Month: September 2022

CENTRALIZED SCIENCE. (Laurent). “Not only was he stuck far from where things were happening, but the university structure of France was set up so that research was really supported only in Paris. According to official instructions, the laboratories of provincial universities were designated strictly for class preparation. Private research by professors was, if not out and out prohibited, at least frowned upon and not at all supported.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

INDUSTRIAL WASTE. “Laurent had to equip his laboratory entirely out of his own pocket. He sought out cheap materials, returning to a product he had worked with in the 1830s as an assistant to Dumas: coal tar. This pungent, greenish brown liquid was a discarded by-product of the gas used in street lighting, which Bordeaux had just begun implementing in the years before Laurent arrived.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

DYES AND INTOXICANTS. “They had taken the waste product of used-up coal, something so cheap and plentiful you could buy a year’s supply for mere pennies, and transformed it into one of the by-products of indigo, a plant so desired and profitable that it was sometimes referred to as “blue gold.” What was even more remarkable, was that aniline had all the characteristics of an organic base, or alkaloid, those compounds like nicotine and caffeine that acted so wondrously on the body.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC EMPIRE BUILDERS. “And what a possibility that was. Opium, tobacco, coffee, tea, cinchona – these were the products that built empires and shifted the populations of the globe. To reproduce their active principles cheaply in a lab would change the world.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

SYNTHETIC CHEMISTRY. “This is the moment in 1844 referred to in the introduction, with Laurent painting fantastical scenes and dreaming of molecules coming apart and joining together in new formations. He took the technique he had used with Hofmann to produce aniline and used it on the essence of bitter almonds, soon producing two brand-new artificial alkaloids, amarine and lophine.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

MONEY MACHINE. “Such artificial constructions would come to be known as “synthetic,” a term that Catherine Jackson has traced to Hofmann’s reference to his “synthetical experiments” in a paper of 1845. Hofmann’s name has become indelibly associated with the new enterprise of making artificial molecules, and he presided over a team of chemists producing one new compound after another, some of them immensely lucrative.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

THE FINAL DEMARKATION. “These two things, the ability of plants to rotate light and the ability of plants to effect bodies, were bundled together under the concept of action or activity, which replaced vitalism and vitality as the demarcating line between living and non-living substances.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

FLY IN THE OINTMENT. “Pasteur's career went from success to success. In his next project, in the 1850s, he studied the production of alcohol, succeeding where Lavoisier had failed, and showing that fermentation was not an inert chemical process, but a “vital act,” which required the presence of a living “ferment” or germ to begin the process.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

LIGHT ROTATION FROM SYMMETRY. “Pasteur’s notion of dissymmetry explained that these two actions were rooted in the same thing: an asymmetry in their molecular arrangement that was unique to living things.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn