Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
natural gas, which were pushed forward at an impressive pace. The
search for substitutes of oil went hand in hand with a significant rise in
environmental consciousness among chemists - given especially some of
the industrial spills during that period, which the media exploited relent-
lessly against the chemical profession as a whole, not only against the
chemical industry.
During the 1980s, chemists as a group were willing participants in a
fuite en avant
, converts to a mystique of growth, even of exponential
growth. This was a time for proliferation of newly made compounds, as
if their preparation were synonymous with innovation. This was the time
of the rise of combinatorial chemistry (Breslow 1997, Borman 1998),
whose products in the tens and hundreds of thousands were screened for
lead molecules by laboratories in pharmacology and in materials science.
This was also the time of the preparation of organometallics in large
numbers, vastly encouraged by the thrust from multinuclear NMR.
4
The 1990s saw the spawning of nanoscience and nanotechnology,
building on some major advances, such as the discovery of carbon nano-
tubes, following up on the serendipitous finding of buckminsterfullerenes
(Baggott 1994). While chemists redirected themselves into these novel
areas, they also had to come to grips with chemophobia on the part of the
public.
2.
Academic and Industrial Chemistry
Now that I have sketched in these few bold strokes what may have
characterized those five successive decades, what exactly is the task at
hand?
There is considerable evidence for the strong group identity of chem-
ists. Chemistry has the distinguishing feature of being both a science and
an industry. It is important to understand their solidarity. Even at the time
of strong media presence by industrial accidents (Seveso in 1976), epi-
sodes of criminal negligence (Love Canal, pollution of the Rhine), or ca-
tastrophes (Bhopal), academic chemists, even though they felt victimized
4
The field started being populated substantially only after the discovery of ferrocene
(Laszlo & Hoffmann 2000, Rich 2004).
