Thirty-Two Short Stories of Chemists and Their Chemicals captures the excitement of chemistry through stories of some of its heroes and tales of how specific chemicals have made an impact on all of our lives.
The title is an homage to the movie Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould, which presents short vignettes that collectively paint a picture of Gould’s life and artistry. The podcast presents vignettes that each center on one or a few chemicals and the chemists who discovered or developed them. Collectively, these stories will reveal how women and men devoted their energies and intellects towards solving important problems that affect us all. Each chapter intertwines history, chemistry, and the lives of chemists.
The stories consider chemicals and chemists who may be familiar to many listeners, and some cases that are unfamiliar but no less interesting. The discovery of the structure of DNA interweaves the impact of the double helix with a Rashomon-like retelling of the personal interactions of Watson, Crick, Wilkins, Franklin, and Pauling. CRISPR has captured the imagination of many hopeful for radical cures — but how many people know it originated with two graduate students who noticed a repeat sequence in bacterial DNA, part of a defense mechanism against viruses, before becoming a race for the Nobel Prize and a battlefield over patent rights?
Less familiar stories sit alongside them: how uranium and plutonium were stockpiled in cities built from scratch at Oak Ridge and Hanford, where a corrosive compound gave purpose to the accidentally discovered Teflon; how dyed cloth became a symbol of power, with purple worth more than gold; and how a chance discovery by an eighteen-year-old student launched the first chemical factory.
Several themes are developed across the episodes. These themes create an overarching story of progress built on the accomplishments of chemists to produce a better society while constructing a philosophy and practice of chemistry.
Scientists employ myths much as any culture does. Newton’s apple is probably untrue, but it establishes an origin and lionizes its hero; chemistry has two of its own — Wöhler’s synthesis of urea, the origin myth of organic chemistry, and Kekulé’s dream, which sustains the myth of the lone, heroic scientist. More often we offer counterexamples: discoveries made simultaneously by rivals, or built from many small steps. Ferrocene and the metallocenes came with Woodward’s claim on a share of the Nobel Prize — scientists are competitive humans too — while the lithium-ion battery, and the portable electronics it made possible, was birthed by many parents. Usually the time is simply ripe: oxygen’s discovery is credited to three men, and the one who found it first, Scheele, had his work suppressed by Lavoisier and his family for two centuries.
Of course, discoveries often have unintended consequences: the same chemistry that saves millions can also exact a steep societal price. And as with most human endeavors, the names remembered do not always reflect the actual key players involved.
Kwolek went looking for a stiff polymer and found Kevlar; insulin resulted in a half dozen Nobel Prizes and saved millions of lives; Haber and Bosch pulled fertilizer out of thin air, and more than half the world alive today eats because of it. And sometimes the triumph turns: DDT stopped malaria and typhus epidemics cold, earned its inventor a Nobel Prize, then Silent Spring ended it. Thalidomide eased morning sickness, caused horrific birth defects, and decades later became a hope for new drugs. CFCs cooled the world until we learned they were shredding the ozone that lets us live on it.
Above all, we want you to feel what chemists feel: the lifelong obsession Hodgkin and Perutz had for structure, the competitive fire that drove Watson and Crick, the awe Kroto, Smalley and Curl felt the moment fullerene fell into place, and the biotechnology future Doudna and Charpentier glimpsed in CRISPR.
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