Creative Chemistry | Page 3

lie between the two extremes of
agriculture and steel manufacture!
Moreover, the domain of the science of the transformation of matter
includes even life itself as its loftiest phase: from our birth to our return
to dust the laws of chemistry are the controlling laws of life, health,
disease and death, and the ever clearer recognition of this relation is the
strongest force that is raising medicine from the uncertain realm of an
art to the safer sphere of an exact science. To many scientific minds it
has even become evident that those most wonderful facts of life,
heredity and character, must find their final explanation in the chemical
composition of the components of life producing, germinal protoplasm:
mere form and shape are no longer supreme but are relegated to their
proper place as the housing only of the living matter which functions
chemically.
It must be quite obvious now why thoughtful men are insisting that the
public should be awakened to a broad realization of the significance of
the science of chemistry for its national life.
It is a difficult science in its details, because it has found that it can best
interpret the visible phenomena of the material world on the basis of
the conception of invisible minute material atoms and molecules, each
a world in itself, whose properties may be nevertheless accurately
deduced by a rigorous logic controlling the highest type of scientific

imagination. But a layman is interested in the wonders of great bridges
and of monumental buildings without feeling the need of inquiring into
the painfully minute and extended calculations of the engineer and
architect of the strains and stresses to which every pin and every bar of
the great bridge and every bit of stone, every foot of arch in a
monumental edifice, will be exposed. So the public may understand
and appreciate with the keenest interest the results of chemical effort
without the need of instruction in the intricacies of our logic, of our
dealings with our minute, invisible particles.
The whole nation's welfare demands, indeed, that our public be
enlightened in the matter of the relation of chemistry to our national life.
Thus, if our commerce and our industries are to survive the terrific
competition that must follow the reëstablishment of peace, our public
must insist that its representatives in Congress preserve that
independence in chemical manufacturing which the war has forced
upon us in the matter of dyes, of numberless invaluable remedies to
cure and relieve suffering; in the matter, too, of hundreds of chemicals,
which our industries need for their successful existence.
Unless we are independent in these fields, how easily might an
unscrupulous competing nation do us untold harm by the mere device,
for instance, of delaying supplies, or by sending inferior materials to
this country or by underselling our chemical manufacturers and, after
the destruction of our chemical independence, handicapping our
industries as they were in the first year or two of the great war! This is
not a mere possibility created by the imagination, for our economic
history contains instance after instance of the purposeful undermining
and destruction of our industries in finer chemicals, dyes and drugs by
foreign interests bent on preserving their monopoly. If one recalls that
through control, for instance, of dyes by a competing nation, control is
in fact also established over products, valued in the hundreds of
millions of dollars, in which dyes enter as an essential factor, one may
realize indeed the tremendous industrial and commercial power which
is controlled by the single lever--chemical dyes. Of even more vital
moment is chemistry in the domain of health: the pitiful calls of our
hospitals for local anesthetics to alleviate suffering on the operating

table, the frantic appeals for the hypnotic that soothes the epileptic and
staves off his seizure, the almost furious demands for remedy after
remedy, that came in the early years of the war, are still ringing in the
hearts of many of us. No wonder that our small army of chemists is
grimly determined not to give up the independence in chemistry which
war has achieved for us! Only a widely enlightened public, however,
can insure the permanence of what farseeing men have started to
accomplish in developing the power of chemistry through research in
every domain which chemistry touches.
The general public should realize that in the support of great chemical
research laboratories of universities and technical schools it will be
sustaining important centers from which the science which improves
products, abolishes waste, establishes new industries and preserves life,
may reach out helpfully into all the activities of our great nation, that
are dependent on the transformation of matter.
The public is to be congratulated upon the fact that the writer of the
present volume is better qualified than any