Category: Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALCHEMICAL ROOTS. “The ability of plants to act upon the human constitution gave rise to a language of “active principles” which persisted through the centuries, even as its meaning changed. Within the alchemical tradition, the notion that matter itself could have an active component was continuously intertwined with efforts to capture the intoxicating powers of fermented plants.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

RESIDUES OF VITALISM. “Although references to a particular vital substance disappeared, scientists such as Laurent, Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774-1862), and Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) insisted on the particular nature of living substances. “Activity,” or the ability of substance to alter the mind and body, was at the centre of their work.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn

VITALISM WOBBLES. “There was an ambitious programme of accounting for organic substances with the same matter and processes used in the inorganic realm. But the death of vitalism was far from complete. The nineteenth century, rather, saw a shift away from a vitalism that identified life with a particular substance, and towards an emphasis on organisation.” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00026980.2020.1867786 View in LinkedIn