Symposium on Pioneers in Chemistry at Columbia*
LOUIS P. HAMMETT Columbia University, New York, N. Y.
THIS symposium honors four men who, each in his time and in his own way, pioneered in an important way in the advancement of science. It is fitting that we should pay tribute to their accomplishments in the year in which the university with which each was connected throughout his professional life is celebrating the two-hundredth anniversary of its founding. It is equally fitting that we should examine the lives of men like this in the hope of obtaining guidance for our own actions. This symposium is presented by the Division of History of Chemistry, and it is an important function of history to study the ways in which men have behaved in the past in order that me may predict their behavior in the future. We can learn much that is helpful for the critical problems of our difficult times from the rareers of these men. There can be no question that science now affects the lives and welfare of people generally more intimately and more vitally than ever before, and there is no doubt in anybody's mind that the results of scientific discovery are of the utmost importance for the defense and protection of our nation. And yet it would be foolish to deny the prevalence of a misunderstanding which approaches antagonism between scientists and their nonscientific neighbors. I t seems to me that the very crux of this difficulty lies in the matter of pioneering, of breaking away from established patterns and habits. To the scientist i t is self-evident that major scientific advance depends upon the pioneering genius, that is, that it depends upon exploratory research in areas which have no immediately obvious practical value, carried out by people of outstanding and exceptional ability. And yet many scientists feel that the public generally and their elected and appointed representatives in particular think of scientific work as a matter of routine plugging in which the result can be predicted in terms of man-hours of effort. Most scientists are appalled by the indications that government does not feel the need of the genius, that i t wants only the thoroughly disciplined, even if this implies the thor* Presented before the Division of History of Chemistry s t the 126th Meeting of the American Chemical Society, New York, September, 1954.
oughly dull employee. They are frightened by the apparent prevalence of the Maginobline mentality which is more concerned with the preservation of .secrets than it is with the effort to advance more rapidly than the enemy does. No one can feel that this is a healthy situation or one conducive to the exercise of those highest functions of the creative imagination upon which all great discoveries depend. Living under these conditions it is well to remind ourselves that scientists have differed with government in other times than these and have sometimes been able to mold and lead public opinion to the public good. I know of no better example of this than the career of Charles Frederick Chandler. We may also with profit examine the environment in which these four men worked, an environment whose character and quality they helped largely to form. This is a university department of chemistry mhich has always had and still has its own highly characteristic attitudes. I t is the kind of a department in which Bogert could become an outstanding leader in the training of organic chemists by his own inspiration and effort a t a time when a background of European training was generally thought to be obligatory. It is a background in which Sherman could start as an analytical chemist, specializing in the analysis of foods, and become one of the chief architects of the new science of nutrition. I t is a department in which Nelson could adventure in two new directions, one in what would now be called physical organic chemistry, the other in the quantitative study of enzymes, a t a time when the pattern of activity of the organic chemist was in most institutions frozen into narrowly defined limits. It is a department in which Beans started as a synthetic organic chemist and became a leader in the modern teaching of analytical chemistry. It is a department in which La Mer, whose doctorate was earned in food chemistry, could become first a leader in theoretical electrochemistry, and later one of our outstanding colloid scientists. It is therefore an institution in which individuality has always been encouraged, one where departure from patterns has been looked Won favorably, one which has had very little use for the
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kind of type-casting by which a man's whole scientific career is determined by his choice of a doctoral research problem. I t is not the only kind of successful and highly useful department of chemistry, and it has its weaknesses as well as its strengths, but it is a kind of department which has played a valuable part in the advancement of science in this country and in the
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world. It is one which has deserved well of the public support which it has enjoyed and upon which every university department must depend. It is indeed one of the great strengths of our American society that university department,^, like other institutions, do vary in character and organization, instead of conforming to a single type prescrihed hy a central government.
