Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
discipline, lost a measure of autonomy; it became more of a physical sci-
ence, owing many of its tools ('physical methods') to physics too. More-
over, it became solidly fixed in the classification of sciences in-between
physics and biology.
The birth of molecular biology saw to such an anchoring between
physics and biology. The discovery of the DNA double helix (Watson &
Crick 1953) was a turning point in the affirmation of chemistry and biol-
ogy as sister sciences. Correspondingly, the notion of the interdepen-
dency of disciplines came to the fore, chemistry getting its tools from
physics and biology, in turn, getting hers from chemistry. The influence
from biology was not restricted to molecular biology. To give another
instance, prebiotic chemistry came of age in the 1950s with the discovery
of interstellar molecules (Ewen & Purcell 1951) and with the classic ex-
periment in prebiotic chemistry (Miller 1953, Asimov 1960).
A chemist, Linus Pauling, embodied such a physics-chemistry-biol-
ogy alloy. A crystallographer by training, he had taught himself the new
quantum physics at its inception in the early 1930s and imported it into
chemistry. Later on, during the 30s and 40s, he was one of the pioneers
in molecular biology, elucidating key features of protein structure (Nye
2001). Pauling was much admired, an emblematic figure to chemists
worldwide (Lipscomb 1993, Hager 1995, Kauffman
et al.
2001).
However, in spite of and perhaps also because of the tendency to the
blurring of disciplinary lines between chemistry and her sister sciences
biology and physics, inner lines within chemistry endured and may even
have become stronger. F. H. Westheimer tells a revealing anecdote in
this respect:
it is hard to understand the tightly compartmentalized minds of the
chemists of that day. (An extreme example of compartmentalization: at
the chemistry library at Cambridge University, an imaginary line divided
the room into two parts, one for physical chemists and one for organic.
The library had two sets of the
Journal of the Chemical Society
, since an
organic chemist was not supposed to cross that imaginary line to use the
volumes on the physical chemistry side of the library, and vice versa.)
[Westheimer 2003]
A traditional aspect of chemistry also became stronger, its iconic lan-
guage of formulas that the structural theory of the 1860s had established
