Perspectives Lecture
Choices Eugene G. Rochow Box 655. Captiva, FL 33924 I t is many years since I have faced the Division of Chemical Education, and I was very surprised when asked to present this lecture. I t is not that I have no perspective on life as a chemist, for surely everyone who has been active in chemistry for 60 years has that. Nor is i t that I have lost touch with chemical education, for we are all students all our lives, every one of us. I t is just that I have read with so much awe and resnect the learned discussions of mv . nredecessors . in this series. I marvel a t people who can condense an entire field of chemistrv into one brilliant and annotated review and serve i t up with such charm and Blan. I doubt that I could do it. or should do it. I asked myself, "Who could possibly he interested enoughin the history and chemistry of silicones to sit through an hour of it right after lunch? And on a spring day in ~lorida!"I got t h e strong answer, "No one!" So I have become the maverick once more. I decided to present to you some matters which are not taken up in chemistw courses. and are not in the textbooks.. vet . affect every budding or flowering chemist. Affect him or her deepIv. ..in fact. There will he no tables of numbers,. no graphs, - - and no kinetics or reaction mechanisms. This is a nontechnical talk about some choices faced bv everyone who seeks t o make a living or just have fun in chemistry. Life is a sequence of choices, for those of us lucky enough to he ahle to make choices, and so it is what we choose and u hen we make the choice that will determine the outcome. It determines what we make of ourselves and our careers. All of you in this room, presumably, already have opted for a career in science, and out of several alluring possibilities have chosen chemistry. Good! That provides us with a common ground. But what branch of chemistry? What area within that branch? What research projects to choose? What projects to abandon and replace with new ones? How to record your own ideas (as distinct from those of your supervisor), and how t o slin these into vour stream of ex~eriments? Should you pla; i t safe and take small steps, or be bold and take big-steps? . What exactly is your responsibility to society and how do you best dischkgek? All these matters involve personal choices, very personal ones, so no hard-and-fast rules can he given. Each of you must look at a few case histories, and then make up your own mind on the bigissues. Sometimesfate (or circumstance.. if vou . will) seems to take a hand and makes some of the decisions fnr you. Most of you, orobablv. .. have had the rxoerience of falline under the influence of an outstandingteacher who fired up your enthusiasm and directed your thoughts and energies along a particular line. For me, there were several. I was much taken hy the elegant lectures of John R. Johnson on organic chemistry, and I enjoyed the five-hour organic labs from 8 to 1 on Saturday mornings. There was time to get things done, and then the Saturday afternoon football games became re-
Perspectives Lecture for ACS in Miami, April 30. 1985.
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wards. But soon a second and greater hero appeared, Louis Munroe Dennis (Fig. 1).He gave the senior lectures in what was then called Advanced Inorganic Chemistry, and they were demonstration lectures. (Confucius said. "Hearing something a hundred times is not as good as seeing it once!;; He really said that.) They were filled with elegant, seeable, understandable, impressive, convincing experiments. Dennis was a master a t this. Furthermore, he believed in the inherent dignity and importance of every element; he put just as much emphasis on the rare and lesser-known elements as on the common ones, or the ones of commercial importance. This was a sort of civil-rights movement among the elements and Dennis was a leader in it. He believed that all elements are chemical individuals; each is born with its own unique structure and ~ronertiesand hence its own unique hihavior, which transcends any family relationships. Furthermure, he believed that all elements are born with the same potential greatness-that is, all have the same potential for useful application to our society in our unfolding technology, if o& we will take the tro"ble to investigate each element thoroughly and search out how it can be applied. All this was a revelation t o me, and it was heady stuff. So we see how L. M. Dennis made his choices: he had convictions about the individual elements, and he stuck to his principles with Scottish stuhhorness. This was not easy
Figure 1. L. M. Dennis.
at a time when inorganic chemistry was in low repute in the USA. American industrial chemistry had its roots in the submarine blockade of the First World War, when German dves and nharmaceuticals were cut off. forcine develooment or substiiutes here. The emphasis was all on organic chemistry, so that was where the job opportunitieslay, and that was where research money came from. Inorganic chemistry was impoverished and belittled. As a famous professor of organic chemistry in a leading midwestern university put i t while I was at Cornell, all 87 elements had already been discovered, so what remained to be done? Dennis w& not deterred. He was intrigued by germanium and gallium, the two elements predicted by Mendeleev. In particular, he noted that little had been done on germanium since its discovery by Winkler in 1886, and so he set out methodically to extract the element from any and all sources, to produce the pure metalloid, to nreoare - . oure . comoounds of i t in all oxidation states, and to open up the organimetallic chemistry of germaniu&in considerable detail. I t is mostly through his efforts that chemically pure germanium was available in reliable supply to the physicists at Bell Laboratories in their studies that resulted in the development of the transistor. In fact, the whole astonishing modern development of solid-state electronics began with the first practical transistors, which were made of germanium. Without the pioneering work of Dennis, that material would not have been there waiting. Dennis had many good friends in England and Germany, where inorganic chemistry flourished, and he was an influential man in academic and social circles. He persuaded George Fisher Baker, president of the First National Bank of New York, to provide the money for constructing the Baker Laboratory a t Cornell. a oace-setter in desim and construction in 1927 and still an imposing and usefuibuilding today. He then went further and persuaded Baker to endow the George Fisher Baker l.ectureship, a device for bringing ro Cornell outsranding rhemists from all over the world. Fach spent a semester o; a year in the daily life of the departmeit and wrote a book for the famous Baker Lecturer series. I remember particularly Fritz Paneth and Otto Hahn (Fig. 2) on radioactivity, A. V. Hill on muscular movement in man, G. P.
Figure 2. Olio Hahn
Thomson on atomic structure, N. V. Sidgwick on the whole realm of inorganic chemistry (he wrote the book!), and W. L. Bragg on crystal structure. And especially Alfred Stock (Fig. 3), who helped me choose silicon as my favorite element. Stock lectured about the hydrides of boron and silicon, an area he had chosen because (as he put it) the solid ionic compounds of boron and silicon were well known and widely used, but the other half of their chemistry, the covalent half, was almost unknown. So he chose to work with the very volatile and reactive hydrides, and he had an interesting thesis: to him, hydrogen was merely the first member of the alkyl series of aliphatic radicals (hydrogen, methyl, ethyl, and so on), so anything hydrogen would do could be done by methyl groups, too. This was a dictum that was to be very helpful to me in later years. Alfred Stock came to Comell as a Baker Lecturer when I was in my first year of graduate study. I t would have been easy for me (and certainly far more comfortable) simply t o attend his lectures and to devote myself otherwise to my thesis research, but I knew that a personal assistant for Stock had not yet been chosen, and I wanted t o learn more about the man and his work so I anolied for the iob. At the time I knew no German and ~ t o c d i n e wvery 1itt"le English, so i t made for a verv interesting but difficult relationshin. Stock wrote in a very small buCprecise hand that I had to learn to decipher, and I had to learn to perform his lecture experiments in very small and precise apparatus within an enormous Zeiss epidiascope that projected the images on a large screen. I drew the diagrams for his book on the hydrides of boron and silicon ( I ) and learned to use his elaborate glass apparatus for preparing sensitive compounds in the absence of air and moisture. It was all very good training for what was to come later, Many stories are told about Alfred Stock, his idiosyncrasies, his battle with mercury poisoning that came from his experiments with gases, and his adventures a t Cornell. Some of vou have heard these stories. so I shall not take time to repeat them here; you may ask about them later, if you are curious. I was there and I was his assistant a t the time, so I know. I have not said anything about the third man, Otto Hahn.
Figure 3. Alfred Stock.
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All of vou know of him as the man whose exneriments with Lise ~ e i t n e proved r that the uranium nucieus underwent fission when bombarded with neutrons. Indeed. he received the Nobel Prize in 1945 for his discovery of fission, but 12 years before that he was invited to Cornell as a leading expert on the use of radioactive tracers in the study of chemical reactions. As a young man he was fascinated by the concept of transmutation of the elements, and as soon as he completed his training in Germany he hastened to study with Ramsay and Rutherford. In the course of his own work he discovered the element protactinium, and his lectures a t Cornell dealt with this and with the technique of unraveling what happens in all sorts of reactions by labeling the reactants with radioactive isotopes. All this was done with minute amounts of material and without benefit of cyclotrons or nuclear reactors. Hahn had nothing whatever to do with nuclear weapons or nuclear power; he was a kind and affable man with a keen sense of humor who was s i m.~.l vnuzzled . about why barium should show u p as a reaction product of uranium. At first he could not believe it; hut the experiments were repeated again and again, and always barium showed up. If it was not barium, i t certainly acted exactly like every sample of barium one could find in a chemical stockroom. So he felt he had to report it as such, although after he mailed the report he wished he could get it back out of the mailbox because it simply could not he true, hy all the principles of chemistry. Now let us take time out to recapitulate why and how these three men, Dennis, Stock, and Hahn, came to choose their fields of work, the fields that turned out to he so productive and so significant. Dennis believed in the fundamental importance of all elements and was determined to give the rare and lesser-known ones a break. Stock was intrigued by the hydrides of boron that were discovered by his mentor, Moissan, and made enough of them to establish that they were not just accidents; theiwere a whole family of compounds that did not fit the rules of chemical bonding or the way we write formulas. He was determined not ti he deterred by the mere fact that they were so reactive toward air, water, and just about everything else. As for Hahn, he found it fun to be a chemical detective and find out just what happens in controversial reactions; he used his tracers to put down mere speculation and arrive a t the truth. Note that each one of the three men was influenced bv his teachers. as we all are influenced by what goes on aroind us, hut each man made his own deliberate choice based on his own beliefs and for his own reasons. So what should each of you do, as young and eager chemists or students of chemistry, to make a wise and satisfying choice of field? First, prepare yourself, not only by taking all of the courses required of you for a degree, hut attending all the extra lectures and meeting all the visiting experts you possibly can. Especially go to hear and meet people from faraway lands, for this is the only way to broaden your horizons and learn what is going on in the world. One of the troubles with America is its insularity; we need to mix more with people from other countries, to learn their lanzuages. and to understand their customs and cultures. hi back: ground for our later choices is laid out in subtle wavs that are not appreciated a t the time. Second, keep ahead, all the time; set yourself not only an immediate goal, hut several long-range objectives. Never let yourself he caught without an alternative; always have another string to your bow. We cannot control many events or forces around us, but we can he ready a t once with Plan B if Plan A should disappoint us. I have been advisor to undergraduates for many, many years, and the saddest sack is the one who comes in to sav he has been turned down hv this or that medical schoolbr graduate school or whateve; and does not know what to do. Put Plan B into motion, and he readv with Plan C and Plan D! 402
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Can you follow two plans a t once, if you are not certain of the outcome or the "rightness" of either one? I say yes, you can, because I did and i t worked. I must explain that, in still another example of his amiable persuasiveness among wealthv and influential neoole. Dennis neeotiated an endowment from the noted*philanthropist ~ i g u s Heckscher t to establish research fellowshios for eraduate students in broad, unspecified areas. T o prkvent tLe use of such fellowships to "huv" araduate students. the r e c i ~ e n tof such a fellowship was required to carry on a parallil research project distinctly separate from his thesis research. This extended his minimum residence time to four years instead 6: three; in effect, the recipient carried on postdoctoral research along with his thesis work. I had the chance to get a Heckscher fellowship, so I had two projects: one was on straight inorganic chemistry, and for the other one I chose organometallic chemistry. Since then I have always been glad of the broader experience and the supplementary training, although the extra work and extra year loomed large at the time. What job, then? Young chemists today often can choose what organization will have the benefit of their services, hut this was not so in 1935! True, two opportunities to teach high-school chemistry at $835 per year turned up, but they were snaoned up a t once. I wrote 32 letters of aonlication .. and got nit; me;ingle nibble in reply. With degree i n hand I had nothinr. Then an International Exrhanec Fellowshir~at a subsistence stipend became available. I applied and k a s happy to he chosen. I t was for a year of study a t Berlin, in geochemistry. I acquired a passport and a third-class ticket on a steamer, hut two weeks before sailing time, aman called Adolf Hitler decided that novounemen of militarv ace could leave Germany, so the whoie exckange program.c~lapsed. What to do? Throueh the eood offices of Winton Patnode a t the prestigious ~ k e r a ~ l l e c t r i cResearch Laboratory a t Schenectadv. . . I eot .. a summer iob there as a ceramic chemist. Crramirs? I had neversrudied ceramic chemistry before. but vou mas he sure I did then! F'ortunarels. .. the underernduate training a t Cornell was unusually broad: i t require& course in chemical microscopy and one in mineralom, and stronelv recommended ~ a u h e n ~ a ~ ecourse r's in the chemistry'df zlass. So I had a few of the basic tools, and I read furiously at night to catch up. Actually, the work was a lot of fun: fu&ng 10 pounds of magnesium oxide at a time in a graphite crucible a t 3000°C with measured amounts of calcium, aluminum, beryllium, and silicon oxides as impurities, then breakine up the hie crvstals and comnactine the oowder in swaeed m&ai tubes co conduct electrical testson tGe material f o r k e as insulator in the Calrod units for electric ranges. I had a strong interest in electrical technology anyway, and it was fascinatina to work with a material that was a eood conductor of heat hut a very poor conductor of electricity, even at 1000°C. (Try to match that combination with anything hut MgO!). I grew single crystals of MgO a t 3000' and compared their conductivities with those of single crystals of Si02and A1203 at high temperatures. I t was fun, and the work progressed so well that Hotpoint and G.E. decided it should be continued. So a t last I was employed, and (to put i t in today's vernacular) I was into high-temperature insulation. This is an area of ereat imnortance in material science. There are inorganic insulating materials that are serviceahle a t temperatures up to 1000' or more but are rigid. There are also the traditional organic materials: paper and pitch (as used by Thomas Edison), then cloth-reinforced Bakelite, and later a variety of organic plastics, all limited to about 150° in steady service. What was needed was something that was at least moderately flexihle and would be serviceable a t 200" to 300" over long periods. Inorzanic flexible materials like ashestos and mica needed to-be fastened down with some adhesive; if shellac or varnish were used, the composite was still limited to 150" by the organic material used as adhesive.
A new and different kind of flexihle polymer was needed. From his inorganic training withDennis, Patnode felt sure that the element silicon ought to he useful in such new compositions, and he had tried hard to bring silicon compounds into the polyester scheme. All his compositions were hydrolysahle, though, and so had short life. I thought direct honds between silicon and carhon would be much better than ester links through oxygen, which were hydrolysahle, and there also should he no carbon-to-carbon bonds, to minimize carbonization a t high temperatures. Such reasoning pointed to a methyl polysiloxane, or (as we now call it) methyl silicone. But such a material had not been made, presumably because the classical approaches did not work. I t was an intriguing prohlem in organometallic synthesis, hut I was supposed to be a full-time ceramic chemist. So I went to Dr. Coolidge, the quiet kindly gentleman who was then director of the G.E. Research Lah, and told him I thought I could make a contrihution if I could have a go at the prohlem of flexible high-temperature insulation. He said a man always works best a t something he wants to do, so I should eo ahead and do some nart-time exneriments while he squared matters with the ~ o t ~ o ipeopie. nt Within the limited framework allowed by circumstances, I had made a choice and I was given a chance. Great! The first samples of methvl silicone resin, lahoriouslv made hv the rather inappropriate Crignanl synthesis. lived up tu expectations (21, hut I soon had to face the realitiex of the mapnesium monopoly and the economic impossibility of relying on silicon tetrachloride as a raw material. There followed some agonizing months of failure to find any method of preparation that did not rely on organometallic reagents, hut eventually the application of some of Alfred Stock's principles led to the direct synthesis of methyl chlorosilanes (from methyl chloride and elementary silicon) (3) and of methyl silicone in quantity. Out of these efforts the entire modern silicone industrv was horn (4). I have been c&eful to relate the background provided by L. M. Dennis and Alfred Stock because it illustrates the basis for making the critical choices. You will each have your own basis for your choices, hut I want to explain further what I call the Dennis Principle for making decisions in research. He calledit shaking the plum tree, andexplained it this way: understanding chemical research is like entering an orchard of beautiful plum trees at harvest time. Some trees, close to the entrance, have always yielded some lucious plums, if shaken hard enough, so you have every expectation that they will yield a t least one more if you do the same. This is the reasonably safe thing to do; you go to the library, find out what everyone else has done, and then plan some logical extension that may he expected to produce an improvement or an extension of knowledge, however modest. The other, more adventurous, unsafe thing to do is to wander far from the beaten path, search out a plum tree no one has ever shaken before, and hope that i t will yield an abundance of research plums. You are eiven the choice. Almost everyone chooses the safe-and-surepath,and undeniably they mikea h i n g at it aud the science is advanced slowly and surely by it. Nevertheless. I am devoted to eoine in search of a n u n shaken plum tree. The hazards are7ar &eater, hut the possible regards are also much greater. I t takes courage, and patience, and belief in your training, your rationale, and yourself. Just what can you expect, if you make the more adventurous choice and ao far afield? And what must vou do: how must you operate? First, think out the problem by yourself. Do nor no l o /he lil~rury!If you do that you will have l11dtvour only chance for a w h d y original appioach, for you will see what everyone else has done and will immediately think along the same lines. Instead, think the problem through as best you can yourself, write down your thoughts in a bound notebook, Sign and date every page. Get a trustworthy and
knowledgeable colleague or friend to witness your conclusions. If you do not have your notebook handy, or do not yet keep one, write out your ideas in full, sign and date the page, put i t in a sealed envelope, and give it to a responsible mature person for safekeeping. This will establish your priority, should i t ever he necessary t o do soduring patenting or litigation. Second. do some sienificant experiments to test vour ideas, and record the results with equal care. Ideas alone are not enoueh: they must he hacked up hvnhvsical reduction to .. . practice.~venif you spend only 10% of your time on the new project while continuing your bread-and-butter operations, keep trying to the best of your ability. Then go to the library and see what others have done. And, when (or if) you find you have done something you consider significant or important, publish it! Secrecy will not help you if a controversy should arise. and secrecv certainlv does not advance the science. ~ u i h e r m o r ea, chemist ha; only one ultimate securitv. and that is his renutation amone his neers. That reuutati& is secured by his or her resear& results as reportkd in his or her articles and hooks. Most chemists find it hard to write, especially to write clear, concise, convincing reports; they w d d much rather he in the lahoratorv doine rxoerimental work, and they begrudge any acti;ity t h i t Geeps them from the bench. Yet work doneand not reported might just as well never be done at all, for all the good it does. And do not wait until all the loose ends are tied up neatly to your complete satisfaction before publishing. If you hold off until everything is complete and perfect, the report will never he written, and you will have advanced neither yourself nor chemistry. Although all research requires patience, I have said that choosing a far-out approach requires much more patience, nerhaus over a verv lone period. I waited 40 vears for a Lerification of my very ea& report on the existence of hypofluorous acid, hut it came. First there were vieorous denials on theoretical grounds, then there were derjvatives, then ultimatelv. proof of the acid itself, which was .. aratifvine. . . .. I hare equal faith in alternosorption as a principle and as a valuable tool with many conceivable applications in industry, hut I shall have to wait to see it used. For those of you who do not know what I mean by alternosorotion. . .a brief exnlanation is in order. I t is well known that the electrical conductivity of a semiconductor may increase or decrease accordine to the nature of the eas adsorhed on the surface of the soEd. For example, the conductivity of an n-tvne .. semiconductor increases when hvdroeen . .. or anv other rlectron donor is adsorhed on the surface, since exrm carriers are contrihuced to the interior of the solid. The same ntype semiconductor decreases in conductivity when an electron-withdrawing suhstance such as oxveen is adsorhed. Conversely, a p-type semiconductor suffers a decrease in electrical conductivity upon adsorption of hydrogen, . . since some of its carriers are neutralized, and it increases in conductivity when oxygen is adsorhed. These effects are well documented (5).What I call alternosorption is the reciprocal or converse effect, by which it is to be expected that the auantitv of adsorbed suhstance (and oossihlv the rate and the tenacity of bonding) might be influencei or even controlled hv electrical maninulation of the solid. If an alternating electric field were to b e applied to the solid by suitable means, the adsorhed gas should alternately he seized and released by the solid. One might then expect to orchestrate the adsorption and desorption of reacting gases on the surface of a heterogeneous semiconducting catalyst, for example, and so control the output and percentage yield of a catalyzed reaction. Instead of sitting around, waiting for the reaction product to be released from the surface by the thermal scourine and honing . there will not he too much thermal decomposition while waiting on this random process, i t should be possible t o expel the product as soon as the
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reaction is complete, thus making room on the active surface for new reactants. The optimum frequency of alternation would have to be determined hy experimmt. The result would he not only a new form of control, hut also a tool for investigating the mechanism of reactions by determining the reaction time. Some experiments (6)have demonstrated the existence of the effect, hut so far no great joyful throngs of chemical engineers have rushed in to apply the method to control throughput and yield in vast commercial operations. I can wait. I t will come. Suppose you make similar choices and are fortunate enough to come up with a result that proves to he far ahead of its time. What should you do? Well, if you are a good publicist and a convincing salesperson (which 1 am not), you could hasten acceptance bf your discovery, instead of waiting around as I have done. Good luck to you! Be prepared, thouah. for disbelief. ohiections. even ridicule. As Albert ~ c h i e i z esaid, r "1f t;y to do good, people will roll stones in your path."Let me illustrate. Thirty-six years ago, in May of 1949,I gave a puhlic lecture about the future of chemistry in world affairs (see CEN report of the Baekeland medal (7). I said that the ability of chemists to create devices and substances that are capable of terrific destruction had a m ~ l v been demonstrated i n k o r l d War 11;i t was time for chemists to turn away from such work and center their attention on possible contrihutions of chemistry to a world trying t o live in peace. I dwelt a t some length on the responsibility of chemists to society as they directed their efforts toward alleviating hunger and disease and toward developing new materials of construction. I pointed out the nrodieious waste of irreplaceable natural resources during the long war and the sad state of our remaining store of fuels and ores. The most immediate concern, I said, was the supply of domestic petroleum, which was dwindline in the face of r a ~ i d l vexpanding demand. Most people aythat time simply ioulh not believe that the U.S.would ever run out of oetroleum within its own borders, hut any logical extension bf the figures for consumption made that very event inevitable. What made matters much worse, it seemed to me, was that the petroleum was heing wasted as a fuel when it should he saved and used as a valuable raw material for plastics, elastomers, solvents, pharmaceuticals, and the entire output of petrochemical products. Ultimately, of course, petroleum would be needed for the synthesis of fats and proteins on an enormous scale, to meet the needs of a rapidly growing population. During the war, edible fats had been synthesized in Germany from their synthetic glycerol and the fatty acids obtained from the Fischer-Tropsch reaction, and it was known that edible proteins could he produced bv microorganisms feeding on petroleum distilfate and simple fixed nitrogen, so these hasic foodstuffs could he manufactured in massive quantities. Carbohydrates could best he obtained by the hydrolysis of cellulose from agricultural waste, from wood, even from discarded paper and cotton clothing, leaving our farms to grow the nutritional extras, the flavorful trimmines. the extraordinarv foods. The ACS audience mostly concurred, hut the reaction in the popular press was one of hilarious ridicule (Fie. 4).You see how difficult it is to get the public or the press io think further ahead than next 'I'uesdav. I have wa~tedthrouch the vears to see what would happen. The situation on critical metals became more critical, and the government began stockpiling the essential ones. The oil industry, and then the federal government, began warning people that our oil production would decline as the wells dried up, and i t did-and we became dependent on imported oil. Now we are enslaved by a new set of Barbary pirates called OPEC. A sad state, hut that was not my only disappointment. The puhlic not only failed to heed all the warnings about the coming energy crunch, they also ignored my chief proposal in that 1949 lecture: the conservation quotient. Since we and the future multitudes ultimately
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must get along on wholly renewable and inexhaustible resources, I said we should point ourselves gently and firmly in that direction by thinking about everything we use. Does i t consume or waste irreplaceahle material? If so, how much? What is the proportion of irreplaceable material? T o put matters on a more positive basis, I suggested that we take the proportion -weight.- of replareahle or inexhaustible material total weight of matrrials used in the manufacture as a figure of merit, which1 called the conservation quotient. This could he, and should he, imprinted on every label, stamped on every product, and printed in every advertisement, so that we, the consumers, could he aware of what we are doing. Thus the CQ of a kilowatt-hour of hydroelectric power is very high, for even the comer and steel used in the generation and transmission are rkioverahle, hut the CQ of electric power produced in a coal-burning or oil-hurnine power station w d d be very low, and woul: get a low merit rating. The CQ of passenger-miles in vour oersonal car would he zero if the car ends up in an autbmohile graveyard or isdunlped in thesea aa a home for fish. On theother hand. if the car were designed so that the component metals (copper, steel, aluminum) could he separated a t the end of the cars' life and returned t o useful employment, and if the car burned alcohol made from agricultural trash, the CQ could be quite high. Think of what is heing done with aluminum cans! As you see, I get carried away by this, hut i t still seems to put John Q. Public to sleep. I t has taken 30 vears and a national emergenry to require-the energy efficiency of rcfrigeratorsand airconditioners to he posted on them, bslaw. We could have similar ratings on almbst all manufactuied products, and so make the world a much better place for our grandchildren. Think on it! The time of the CQ must surely come. So let us recapitulate again. If you choose far-out research projects and adopt a far-in-the-future outlook, you may well find yourself in the position of being well aheadif your-time. This is not always a comfortable position; it carries with it certain frustations, as well as some satisfactions. Well, everything in life carries a price for its pleasures. There is one great advantage in heing far out ahead in a field of research, though: it puts all the others in the position of trying to catch UD. Thev have to hustle and keen readine vour latest oaners. .. . while you can spend that time i;l the lab: Perhaps vou think vou mav be aiven no choices. After all. 90% of chemistry graduates ente;industry, and you will hd told what to do. I can only answer that I was there once myself, and I found that the situation is not as rigid as you might imagine. Almost any research director will allow you to spend some of your time (say 10%)on independent research if you present a logical argument for your project.
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Figure 4. Cartoon typifying public reaction to the author's suggestion Umt foodst~fls could be synthesized.
That may be all the experimental time your early thinking will support, anyway. Do not neglect the main job: any prudent person (eipecially one with family responsibilities) will see to that. Nevertheless, there is a lot of thinking time after hours. Cherish your own ideas and their result! They are your own individual expression, your statement in today's world. I have left to last the very important question of work for the militarv. .. on contract or otherwise. I have done so because it is an exceedingly personal choice. Should you work on any oroiect that has ootential for harminc ur killine. neoole? Put this way, it is a straightforward ques'tion withastraightforward answer, painful though the decision might he. But there is a larger aspect: do you have any control over the use other people may make of the results of your basic research. Think of Otto Hahn. His only motivation was curiosity, particularly about the mysterious appearance of barium where no barium had existed before. Yet out of that work came the Nuclear Age, and there were some unthinking neonle who blamed all the conseouences on Otto Hahn. He kas.attacked by terrorists, was beaten and badly wounded. He suffered much nain and aneuish for somethine that was not all of his doing. Every screntist who explor& the unknown is subiect to the same risk. Is there anv reallv safe area of research that cannot be subverted to destruct&e or harmful purposes? No, there is none. Every discovery can be perverted to serve the purposes of a determined military, although there are some areas of research (notably in medicine a i d surgery) that are safer than others from predators. Even in medicine, though, a life saving substance or technique is quickly seized upon to further military aims and is controlled to keep i t out of the hands of the enemy. So your choices of area of work, of industry, and even of company to work for, will depend on your own inner convictions; no one can really offer advice. I know some people who have done their best work for a branch of the military and are proud of
their contribution to their country both in war and peace. I respect these people, though I myself could never join them. I know other oeoole who have refused to coonerate with the military and h i h a v e nothing to do with &y investigation that is known to have a harmful ournose. . . I resnect them, too: they seem equally happy and equally sure oftheir position. There are some oeonle in between, too. some who worked for many years on prbject they thoughtwas right and proper because the country's leaders asked them t o do so, yet have spent 2001 30 years afterward trying toundo what they set in motion. I know of no one who was a confirmed pacifist and now works gung ho for the military. So you will have to decide for yourself. But think about it; do not just drift into something that may haunt you later. So this is my perspective on life as a chemist. You should rememher that this is just one man's opinion on how to handle the choices that determine your future. You may very well want a second ooinion, and a third, and fourth. Still, these words may have served a useful purpose if they have gotten you started thinking about the future and your own place in it, so that you may indeed make more intelligent choices. If my exposition has not been clear, rememher that language is not a perfect medium for expressing ideas. If there is something.you want clarified or enlarged upon, just ask!
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Literature Clted I11 Stock. A. "The Hydrides of Boron and Silicon":Cornell University Press: Ithaea, NY,
15) Fensham. P. J. Q. Re". 1957. 11, 227: Greenwood, N. N.: Anderson,J. S. D k u s s . Foradmy Soc. 1950,8,238: Gamer, W. E.: Msggs, J. T r a m Farodoy Sor. 1936.32, ,"LA
(61 Roehow. E. G. J. lnorg. Nuel. C h o n 1967, 29.65: Schwartz, lnorg. Nucl. Chem. 1967.29.1559. I71 Rochow, E. G . Chem. Eng. N e u 1949,27.1510.
S. E.; Raehow, E. G. J.
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