Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Empiricism
Facts
experiments
Rationalism
Axioms
hypothesis
Inductive
analysis
Extension
Deductive
analysis
Environmental
preservation
Explanation
Truth
Figure 2.4
The primary paradigm of Analytical Chemistry as an alteration between induction and deduction
from the ideas of Malissa.
2.2
The social perception of Analytical Chemistry
One of the problems which we have today as chemists is the mass media and bad image held by society about
chemistry, the negative evaluation which everybody has about the benefits and drawbacks of the chemical activities.
So, nowadays the images associated to the social perception of chemistry are those of polluted rivers, the black
smoke of a chimney, the smog in the city and acid rain. Only those aspects which concern bio- or eco-chemistry
escape from the aforementioned discredit of activities related to the synthesis and registration of chemicals, the
chemical industries and all that is related to human efforts to create new molecules and to incorporate these new
structures in our life. In such a frame analytical activities are considered just as an additional pollution focus.
However, it is true also that there is a social perception of the need for analytical chemistry to evaluate the
environmental side effects of basic chemical activities and we analytical chemists can take advantage of this fact.
At the middle of the 1980s George Pimentel, who was the president of the American Chemical Society
(ACS) in 1986, presented a report to the National Academy of Sciences of the USA concerning
Opportunities
in Chemistry
[5] which was a deep evaluation of the advantages offered by the chemical knowledge and the
problems related to bad practices in this field. The aforementioned information can be considered as a starting
point on the ecological mentality of the chemical community and, in this sense, the Pimentel's proposal to the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created in 1970 by the initiative of President Nixon [6] included a
series of aspects that directly concerned analytical chemistry such as; the increase in the percentage of
research and development funding devoted to exploratory research, the improvement of fundamental research
on reaction pathways for substances of environmental interest, the detection of potentially undesirable
environmental constituents at levels below their expected toxicity and the EPA support of analytical chemistry
in a prominent way; thus clearly indicating that the analytical tools could be a key factor for pollution
monitoring and to evaluate the deleterious side effect of the synthesis and fate of chemical compounds.
The Pimentel report also created the need for an increasing conscience of the chemical society about the
side effects of all their activities. Based on this, many efforts can be identified in the literature which look for
the reduction of prime matters and regents consumed, the deep control of chemical substances in all steps
from the extraction of natural products to the different reactions involved in the synthesis of new products.
It was also necessary to pay attention to the generation of by-products and the behaviour of chemical
