Chemistry Reference
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by the finger-pointing of public opinion, would not turn against their in-
dustrial colleagues.
Academic chemistry and industry share an umbilical cord. Universi-
ties train chemists for an industrial career. In return, the chemical indus-
try funds some academic training (fellowships) and research (grants).
Many professors of chemistry serve as occasional industrial consultants,
receiving a handsome fee for their expert advice. Moreover, it is not in-
frequent for chemical careers to be hybrids, with scientists moving from
an academic institution to an industrial environment, or vice versa.
Examples which come to mind are those of Philip E. Eaton, who
owed his interest in cage molecules to industrial work on chlorinated
pesticides, which led him to the epochal synthesis of cubane in 1964
(Traynham 1997); of Fred McLafferty and George Olah, who both
worked for a time in a laboratory of Dow Chemical; of Richard E.
Smalley, an industrial chemist before he enrolled as a graduate student at
Princeton (Smalley 1996); of Earl Muetterties, who left the Experimental
Station at DuPont in Wilmington for a professorship at the University of
California; of Howard E. Simmons who, when heading central research
also at DuPont, turned down the offer of a professorship at Harvard
(Bohning 1993, Roberts & Collette 1999); and so on.
A strong group spirit extends across the chemical board, even at the
cost of seemingly exonerating managers of industrial plants from griev-
ous oversights or mistakes - in spite of their belonging to a social group
distinct from that of laboratory chemists, whether academic or industrial.
Put in another way: do chemists suffer from collective guilt? From none,
is the answer.
However, granted that chemists share a strong group identity, what
does it consist of, and how did it evolve during the second half of the
twentieth century? I shall now proceed to build answers to those queries.
3.
The 1950s: Rise of the Research University and Chemistry
The 1950s saw the rise of the research university. The U.S. was its breed-
ing ground: Science, the Endless Frontier , the report to the President by
Vannevar Bush (1945) had urged such support by the federal govern-
ment, to which chemist James B. Conant, then president of Harvard
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