Chemistry Reference
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and which G. N. Lewis had bolstered with the notion of the electron pair
in the 1910s. Pauling and his concept of mesomery (valence-bond
theory) were responsible for this 'formulaic turn', which became a
lingua
franca
among chemists. While physicists may have been virtuosi in
estimating orders of magnitude for their data or in setting up differential
equations, chemists could find shelter in their different language and,
instead of back-of-the-envelope calculations, jot a few Lewis structures
and make qualitative or semi-quantitative predictions, based on meso-
mery (Nye 2001).
I have emphasized so far the bonds between chemistry and physics
and between chemistry and biology. An overarching notion for chemistry
was to be of service to society. During World War II, the penicillin pro-
ject, second in importance only to the Manhattan Project, had involved
synthetic organic chemists and microbiologists (Harris 1999, Raber
2001, Shama & Reinarz 2002). The search for new antibiotics was a ma-
jor thrust of pharmaceutical R&D during the 1950s. This turned out to be
an epochal period in the alliance of pharmacology and synthetic organic
chemistry, with the syntheses of morphine (Gates & Tschudi 1952), cho-
lesterol and cortisone (Woodward
et al.
1951a/b), cantharidin (Stork
et
al.
1953, Bohning & Fine 1991), strychnine (Woodward
et al
. 1954),
penicillin (Sheehan & Henery-Logan 1957), colchicine (Schreiber
et al.
1961), chlorophyll (Woodward
et al
. 1960); with the elucidation of the
biosynthesis of steroids (Eschenmoser
et al
. 1955); and with applications
of profound social impact, such as the discovery of neuroleptics by Henri
Laborit, Jean Delay, and Pierre Deniker in 1950 (Healy 2002), that of the
first benzodiazepine tranquilizers librium and valium by Leo Sternbach
and Lowell Randall in 1957 (Bello 1957, Baenninger
et al.
2004) and the
devising of oral contraceptives by Carl Djerassi and Gregory Pincus in
1955 (Asbell 1995, Djerassi 1970, 2001). Chemists could see and indeed
saw themselves as agents of social change, even more so as they pro-
vided society with entire crops of new materials, often made of polymers
(textile fibers, plastics).
7
This was also the time for the rise of great in-
dustrial laboratories, such as at DuPont (Roussel 1959a/b, Hounshell &
Smith 1988), IBM, Bell Telephone, or Xerox from the success of the
7
Stereoregular polymerization was invented by Karl Ziegler and Giulio Natta in 1953.
