Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
In response to the wane of public support for chemistry, some chem-
ists became more vocal. They praised not only the field and their indi-
vidual contributions with a more emphatic tone. Hyperbole as a rhetori-
cal tool was resorted to more often. It marked scientific publications
especially, research proposals even more. Advertising hype displaced the
more modest, objective, and neutral style of reporting. Results became
routinely 'divulged' or 'revealed'. Facts were praised by the authors as
'unprecedented', 'novel', and 'remarkable', to quote some of the routine
adjectives.
Such advertising belonged to a relatively new trend. Science, in addi-
tion to being conducted according to the norms, had to be marketed ade-
quately. Science results were sometimes publicized as if they were a
commercial commodity. Hence, one witnessed attempts at renaming and
rebranding chemistry, in part or as a whole.
Renaming as a whole? The Department of Chemistry at Harvard took
the lead. It added to its name the complement 'Chemical Biology'. Other
universities (Cornell) followed suit. They had a good excuse in improv-
ing their name and their image, so they thought: their new name was
more accurate. As mentioned above, the younger faculty members were
moving towards more biological topics.
Against the profit background (Hounshell 1998) and in the face of
decreasing public support of science, the research university sought to
reinvent itself (Kumar & Patel 1995). With academic and industrial sci-
ences continuing to be structured in different ways (Ziman 1994), both
the chemical industry and the pharmaceutical industry supported two of
the vogues
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which were foremost in the conceptual landscape of the
1990s, those of biotechnologies - both within small start-up companies
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Industrial research is not immune to fashions that, as a rule, hit at the academic-
industrial interface. The pharmaceutical industry, in its search for blockbuster drugs,
has tried a whole litany of means, among which one may recall Hantzsch partition
coefficients, linear free energy relationships, MO calculations of electronic distribu-
tion in molecules, docking into receptor sites using computer modeling,
etc
. The
chemical industry proper has had its own vogues, which influenced also some aca-
demic research. For instance, shape-selective catalysis, as performed by zeolites, led
to a major undertaking in the area of pillared clays, whose results little matched the
expectations.
