Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
and within large corporations such as Novartis in Basel
29
- and of nano-
science and technology (Welch Foundation 1996, National Science
Board 2002, Schummer 2004, 2005).
Even within academia, chemists were shifting their focus (Ivory
Tower, intellectual distinction, remoteness from public concerns) to the
marketing of their productions. Those products continued to take the
form of publications and patents. The novelty was the hype, often com-
bined with the perceived need to disassociate oneself from the negative
image carried by the discipline.
A solution was to rename the subdiscipline one belonged to. The new
name would avoid the 'chemical' adjective. Surface science thus thrived
during the 90s. Another renaming occurred with the nanoscience and
nanotechnology bandwagon.
30
That brings up the twin issues of branding and rebranding (Rivkin &
Sutherland 2004). Were you living off your heritage as a traditional
chemist, without paying attention to negative public opinion, without
thinking about the future at all? Such a stance was risky at a time when,
to mention just one country, the government was closing down chemistry
departments in British universities.
31
It was much more advisable either
to brand yourself as trading on your heritage, but with the future in mind
- which accounted for combinatorial chemistry.
32
Better yet, you could
29
Other pharmaceutical companies, in Germany in particular (Boehringer, BASF,
Hoechst,
etc
.) chose another option, subcontracting to specialized companies, in the
U.S. predominantly. By and large, this choice was an economic failure.
30
The move was protracted, as so often in history. The incentive came from the discov-
ery of the DNA double-helix by Watson and Crick, and from the ensuing lecture by
Richard P. Feynman in 1959, calling for the devising of small mechanical engines
and devices operating at the nanometer scale.
31
18 British universities closed their departments of chemistry between 1992 and 2001,
an overall 27% reduction. The trend did not stop with the decade though. By 2004, 28
departments of chemistry had been closed since 1996. Some pessimists predicted that
only six departments of chemistry might survive in the UK.
32
A name with an obvious redundancy, most of chemistry being combinatorial by na-
ture. This vogue was long overdue, Merrifield had pioneered his peptide synthesis on
small beads of polymers in the 1960s (Merrifield 1963), meeting collective indiffer-
ence from the profession. When such a technique was rediscovered towards the end
of the century, it came back with a big splash with, behind it, big financial support
from both materials science and the pharmaceutical industry. The latter was intent, as
it always is, upon finding shortcuts to promising lead molecules, in terms of drugs
both patentable and profitable.
