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•EDITOR'S PAGE
In Praise Of Polymaths
O
n a trip earlier this month to Frankfurt, Germany, to meet with chemical company executives, I found myself on a Monday morning with a few hours of free time. Poring over a city map, I located "Goethehaus." A quick crossreference in the guidebook identified it as the birthplace and residence (until 1775) of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), one of the greatest figures of German culture, literature, science, music, and philosophy—indeed, the very personification of the word "polymath." That sounded great to me. Some 15 minutes later, I found myself at a busy intersection in the center of the old city. Thanks to a colleagues navigational skills, we found the elegant four-story mansion, tucked away on Grosse Hirschgraben. Like so much else in Frankfurt, Goethe's birthplace was reduced nearly to ashes during World War Π, so this Goethehaus is largely a reconstruction. The ground fl(x>r is almost entirely the origi nal, and some building materials used in the reconstruction were retrieved from the rubble. A few original furnishings from Goethe's home—including the high desk at which he stood to write his early works—were stored before the war and thus saved. I was enthralled by the ob jects, maps, paintings, and etchings. On my return to the U.S., I became obsessed with learning more about Goethe. The World Wide Web with its many Goethe sites proved useful. But Borders bookstore was better, yielding the magnificent 12-volume Princeton University Press paperback series that provides modern translations of a sam ple of Goethe's vast body of work—po etry, drama, fiction, memoirs, criticism, and scientific writing. I'm now in Goethe heaven! Best known for his dramatic poem "Faust" and his lyrical poetry, Goethe was also enamored of chemistry and even set up a laboratory in his home. In 1770, he confided to a relative, "Chemistry is still my secret love." In Volume 12 of the collected works, Douglas Miller writes of Goethe's myriad accomplishments: "founder of compara tive anatomy; the discoverer of the inter maxillary bone (which helped lay the groundwork for modern evolutionary theory); an early proponent of the idea of Views expressed
an Ice Age; a participant in the first system of weather observation stations; the founder of important museum collections in botany, geology, and zoology; an origi nal investigator of plant growth process es; the first to use the term morphology; the first to understand normal physiolog ical response to color properly." Goethe also wrote extensively on the history and philosophy of science, including the im plications of the Industrial Revolution. Goethe expected to be remembered as a scientist, but his reputation as a poet has long overshadowed those accomplish ments. Yet, according to one biographer, he regarded poetry and science as one. I had barely read this when I came across the remarks of Stanford University chemist Carl Djerassi at the dinner where he received this year's Gibbs Medal (see page 37). Djerassi, a polymath himself, quotes from the poet Muriel Rukeyser, a Gibbs biographer: "The world of the poet, however, is the scientist's world. Their claim on systems is the same claim. Their writings anticipate each other, wel come each other, indeed embrace." Djerassi is a firm believer in "intellec tual polygamy," a topic he described last week at the University of Maryland, Balti more County, where he received an hon orary degree. He urged graduates to es chew the tendency toward "overpower ing specialization . . . knowing ever more about less and less. . . . in the process, our intellectual cameras have switched from wide-angle lenses to ever narrower long-distance zoom alternatives. What is lost in the process is a form of cerebral independence associated with a broad perspective—to me the ultimate human treasure that should not be given up with seemingly so little struggle." Not that this recommendation is without its risks. In his day, scientists considered Goethe a dilettante for writ ing poetry, while his literary audience disapproved of his scientific undertak ings. To which Goethe responded: "Sci ence arose from poetry. . . . and when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends."
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MAY 26, 1997 C&EN 5
