Month: September 2022

POLARIZING CRYSTALS. “After successfully creating artificial alkaloids, he collaborated with Jean-Baptiste Biot to determine that while plant-derived alkaloids were optically active, his artificial ones were not, further establishing a link between the action of molecules upon polarised light and their action upon the animal economy, and a firm line between natural and artificial products later taken up in the work of Louis Pasteur.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

AFTER KEKULE’S SNAKES. “I no longer think, I dream,” wrote Auguste Laurent (1807-1853) to his friend Charles Gerhardt in March of 1845. For the past eight days and eight nights, he reported, whenever he closed his eyes he saw what he called phantoms of the molecules he was working with dance before him and metamorphose into the phantoms of a different molecular form.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

DREAMS FROM INDUSTRIAL WASTE. “He spent every moment in a fevered pursuit of these transformations, starting with one material and trying to make another, more desirable one, from it. Scattered about his laboratory were the objects of his investigation: opium, nicotine, cinchonine, indigo, as well as a supply of cheap and less coveted coal tar, which, if all went according to plan, would be the starting point of these transformations.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

STUPEFYING DRUGS. “These, the intoxicants that altered the mind and skirted the boundary between pleasure and harm, became the most emblematic and best studied of the new alkaloids: morphine, caffeine, codeine, and nicotine.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS. “But the practical motivation of making expensive drugs from cheap materials was always present beside the theoretical speculation. The effort to procure substances like coffee, tea, tobacco, cinchonine and more, had shaped global trade and colonial enterprise for the past two hundred years. Britain was at that moment engaged in an “Opium War” on the other side of the globe.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

THE MONKEY LAB. “This was also the period when Laurent painted this remarkable scene, complete with bespeckled monkeys and a dunce-capped violin flying around the room on an umbrella. The pots and urns have come alive upon the wall while a demon calmly tends the fire spit amid a number of equally strange apparitions. It is not clear what to make of the fact that Laurent’s dreaming and painting coincided with his work on opium extracts.” (See charming picture in text). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

MANY A SLIP BETWIXT THE CUP AND THE LIP. “Laurent, who was known to taste his laboratory products every now and then to get the full range of sensory effect, did not mention ingesting them, but it serves as a reminder that these substances were of more than theoretical interest.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

LIVING VS NON-LIVING. “My goal here is to reinsert the question of intoxication into the chemical investigations of the day as it served both to motivate the study of plant substances and acted as a model for thinking about how chemicals could affect the human body. As such, the question sat at the centre of important nineteenth-century debates on the development of synthetic chemicals and how to talk about the differences between living and non-living substances.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

DASHED DREAMS. “For Auguste Laurent in particular, his work on morphine and other intoxicating alkaloids was a turning point. He entered it optimistic about the prospects of artificially producing morphine, nicotine, and other organic compounds. He left it convinced that any such laboratory creations would never be able to have the same effects on the human body.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn