ON THE SELF-IMAGE OF CHEMISTS, 1950-2000 - The Public Image of Chemistry - page 353

There's always going to be chemistry, because we are so special, be-
cause we create new things. There's almost no other science that creates
anything. We create new things, and that creation involves an intellectual
creativity in realizing what to do, what to make, and why to make it, and
what to do with it when you've got it, that is very special to our field.
This notion of the creativity of chemists not only fits the 'individualism
methodology' (Boudon 1979), it also ties in nicely with a metaphor
favored by chemists in recent years, that of 'Chemistry, the Central
Science' (Breslow 1997, Brown et al. 2003).
Acknowledgements
This chapter was first presented (in a highly simplified form, truncated to
the section on the 1980s) at the 'Public Images of Chemistry in the
Twentieth Century' conference held in Paris, September 17-18, 2004. I
gratefully acknowledge material support from the Chemical Heritage
Foundation, Philadelphia, and Fondation des Treilles, Tourtour, which
gave me the opportunity of two one-week stays in February and in
November 2005 to gather documentation in its Othmer Library, and of a
two-week stay in May 2005 for the write-up respectively. In addition, I
thank Roald Hoffmann for a most enlightening, synthetic, and incisive
presentation of the underlying issues, during a discussion we had in
Ithaca on February 3, 2005.
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