Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
was the price of a state-of-the-art mass spectrometer in the mid-80s. The
implicit message was 'give us the funding necessary to study biopoly-
mers such as proteins, we are willing, we only need the money'.
Both academic and industrial chemists became increasingly depend-
ent on computers. The PR includes another exponential plot, showing
that American industry had equipped itself with large mainframe com-
puters during the post-World War II period. A complementary graph
conveys the steadily increasing cost of computation.
In the 1980s, chemists set up materials science as an offshoot of their
discipline. They strove for polymers to replace wood, glass, and metals
in many of their uses, and to open-up brand new applications. Plastics
underwent an exponential growth during the post-World War II period,
which the PR depicted graphically. And chemists took pride in the petro-
chemical industry rivaling metallurgy in output. One of the illustrations
in the PR aimed at informing the public that sales of chemicals were
comparable in volume with those of motor vehicles or machinery. The
curve goes through a maximum, reflecting the downturn caused by the
second global oil crisis of 1979-1980 with the attendant worldwide re-
cession.
The PR prided itself, not only on the production of man-made fibers
and plastics, but also on the sheer number of new chemical compounds.
It showed their growth, as registered by
Chemical Abstracts
during the
second half of the twentieth century, in a picture of self-satisfaction and
hubris. Chemists prided themselves on the proliferation of chemicals and
the increased density of the chemosphere.
26
This was the time also of the uncontrolled proliferation of organo-
metallics. In countries with powerful chemical organizations, but lacking
a share in the leadership then exercised by American chemists in con-
cepts and methods, primarily in the United Kingdom, Italy, and France,
the field of organometallics became the province of unimaginative scien-
tists who would prepare compounds, based on analogies from the Peri-
odic Table, only because such compounds were heretofore unknown.
They assimilated newness and innovation.
26
A valuable chemometric study on the proliferation of new chemicals is available
(Schummer 1997).
