Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
2. Levi'sLegacy
The British biologist Peter Medawar, one of the most perceptive com-
mentators on the practice of science in the mid-twentieth century, has
expressed very cogently where this preference for the abstract over the
practical has led us:
Francis Bacon was not the first to distinguish basic from applied science,
but no one before him put the matter so clearly and insistently, and the
distinction as he draws it is unquestionably just […] Bacon's distinction
is between research that increases our power over nature and research
that increases our understanding of nature […] Unhappily, Bacon's dis-
tinction is not the one we now make when we differentiate between the
basic and applied sciences. The notion of
purity
has somehow been su-
perimposed upon it, and in a new usage that connotes a conscious and
inexplicably self-righteous disengagement from the pressures of neces-
sity and use. The distinction is not now between the empirically founded
sciences and those whose axioms were supposedly known a priori; rather
it is between polite and rude learning, between the laudably useless and
the vulgarly applied, the free and the intellectually compromised, the po-
etic and the mundane.[Medawar 1984]
Understandably, writers of fiction want the poetic, not the mundane. That
is to say, they have been led, like our culture as a whole, to expect to find
the poetic in the so-called pure sciences, the sciences of 'how the world
works': in physics and biology. It has required a genuine insider, some-
one who knew chemistry intimately, to show that in fact there is plenty
of poetry in chemistry too. That person was, of course, the Italian
chemist and writer Primo Levi.
Inevitably one
must
mention Primo Levi in the context of this chap-
ter's topic. But I confess that I intend to say rather little about him, since
I rather feel that to dwell on Levi would be to cheat on my aim here. He
had a privileged perspective in that he
was
a chemist, whereas I want to
look at how chemistry has impacted on writers who did not have that
training, or indeed that specific focus in their oeuvre. But I do wish to
point out that Levi's classic topic
The Periodic Table
(published in Ital-
ian in 1975) grasps the essence of chemistry's allegories in a manner that
is very much akin to the chemical philosophies of centuries earlier,
where the transformations that are conducted in the chemical laboratory
