Professor Alan Rocke research, focusing on events in France but having a strong comparative dimension toward Germany, promises to shed important new light on such general questions as how local knowledge becomes universal; how research schools exercise (or fail to exercise) influence more broadly; the reality and significance of national styles in science; the operation of nationalist and internationalist pressures in the pursuit of science; and the interaction of socio-cultural and internal factors in the development of scientific ideas and applications. He is addressing these issues in the context of his study of the rise and fall of synthetic chemistry in France and Germany. The remarkable power of modern chemistry--"power" intended in both a scientific and a technological sense--is founded on synthetic methods in organic chemistry, but our understanding of how those methods developed historically is still in a fairly rudimentary state. Two episodes are apt to come to mind upon mention of this subject: early classic examples of chemical syntheses by Friedrich Wohler and his student Hermann Kolbe; and the exploration of an entire series of such reactions by Marcellin Berthelot a few years later, culminating in his path breaking work of 1860, Chimie organique fondee sur la synthese. Viewed thus in national terms, both German and French scientists were intimately involved with the birth of this field. It is ironic that the publication date of Berthelot's book marked the very point when the Germans began to exert extraordinarily powerful influence in synthetic organic chemistry. German chemistry, especially organic, attained a sort of take-off point in the 1850s, a movement that was not paralleled in France. Ironically, the Germans' success can be related to their rapid adoption of reforms begun in France, namely the new atomic weights and unified molecular magnitudes championed by Auguste Laurent and Charles Gerhardt. These reforms led to the creation of a powerful sort of chemistry gu ided by structural organic theory. Not so, however, in the home of the reforms, France, which provides an interesting conundrum. The differential experience in the two countries must have been due largely to social, cultural, and institutional factors, for the French had equal access to the same scientific publications of the early 1850s that so quickly converted their German neighbors. What was it, then, about the French that led to such differences from the German experience? This is the central question for the project to explore. By exploring this central question, Professor Rocke promises to elucidate many of the issues that determine continuing leadership among nations in science and technology.
