Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
I happen to sit on the Royal Society of Chemistry's Committee for
Promoting Chemistry to the Public. I have been a member of the society
since I was a student reading chemistry forty-five years ago (before it
was Royal), but was invited (I suppose) to join that committee in the
hope that an historian might advise on restoring the reputation of the sci-
ence to where it was in the long-distant past. The traditional model of
popularizing was that one took a little chemistry, diluted it, and added
sugar to make it go down: but this has not worked. There is a famous
book-review by a child: 'this topic told me more about elephants than I
wanted to know'. That is how many people feel about being told what
professors and academicians are up to: but with chemistry they may also
feel alarm. They think of pollution, slow poisoning, and weapons of mass
destruction.
I am (like that committee) puzzled about the nature of 'the public' -
no doubt they are and were really publics. Recently the 'SciPer' project
at Leeds and Sheffield has been sampling the science in popular periodi-
cals, mostly from Britain, in the nineteenth century - and this has
resulted in three topics,
1
in which chemistry duly features (though not
very largely). So I hope now to share some uncertainties, hoping for
clarification.
There seem to be three questions that we can profitably have at the
back of our minds:
1.
Who is chemistry being popularized to, and perhaps why and
where?
2.
How was it done in some supposedly heroic better past?
3.
How do popularizing and professionalizing fit together?
2.
Who are the Public?
On the first one, the RSC committee tried to identify publics. One was
the elite: graduates, opinion formers, journalists, members of parliament.
This was a group not unlike the Cambridge undergraduates who flocked
to Bishop Watson in the eighteenth century (Archer & Haley 2005), or
1
Cantor & Shuttleworth 2004, Cantor
et al
. 2004, Hensen
et al
. 2004, and my essay-
review (Knight 2005b).
