Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
Industrie, VNCI). They were public relations officers from several large
chemical companies and were faced with a problem. Since the publi-
cation of Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring
in May of 1962 and a large fire
at a fertilizer plant near Rotterdam in 1963, the public image of chem-
istry in the Netherlands had noticeably deteriorated. Articles in the Dutch
press began to use headings such as 'The poisonous cocktail of tech-
nology' and 'Is the Netherlands still inhabitable?' Something had to be
done to counter this negative publicity. The Dutch population had to be
made aware that chemistry had become an integral part of their life and
that they better accepted it as such. It was decided to hire a communi-
cations representative who would be in charge of maintaining public
relations with both the press and the public (Hoefnagels 1993, pp. 11, 30-
31; De Galan 1965). Eibert H. Bunte, the man who was appointed, hit the
ground running. In 1968, the year of the VNCI's 50
th
anniversary, he
wrote the jubilee book
Leven met chemie
('Living with chemistry')
(Bunte 1968a/b). Since then the VNCI, together with its sister organi-
zation the Royal Dutch Chemical Society (Koninklijke Nederlandse Che-
mische Vereniging, KNCV), has been engaged in a consistent effort to
improve the image of chemistry through information and popularization.
In the 1990s this led to the establishment of the C
3
Foundation
(Communication Center Chemistry).
Over the past four decades, science communication and the popu-
larization of chemistry in the Netherlands have clearly been marked by
this struggle to regain the favor of the public at large. The effort to im-
prove chemistry's public image through the field's popularization was
even so substantial that the uninformed might consider the genre of
popular writings about chemistry to date back no further than the 1960s.
For over two centuries, however, topics and articles have appeared with
the explicit aim of disseminating chemical knowledge in society, as well
as promoting chemistry as a useful science. At times this specifically in-
volved enhancing its public image, but this was certainly not always the
case. When the Haarlem chemist and apothecary Martinus Nicolaas
Beets (1780-1869) published his
Volks-Scheikunde
('Popular chemistry,
or Chemistry for the People') in 1815, chemistry was rather a fashionable
field, a
Lieblingswissenschaft
about which many Dutch wanted to have
