PROGRAMME

Jean-Pierre Sauvage was born in Paris in 1944, and earned his PhD degree from the Université Louis-Pasteur under the supervision of Jean-Marie Lehn, himself a 1987 laureate of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. During his doctoral work, he contributed to the first syntheses of the cryptand ligands. After postdoctoral research with Malcolm L. H. Green, he returned to Strasbourg, where he is now emeritus professor. Sauvage's scientific work has focused on creating molecules that mimic the functions of machines by changing their conformation in response to an external signal. His Nobel Prize work was done in 1983, when he was the first to synthesize a catenane, a complex of two interlocking ring-shaped molecules, which were bonded mechanically rather than chemically. Because these two rings can move relative to each other, the Nobel Prize cited this as a vital initial effort towards making molecular machine. The other two recipients of the prize followed up by later creating a rotaxane and a molecular rotor. Other research includes electrochemical reduction of CO2 and models of the photosynthetic reaction center. A large theme of his work is molecular topology, specifically mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures. He has described syntheses of catenanes and molecular knots based on coordination complexes. He was elected a correspondent member of the French Academy of Sciences on 26 March 1990, and became a member on 24 November 1997. He is currently emeritus professor at the University of Strasbourg (Unistra). He shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the design and synthesis of molecular machines" with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa. He was elected a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in April 2019.

The area referred to as "Chemical Topology" is mostly concerned with molecules whose molecular graph is non-planar, i.e. which cannot be represented in a plane without crossing points. The most important family of such compounds is that of catenanes. The simplest catenane, a [2]catenane, consists of two interlocking rings. Rotaxanes consist of rings threaded by acyclic fragments (axes). These compounds have always been associated to catenanes although, strictly speaking, their molecular graphs are planar. Knotted rings are more challenging to prepare. Several spectacular knotted topologies at the molecular level have been created since the beginning of the 90s either by our group or by other highly creative research teams. Since the mid-90s, the field of artificial molecular machines has experienced a spectacular development, in relation to molecular devices at the nanometric level or as mimics of biological motors. In biology, motor proteins are of utmost importance in a large variety of processes essential to life (ATP synthase, a rotary motor, or the myosin-actin complex of striated muscles behaving as a linear motor responsible for contraction or elongation). Many examples published by a large number of highly creative research groups are based on complex rotaxanes or catenanes acting as switchable systems or molecular machines. Particularly significant examples include a “pirouetting catenane”, “molecular shuttles” (Stoddart and others) as well as multi-rotaxanes reminiscent of muscles. More recent examples are those of multi-rotaxanes able to behave as compressors and switchable receptors or as molecular pumps. The molecules are set in motion using electrochemical, photonic or chemical signals. Particularly impressive light-driven rotary motors have been created by the team of Feringa. Finally, potential applications will be mentioned as well as possible future developments of this active area of research.

Gyung-Su Lee is a Korean scientist who served the Vice Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation for Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT) from June 2021 to May 2022. As Vice Minister, he led and oversaw planning and implementation of national science, technology, and innovation policy across all national-level governmental entities (~ 40 ministries and agencies) and directed overall Korean R&D budget decisions (approximately 27 billion US Dollars in FY2022), including R&D budget for “Net-Zero in 2050”. Before joining Government of the Republic of Korea, Dr. GS Lee served the Deputy Director-General in the capacity of Chief Operating Officer and Site Construction Director for the ITER International Fusion Energy Organization (IO) from October 2015 to May 2020. In IO, he coordinated and implemented, through close collaboration with seven Domestic Agencies, the Procurement Arrangements for designing, manufacturing, testing, and delivering various components and systems to the ITER site in France, and developed and organized the assembly, installation, testing, and commissioning plan to meet technical, quality, and safety requirements to achieve the ITER scientific and technical mission. Also, he led and managed the KSTAR National Project for design activities, project management, machine construction, and initial operation to reach the First Plasma of the KSTAR Tokamak, succeeded in developing a new generation of the Advanced Steady-state Superconducting Tokamak, KSTAR.

For more than thirty years of rapid economic growth and sustained peace on a global scale, many of us assumed that the interlinked value and supply chains driven by globalization would bring further prosperity and stability continuing through the twenty-first century. However, the looming climate crisis with COVID-19 pandemic and strategic competition with renewed “cold war” rhetoric in recent years questioned world on ‘how the future path of civilization would evolve toward the year 2050’? In Korea, we also inquire ourselves how we can sustain an expanding economy and cultural strength in these challenges and uncertainties surrounding us, in addition to the dooming low birth rate that accelerates a record-breaking pace. In the era with two pillars of challenges, namely climate crisis and strategic competition, there is surfacing consensus that prosperity and sustainability of nation are now strongly dependent on the strategic choice and development of emerging and critical technologies ever, for example, semiconductor chips and rechargeable batteries for Korea in this decade. It is also believed to be crucial how to achieve “Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) in 2030” and “Carbon-neutrality in 2050” without strongly impacting economic growth in the different environment of the world of trades where we are in, now. From this perspective, we would like to present worldwide fusion technology development effort for a practical energy source complementing renewables, and examine scientific, economic and social implication of fusion to aim for a better understanding of the feasibility and maturity of technology and industrialization. In this paper, we will utilize the recent progress of the ITER Project as “the way” to fusion burning and international collaboration among seven Members namely European Union, United States, Russian Federation, China, India, Japan and Korea that should answer some aspects of two pillars together.