findings of the ACS Task Force on Doctoral Education. Halstead (page 148), in the association report from the Council on Undergraduate Research, describes the key role that CUR plays in the undergraduate curricula of predominately undergraduate institutions. Beall (page 153) reports on the tenth annual Conference on Chemical Education at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which was devoted to laboratory-centered general chemistry courses. On page 150 the Curricular Change Digests feature contains a description of a unified laboratory sequence by Silverstein et. al. In accord with the mission statement by feature editor Baird Lloyd, this feature prints brief reports on curricular innovations, with complete, detailed information available on the Journal's World Wide Web site (JCE: Online).

An integrated course for elementary education majors is described on page 183 by Gunter et. al. Supported by the NSF, this project makes effective use of the Internet for communication among teachers in a state where distance makes face-to-face interaction difficult. A novel senior seminar is described by Bowyer and Kaydos on page 184, and Drake et. al. report the application of the Japanese KENSHU method to reading research articles. They have used this method with high school and college students (page 186).

This issue contains a first for JCE: Software, namely, a collection of programs intended for purchase by students rather than faculty (page 193). All of the programs applicable to general chemistry (high school or college level) that JCE: Software has published to date have been collected onto a single CD. This is being made available at a student-oriented cost so that the many students who have their own computers can obtain a copy and use the software at whatever time and place is most convenient for them.

Those interested in history will find the paper by Klotz (page 204) fascinating. Using recently released classified information, he lays to rest the idea that there was any possibility that German scientists might have beaten the U.S. and Great Britain to the atomic bomb during World War II. Kikuchi (page 194) describes the history of structural theories of benzene and of aromaticity in general.

A number of papers related to biochemistry or plant or animal materials are available this month. Blood chemistry analyzers (page 177) were already mentioned as part of the Waters Symposium. On page 210 Kimbrough et. al. describe an inquiry-based approach to investigating the activity of catalase. Protein Unfolding Studies involving differential scanning calorimetry are reported on page 236 by Chowdhry and Leharne. Project-oriented laboratories for an undergraduate biochemistry course are described by Deal and Hurst on page 241, and use of NMR to observe proton dissociation in tripeptides is the subject of the experiment on page 243 by Yarger et. al. References are given to novel applications of peroxidase in agricultural, pulp and paper, water treatment, pharmaceutical, and medicinal chemistry by Rob et. al. on page 212.