Lavoisier and the History of Chemistry.

During the eighteenth century, authors of chemical treatises and courses on chemistry often introduced their work with a chapter devoted to the history of chemistry. While there may have been different reasons for the use of history, its importance was never seriously questioned. However, when Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794) took a professional interest in chemistry in the early 1770s, he progressively became uneasy with this literary tradition. In this essay, I intend to explore the ways in which Lavoisier looked at the history of chemistry and to show how, from the 1780s onwards, he began to adopt a hostile attitude towards historical erudition. This vision, which culminated in the publication of the Traité élémentaire de chimie (Paris, 1789), was not only the result of a stylistic preference but constituted a direct attack on a way of doing chemistry from which Lavoisier intended to distance himself.

Patriotic Women: Chemistry and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish World.

During the second half of the eighteenth century, Western countries witnessed an explosion of societies and publishing initiatives aimed at creating and disseminating what contemporaries called useful knowledge. These "economic societies," "societies of friends of the country," or "societies of improvers" sought to improve their local communities through the scientific management of natural and social resources. This article analyses the opportunities that this movement of patriots opened up for women in chemistry, who went from being "exceptional women" to representing themselves as female "friends of the country." This article shows the different ways in which these women "friends of the country" negotiated their authorship, agency, and public visibility in order to maintain gender conventions and the importance of their kinship networks. It also illustrates the other side of the coin: how women's contributions also benefited male scientific societies, which gained visibility and secured the social position of their members in enlightened circles.

Exploring the ancient chemistry of mercury.

This paper explores the chemistry of mercury as described in ancient alchemical literature. Alchemy's focus on the knowledge and manipulation of natural substances is not so different from modern chemistry's purposes. The great divide between the two is marked by the way of conceptualizing and recording their practices. Our interdisciplinary research group, composed of chemists and historians of science, has set off to explore the cold and hot extraction of mercury from cinnabar. The ancient written records have been perused in order to devise laboratory experiments that could shed light on the material reality behind the alchemical narratives and interpret textual details in a unique perspective. In this way, it became possible to translate the technical lore of ancient alchemy into the modern language of chemistry. Thanks to the replication of alchemical practices, chemistry can regain its centuries-long history that has fallen into oblivion.

A different kind of Nierenstein reaction. The Chemical Society's mistreatment of Maximilian Nierenstein.

Between 1920 and 1922, the University of Bristol biochemist, Maximilian Nierenstein, published four papers in a series exploring the structure of catechin in the Journal of the Chemical Society. The Society then abruptly refused to accept any more of his papers on catechin, or any other subject. It provided him with no reasons for the embargo until 1925. It then transpired that Nierenstein was boycotted because it was deemed that he had not responded adequately to criticisms of his work made by his rival in catechin research, the German natural products chemist, Karl Freudenberg. It was not until 1929 that, as a result of a petition by a group of his former Bristol pupils and friends, that Nierenstein was again permitted to publish in the Society's journal. The paper explores the Chemical Society's treatment of Nierenstein in detail, sheds new light on his career and his reaction to the Society's unprecedented boycott, examines some of the structural chemistry involved in the disputes, and discusses whether Nierenstein's research deserves the label of 'bad science'.

[CRISPR Nobel, at last ]. / CRISPR : le Nobel, enfin .

The 2020 Nobel Prize in chemistry rewards two brilliant scientists who have followed quite different career paths but have collaborated very successfully. Of course, the history of the CRISPR system is complex and involves many other individuals, but their contribution has been essential. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this system for the functional interpretation of massive genome data as well as for (sometimes problematic) clinical applications.

TITLE: CRISPR : le Nobel, enfin…. ABSTRACT: Après Marie Curie, en 1903 et 1911, Irène Joliot-Curie en 1935, Françoise Barré-Sinoussi en 2008, Esther Duflo (franco-américaine) en 2019, Emmanuelle Charpentier est la cinquième française à décrocher un Prix Nobel (le Nobel de chimie 2020) qu'elle partage avec l'américaine Jennifer Anne Doudna. C'est la première fois qu'un prix Nobel scientifique est décerné conjointement à deux femmes. Emmanuelle Charpentier (née le 11 décembre 1968 à Juvisy-sur-Orge, France), obtient un doctorat à l'Institut Pasteur, après un master à l'université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC, maintenant Sorbonne Université, Paris). Microbiologiste, généticienne et biochimiste, elle poursuit un cursus international au sein d'institutions américaines avant un retour en Europe (Suède et Allemagne). Elle est aujourd'hui professeure à l'Institut Max Planck de Science des Pathogènes à Berlin qu'elle a créé et qu'elle dirige. Jennifer Anne Doudna (née le 19 février 1964 à Washington) est une professeure américaine de biochimie et de biologie moléculaire à l'université de Californie à Berkeley. Elle est titulaire d'une licence en chimie obtenue au Pomona College en 1985. Sa thèse de doctorat en biochimie, centrée sur l'étude des ribozymes, a été menée à l'université Harvard. Par la suite, elle a effectué un postdoctorat à l'université du Colorado à Boulder.

Between two stools? Pharmacologists nominated for Nobel prizes in "physiology or medicine" and "chemistry" 1901-1950 with a focus on John Jacob Abel (1857-1938).

Since the early stages of its academic professionalization, pharmacology has been an interdisciplinary field strongly influenced by the natural sciences. Using the Nobel Prize as a lens to study the history of pharmacology, this article analyzes nominations of pharmacologists for two Nobel Prize categories, namely "chemistry" and "physiology or medicine" from 1901 to 1950. Who were they? Why were they proposed, and what do the Nobel dossiers say about excellence in pharmacology and research trends? This paper highlights the evaluation of "shortlisted" candidates, i.e., those candidates who were of particular interest for the members of the Nobel Committee in physiology or medicine. We focus on the US scholar John Jacob Abel (1857-1938), repeatedly referred to as the "Founder of American Pharmacology." Nominated 17 times in both categories, Abel was praised by his nominators for both basic research as well as for his influential positions as editor and his work as chair at Johns Hopkins University. The Abel nominations were evaluated for the Nobel Committee in chemistry by the Swedish professor of chemistry and pharmaceutics Einar Hammarsten (1889-1968), particularly interested in Abel's work on hormones in the adrenal glands and in the pituitary gland. Eventually, Hammarsten did not view Abel's work prizeworthy, partly because other scholars had done-according to Hammarsten-more important discoveries in the same fields. In conclusion, analyses of Nobel Prize nominations help us to better understand various meanings of excellence in pharmacology during the twentieth century and beyond.

Premio nobel de química 2020: un premio que surgió en España y que pasó de largo / Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020: a prize that arose in Spain and passed by

Las investigadoras Emmanuelle Charpentier y Jennifer Doudna han recibido el Premio Nobel de Química del año 2020 por "el desarrollo de un método de edición genética", tal y como proclama la escueta pero suficiente justificación aportada por la Academia Sueca de Ciencias, responsable de la selección y elección de los premiados en esta categoría. La palabra CRISPR (acrónimo en inglés de Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) que corresponde, en español, a las repeticiones cortas palindrómicas agrupadas y regularmente espaciadas, descritas por el microbiólogo español de la Universidad de Alicante, Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica, no aparece en la frase resaltada del galardón pero, inmediatamente, el mundo entero supo que este premio Nobel de Química se lo llevaban las "CRISPR", las famosas herramientas de edición genética, descritas inicialmente por Mojica como elementos de un complejo y eficaz sistema de defensa en procariotas y que, gracias al talento y la visión de estas dos investigadoras, fueron propuestas para ser utilizadas, fuera de contexto, para la edición de cualquier gen de cualquier ser vivo. En esta revisión señalaré los puntos clave que permitieron a Charpentier y Doudna obtener, merecidamente, este premio y, por supuesto, subrayaré el papel que han jugado muchos otros investigadores, como el propio Mojica

Two researchers, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, have received the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the development of a genetic editing method", as proclaimed by the brief but sufficient justification provided by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, responsible for the selection and election of the winners in this category. The word CRISPR (acronym for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), described by the Spanish microbiologist at the University of Alicante, Francisco Juan Martínez Mojica, does not appear in the highlighted phrase of the award but, immediately, the whole world knew that this Nobel Prize in Chemistry was won by the "CRISPR", the famous gene editing tools, initially described by Mojica as elements of a complex and effective defense system in prokaryotes. And, thanks to the talent and vision of these two researchers, CRISPR were proposed to be used, out of context, for editing any gene of any living organism. In this review I will point out the key points that allowed Charpentier and Doudna to deserve this award and of course I will underline the role that many other researchers have played, including that of Mojica himself

Computational Approaches to Molecular Properties, Chemical Reactivity, and Drug Virtual Screening.

In the first paragraph of his 1929 paper "Quantum Mechanics of Many-Electron Systems", Dirac wrote that "The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble [...].

Institutional environments and breakthroughs in science. Comparison of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Scientific and/or technical breakthroughs require the exploration of novel ideas and technologies. Yet, it has not been studied quantitatively how national institutional contexts either facilitate or stifle organizational support for exploration. Available qualitative evidence suggests that institutional contexts that exert weak control over universities and research organizations strengthen their capabilities to achieve scientific breakthroughs, while contexts with strong control constrain them. The paper is based on an analysis of the population of Nobel laureates in Physics, Chemistry and Physiology or Medicine. We examine to what extent existing qualitative findings for the biomedical sciences, which are partly based on Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine, can be substantiated both quantitatively and across the three Nobel Prize fields of science. We find that for most of the 20th century and the early 21st century, countries with weak institutional control (United Kingdom, United States) have outperformed those exerting strong control (France, Germany). These results are further corroborated when controlled by population sizes and by GDP per capita. In addition, these results hold not only for the biomedical sciences, but also for Physics and Chemistry. Furthermore, countries with weak institutional control have attracted many future Nobel laureates from countries with strong environments. In this regard, the United States appears to be a particularly attractive setting for conducting innovative research, and thus has been a magnet for young and promising scientists. However, future laureates working in institutional environments exerting weak control are not faster in accomplishing their prize-winning work compared to those laureates working in more restrictive institutional settings.

Work honored by Nobel prizes clusters heavily in a few scientific fields.

We aimed to assess whether Nobel prizes (widely considered the most prestigious award in science) are clustering in work done in a few specific disciplines. We mapped the key Nobel prize-related publication of each laureate awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Physics, and Chemistry (1995-2017). These key papers mapped in only narrow sub-regions of a 91,726-cluster map of science created from 63 million Scopus-indexed published items. For each key Nobel paper, a median of 435 (range 0 to 88383) other Scopus-indexed items were published within one year and were more heavily cited than the Nobel paper. Of the 114 high-level domains that science can be divided into, only 36 have had a Nobel prize. Five of the 114 domains (particle physics [14%], cell biology [12.1%], atomic physics [10.9%], neuroscience [10.1%], molecular chemistry [5.3%]) have the lion's share, accounting in total for 52.4% of the Nobel prizes. Using a more granular classification with 849 sub-domains shows that only 71 of these sub-domains (8.3%) have at least one Nobel-related paper. Similar clustering was seen when we mapped all the 40,819 Scopus-indexed publications representing the career-long output of all the Nobel laureates. In conclusion, work resulting in Nobel prizes is concentrated in a small minority of scientific disciplines.

Henry Jacob Bigelow Inhaled Nitrous Oxide While an Undergraduate at Harvard College.

When teenaged Henry Jacob Bigelow was an undergraduate at Harvard College in 1833-1837, he prepared nitrous oxide gas for demonstrations to other students. Bigelow's son, William Sturgis Bigelow, related the claim, and there is an eyewitness account from Augustus Goddard Peabody, a fellow Harvard undergraduate with Bigelow. Peabody wrote to Henry David Thoreau about a nitrous frolic. College chemistry primed Bigelow to support the concept of inhaled surgical anesthesia when the idea came to Boston in 1845-1846. Bigelow's chemistry professor was John White Webster. According to Harvard alumnus Edward Everett Hale, in addition to demonstrating effects of nitrous oxide, Webster presciently treated two cases of carbon monoxide poisoning with copious volumes of synthetic oxygen gas. The career of Webster was inhibited by financial difficulties that were suspected to be contributory when he was convicted of the 1849 murder of physician George Parkman at the Harvard Medical School, then adjacent to Massachusetts General Hospital and its Ether Dome. Webster suffered the death penalty in 1850.

Friedrich Miescher's Discovery in the Historiography of Genetics: From Contamination to Confusion, from Nuclein to DNA.

In 1869, Johann Friedrich Miescher discovered a new substance in the nucleus of living cells. The substance, which he called nuclein, is now known as DNA, yet both Miescher's name and his theoretical ideas about nuclein are all but forgotten. This paper traces the trajectory of Miescher's reception in the historiography of genetics. To his critics, Miescher was a "contaminator," whose preparations were impure. Modern historians portrayed him as a "confuser," whose misunderstandings delayed the development of molecular biology. Each of these portrayals reflects the disciplinary context in which Miescher's work was evaluated. Using archival sources to unearth Miescher's unpublished speculations-including an analogy between the hereditary material and language, and a speculation that a series of asymmetric carbon atoms could account for hereditary variation-this paper clarifies the ways in which the past was judged through the lens of contemporary concerns. It also shows how organization, structure, function, and information were already being considered when nuclein was first discovered nearly 150 years ago.

30 Years of sonochemistry links with China.

Most scientists consider that sonochemistry became recognised as a discrete subject in the 1980's - some 40 years ago which coincidentally is when my own interests in the subject began. This review briefly outlines how I first became involved in sonochemistry and then in its development. However its main theme is the way in which my links with China through sonochemistry have developed from their beginnings in 1990. This was the subject of my presentation at AOSS4 and involves a range of topics which started with the extraction of natural products and surface treatment but later expanded to include therapeutic ultrasound and environmental protection.

'Revolutions, philosophical as well as civil': French chemistry and American science in Samuel Latham Mitchill's Medical Repository.

From 1797 to 1801 a controversy played out on the pages of the Medical Repository, the first scientific journal published in the United States. At its centre was the well-known feud between the followers of Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley, the lone supporter of the phlogiston model. The American debate, however, had more than two sides. The Americans chemists, Samuel Latham Mitchill and Benjamin Woodhouse, who rushed to support Priestley did not defend his scientific views. Rather, as citizens of a republic, they defended his right to have them. They also castigated the assertions of the "French chemists," whose claims that the new chemistry obviated debate seemed unsettlingly similar to the dictatorial ambitions of the French state. Using the Medical Repository, Mitchill and Woodhouse sought a compromise that validated the new chemistry, but united it with a more egalitarian form of discourse. The desired balance eluded them. Priestley proved too stubborn, and as the French Revolution descended into dictatorship and war, Mitchill and Woodhouse came more to realize that truly prising French chemistry from the culture of the revolutionary era. The episode left Mitchill and Woodhouse disillusioned with chemistry and hoping to redirect scientific enthusiasm to more pious ends.

Failed utopias and practical chemistry: the Priestleys, the Du Ponts, and the transmission of transatlantic science, 1770-1820.

Eighteenth-century events, replete with Dickensian dualities, brought two Enlightenment families to America. Pierre-Samuel du Pont and Joseph Priestley contemplated relocating their families decades before immigrating. After arriving, they discovered deficiencies in education and chemistry. Their experiences were indicative of the challenges in transmitting transatlantic chemistry. The Priestleys were primed to found an American chemical legacy. Science connected Priestley to British manufacturers, Continental chemists, and American statesmen. Priestley's marriage into the Wilkinson ironmaster dynasty, and Lunar Society membership, helped his sons apprentice, and befriend manufacturer-chemist Thomas Cooper. However, ideological persecution forced them from England. Priestley's plans for his sons to inherit Wilkinson's ironworks evaporated; in America, efforts to establish manufactories, colonies, farms, and a college miscarried. Cooper taught college chemistry, but his materialism provoked dismissals. The Du Ponts were unlikely founders of an industrial-chemistry empire. Du Pont's philosophy promulgated that agriculture, not industry, produced wealth. Eleuthère-Irénée apprenticed in France's gunpowder administration, however, plans for his succession died and director Antoine Lavoisier, a family friend, was executed. E.-I. and Du Pont's arrest precipitated relocation to America. Du Pont's utopian colony and schemes proved unrealistic. Nevertheless, E.-I.'s gunpowder manufactory-utilizing transatlantic contacts and privileged knowledge of advanced French chemistry-succeeded through practical application.