Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
disciplines of organic chemistry, and, arguably, of chemistry proper.
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Further factors were involved in synthetic organic chemistry's rise to the
top: the exceptional personality and achievements of R.B. Woodward;
his influence in getting his students appointed to coveted faculty posi-
tions; the economic pull of the pharmaceutical industry, its need for well-
trained preparative chemists to staff its laboratories; the enduring notion
of chemistry as a craft, which, in a defensible description, was a silent
protest against physics turning into factory mode (Latour 1987, Galison
1997). Furthermore, with the narrowing of the job market, synthetic or-
ganic chemistry reasserted itself forcefully, at the expense of both physi-
cal and physical organic chemistries.
Accordingly, to go back to the self-image of chemists, one might say
that the 'classical-nonclassical ion' controversy helped to firm up a di-
viding line between, roughly speaking, two groups A and B. Group A
was that of the traditionalists and conservatives, led by synthetic organic
chemists who draw their power from the labor market, trained people for
employment by the pharmaceutical industry, and gave primacy to obser-
vation and experiment opposed to theory and calculations (Boyd 1958).
Group B was that of the modernists, led by physical and quantum chem-
ists to whom the Schrödinger equation was the Rosetta Stone, who gave
primacy to deducing conclusions from first principles and to numerical
calculations, and who saw themselves as pioneers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the chemical community was bound together
by a set of assumptions held so deeply that chemists themselves were
largely unconscious of them. The first of these shared assumptions was
linguistic: everyone spoke English. Turning to organic and biological
chemistry, as distinct from physical chemistry, another assumption was a
collective distaste for mathematics and any part of chemical theory that
called for a mathematical input. Yet another assumption from the same
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Many people thought the non-classical ion controversy was the modern equivalent of
the medieval argument about how many angels could stand on the head of a pin. In
addition, physical organic chemistry was to some degree a victim of its own success.
By the late 1960s mechanistic thinking was everywhere, and physical organic chem-
ists who wanted to be on the cutting edge (and get funding) went into bioorganic
chemistry, enzymatic biochemistry, and even molecular biology. So hordes of people
were using and even contributing to physical organic chemistry but not calling them-
selves physical organic chemists (Weininger 2005).
