Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
port from chemists. This was neither new nor original to chemistry.
Chemists had earlier on been swept into brief stampedes, such as the
polywater 1972 episode (Franks 1981) or the cold fusion 1989 foray into
pathological science (Langmuir & Hall 1989), Gold Rushes and infla-
tionary bubbles both ending with a quick crash.
That the 1990s were not immune from such collective and highly co-
operative phenomena was a sign of the maturing of the discipline. This
permeated the collective consciousness of chemists. The perceived needs
for renaming and rebranding came against such a background of a ma-
ture, well-established science.
Some topics for scientific research at times become very popular, to
such an extent that a chemometric description as an epidemic may be-
come relevant (Franks 1981). During the 90s, within synthetic organic
chemistry, the devising of pathways to target molecules such as taxol or
brevicomin was highly fashionable (Lowe 2004). Petrochemistry had its
own vogues too. One of those was triggered in the 1990s by the devising
of efficient catalysts for the olefin metathesis reaction: “a few years ago,
it seemed that everyone with two alkenes in their lab was finding a way
to get them in the same flask with some Grubbs catalyst” (Lowe 2004).
The Nobel Prize in chemistry occasionally puts the ultimate seal of ap-
proval on such popularity polls. The metathesis reaction was thus distin-
guished in 2005.
9. Conclusions
Chemists have to face chemophobia. Such public hostility is rooted in a
multiplicity of factors. Some are mythical, such as the Biblical account
of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah from the befouling of air for
breathing and of water for drinking, or the twin medieval anguishes over
the cognate poisoning of wells or polluting of the air. Some are very real,
such as chemical warfare or Bhopal.
Hence, a significant segment of the population sees the chemists as if
in a ghetto. Such scapegoating of the chemical community - a scapegoat-
ing indeed, chemists bear the brunt of complaints against environmental
pollution, of which other industries and the public itself (automobiles)
