Chemical Education Today
The Journal Celebrates
Viewpoints: Chemists on Chemistry by Glenn T. Seaborg
It is a great pleasure for me to be associated with Viewpoints: Chemists on Chemistry, a series of papers in this Journal that will delineate the recent past and the near-term future of our science. Viewpoints is a major feature of the celebration of the Journal of Chemical Education’s 75th anniversary year. It is being supported by The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc., which recently celebrated its own 50th anniversary. Each paper in the Viewpoints series will be written by a chemist or group of chemists with special expertise in a particular field, with the aim of providing an overview of that field’s accomplishments, importance, and prospects. The goal is to reflect on developments during the past 50 years and to predict how each field will evolve over the next 25 years. The total perspective encompassed by Viewpoints corresponds with the 75 years of this Journal’s lifetime and reflects its comprehensive interest in all of chemistry. The 50-year retrospective view of each field corresponds with the period during which the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation has been supporting the chemical sciences. As many readers know, the Journal of Chemical Education was founded in 1924 by Neil E. Gordon, a man whose broad range of interests and energetic nature were also responsible for initiating the Gordon Research Conferences. In Volume 1, Number 1, of this Journal, Gordon stated four goals that are still valid today. 1. To act as a medium for bringing before chemistry teachers … any worthwhile work done in chemical education. 2. To encourage community of effort in any instituted reforms, furnishing a medium through which significant reports, studies, and experiments will be given wide circulation. 3. To encourage sufficient research among the teachers so that the proper investigational atmosphere may prevail in our class rooms. 4. To keep the teacher and student in closer touch with current opportunity furnished by the American Chemical Society and other scientific organizations.
Not everyone thought that a journal devoted to chemical education would be successful, the American Chemical Society included. The story goes that Neil Gordon won an excellent steak dinner from the Secretary of the ACS, because the Journal’s circulation of 1300 at the end of its first year was 1000 more than the Secretary had predicted. The number of subscribers is now more than ten times that firstyear figure, and the Journal has become the premier venue in the world for papers that deal with chemical pedagogy and the chemistry curriculum. The Viewpoints series satisfies aspects of each of Gordon’s original goals and is particularly appropriate as a way to celebrate the Journal’s 75th year. The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, Inc., was established in 1946 by chemist, inventor and businessman Camille Dreyfus as a memorial to his brother, Henry. The
Foundation became a memorial to both men when Camille Dreyfus died in 1956. Born and educated in Switzerland in the latter part of the 19th century, Camille and Henry Dreyfus dedicated their lives to the scientific and commercial development of cellulose acetate and related chemicals. The brothers organized and directed the Celanese companies in Britain, Canada, and the United States and contributed significantly to the evolution of the modern chemical industry. Camille Dreyfus directed that the Foundation’s purpose be “to advance the science of chemistry, chemical engineering and related sciences as a means of improving human relations and circumstances around the world.” Throughout its history the Foundation has sought to take the lead in identifying and addressing needs and opportunities in the chemical sciences. Its support of the Viewpoints series is therefore a logical outgrowth of its fundamental purpose. Authors of Viewpoints papers have been asked to provide perspectives on what chemistry has done during the lifetime of the Dreyfus Foundation and to set the stage for what chemistry will become well into the next century. The papers that appear in the Journal will be written at a level appropriate for upper-division undergraduate chemistry students. We expect that these papers will extend and enhance the Journal’s role as, in the words of an early editor, “a living textbook of chemistry”. In addition, they will be published in electronic format via JCE Online (whose founding was also supported by the Dreyfus Foundation). In the Journal, Viewpoints papers will take full advantage of color graphics, which of course will also appear in the electronic version. In JCE Online there also will be links to the authors’ and other related Web sites, and video and animations when relevant. At the end of the 75th anniversary year, the collected Viewpoints papers will be adapted to the needs of a broader spectrum of readers by a special Viewpoints editor, and
Henry Dreyfus (left) and Camille Dreyfus (right). Photos courtesy of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.
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The Journal Celebrates
supplementary material will be added so that they can be made accessible to a more general audience. This collection will be published as a trade book and on a CD-ROM as a means of bringing the fundamental importance and broad relevance of chemistry to the attention of the general public and to a broad range of students. I have the pleasure of chairing the Viewpoints Editorial Board, which will oversee the entire project. Its members are • • • •
• • • • • • • •
Glenn T. Seaborg, Chair; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley Allen J. Bard, University of Texas at Austin Jerry A. Bell, Directorate for Education and Human Resources, AAAS Frank Cardulla, Chair of Subcommittee A of ACS Society Committee on Education, Niles North High School, Illinois Ann Cartwright, San Jacinto College Central, Texas Charles P. Casey, University of Wisconsin-Madison Ernest Eliel, University of North Carolina Dudley Herschbach, Harvard University Joseph J. Lagowski, University of Texas at Austin Stephen J. Lippard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Jerry Mohrig, Carleton College Chadwick A. Tolman, Consultant; DuPont Central Research (retired)
The Editorial Board will recommend topics and help to recruit authors for the series. Some of its members will review Viewpoints manuscripts and recommend ways that the authors can improve their work, and some will be authors of papers. Planning for and production of the Viewpoints trade book will also be supervised by the Editorial Board. We appreciate the board members’ willingness to lend their support to this important project. The Viewpoints series will begin next month in the February issue with “Surface Chemistry”, a paper from the laboratories of Gabor A. Somorjai of the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include molecular surface science and its application to heterogeneous catalysis and the formation of hard coatings. Somorjai and his co-author, Günther Rupprechter, discuss concepts related to external and
Surface Chemistry. Field ion micrograph (left) and stereographic projection (right) of a (001)-oriented Rh tip.
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Chemical Education Today
internal surfaces and interfaces and the dynamic nature of surfaces during chemical processes. A broad overview of the most frequently used surface science techniques is also included, along with references for each technique. Somorjai and Rupprechter close with a discussion of the present and future technological impact of surface chemistry on catalysis and semiconductor devices, and the chemist’s role in surface science in the coming years. The second Viewpoints paper, “The Computer as a Materials Science Benchmark”, is from the laboratories of Arthur B. Ellis at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Ellis’s research interests include the study of photoluminescence to develop chemical sensors, investigating coordination chemistry of semiconductor surfaces, optimizing solid responses and carrier dynamics, and miniaturization of sensors. Ellis and several coworkers delineate benchmarks in materials science by exploring the components and evolution of the computer. The computer has helped drive developments in the field of materials science, and developments in materials science have made possible the unprecedented information processing power that we almost take for granted today. Ellis and coworkers also explore the future of computer chip manufacturing and the many opportunities chemists will find in materials science. The Computer as a Materials Science Benchmark. A demonstration of the large thermal conductivity of synthetic diamond: Heat transferred from a human hand enables the diamond sample to cut rapidly through a cube of ice.
I hope that you enjoy this new feature and can use it as a way to become familiar with new topics as well as a tool for introducing these topics to students.
Joseph J. Lagowski, University of Texas at Austin and previous editor of this Journal, has written on “Chemical Education: Past Present and Future”. He focuses on his chemical education research interests on the use of computer methods in the laboratory and lecture. He draws upon his vast experience as editor of the Journal of Chemical Education to give a detailed view of undergraduate and graduate education as influenced by policies of the American Chemical Society and predicts the impact of new and changing technology on the educational process in the future. Other fields to be included in the Viewpoints series, and authors who can bring them alive for an audience of chemistry students, will be selected by our Editorial Board. Under consideration are Chemical Biology, Polymer Chemistry, Synthetic Chemistry, Chemical Dynamics, Photochemistry, Applied Chemistry, Chemical Analysis, Environmental Chemistry, and more. We plan to explore a different field each month of the Journal’s anniversary year. The great breadth of our science will almost certainly dictate that we continue the Viewpoints series beyond 1998 as an ongoing celebration. I hope that you enjoy this new feature and can use it as a way to become familiar with new topics as well as a tool for introducing these topics to students. Your comments and suggestions will be most welcome and should be directed to the editor of the Journal. The Editorial Board, the Journal’s staff, and I all look forward to reading the Viewpoints of many prominent chemists. We hope you will too.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Glenn T. Seaborg has had a long, distinguished career in science, education, and public service. He is University Professor of Chemistry, Associate Director-at-Large of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and Chairman of the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his A.B. in Chemistry from UCLA in 1934 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Berkeley in 1937. He has served on the faculty of the Berkeley campus since 1939, and was Chancellor of that campus from 1958 to 1961, in which year he was appointed chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission by President John F. Kennedy. He was subsequently reappointed by both Presidents Johnson and Nixon, serving in that position until 1971. Winner of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (with E. M. McMillan) for his work on the chemistry of the transuranium elements, Glenn Seaborg is one of the discoverers of plutonium. He and his coworkers have since discovered nine more transuranium elements: americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium, and element 106, which has been named in his honor. Seaborgium is an unstable element that decays rapidly, but its namesake has had a long and productive life in scientific research and education. His work with the Lawrence Hall of Science and his many publications in this Journal attest to his strong efforts on behalf of chemical education.
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