Product Description

"…excellent job of describing the chemical processes and their legacies-both beneficial and unintended. She never lets any of her characters be good or bad, just human. This humanity makes her stories gripping. I highly recommend this thoughtful and thought-provoking book. McGrayne successfully describes the ambiguous effects of chemical technology and the role that human strengths and frailties play on mitigating or exacerbating those effects."—Chemical & Engineering News

"…a compelling read."—Nature

"Sharon Bertsch McGrayne's appealing collection of biographical essays reminds us how much we owe to chemistry." ­­—New Scientist

"On your next trip to the bookstore bypass the action adventure thrillers and seek out Prometheans in the Lab by Sharon McGrayne . . . I wish that (it) were twice its length." —­­PopularMechanics.com

"In this striking and readable collection of nine thumbnail biographies of heroic (and troubled) figures in the history of chemistry . . . McGrayne is conscientious about showing the downside of each chemical breakthrough, and the human flaws and 'features' of each Promethean." ­­—Choice

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1200711 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
"I highly recommend this thoughtful and thought-provoking book... McGrayne successfully demonstrates that chemistry and the use of chemical technology in our lives is a human endeavor, neither good nor evil, just human." - Chemical and Engineering News; "...a compelling read" -Nature

Book Info
Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein and other great physicists and biologists are household names, but the great chemists have received little recognition. Yet it could be argued that chemistry more than any other scientific discipline, has made the modern world possible, largely through products that we take for granted. Softcover.

From the Back Cover

The History of the Chemical Revolution--and How it Has Shaped Our World

"Chemistry's relationship with the public is unique ... Chemistry's products become part of our everyday lives and are profoundly intertwined with society's tastes, needs, and desires...."

Leblanc, Perkin, Rillieux--they aren't household names of science, yet they are some of the chemists responsible for products that make our lives easier, cleaner, and sweeter. Soap, sugar, colorful dyes, clean water, safe refrigeration, and powerful cars--they're taken for granted, yet behind every chemical product is the story of a scientist and a breakthrough discovery.

Acclaimed science writer Sharon Bertsch McGrayne depicts this chemical revolution through the lives of its creators. Prometheans in the Lab takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of history through epidemics, wars, scandal, moral dilemmas, and personal tragedies as McGrayne explores the upside of each pivotal discovery, and also its sometimes devastating effects on the environment and public health. It is an enlightening account of chemical discoveries, the people who discovered them, and how they shaped the modern world--for better...and for worse.

"...these are the dramatic stories of bold chemists who irrevocably changed our lives. They are indeed Prometheans who made our modern world."

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne is a science writer and award-winning journalist. She has been a reporter for Scripps-Howard, Crain's, Gannett, and other newspapers covering education, politics, science, and health issues. She is a former science editor and writer for Encyclopaedia Britannica and the author of several books, including Nobel Prize Women in Science.

Customer Reviews

amazing
This accessible but rewarding history of applied chemistry ranks among the best books I have read in years. It does the basic job: providing information, but its prose is transparent and unobstrusive, its exposition uniformly consistent and intelligible, and the narrative even builds to moments of drama; finally, it demonstrates the tension between chemistry and environmental concerns, as well as that between science, capital and society. All this without taking a polemical stance. Who would have thought so drab a subject could be rendered this important and engaging? Anybody with an interest in business, finance, industry, environmentalism, science and applied research should read it. It wouldn't hurt for some book authors to study it as well as how to tranform coal-tar into mauve, so to speak.

Intimates: Genius and madness
If you enjoyed "A Beautiful Mind," you should check out "Prometheans in the Lab." Scientific genius and mental illness are clearly not rare combinations. Like John Nash, several of the nine chemists profiled so ably by science writer Sharon Bertsch McGrayne were odd ducks who struggled with intractable mental disorders while achieving society-changing breakthroughs in their labs. McGrayne's nine subjects invented processes and products that define modern life.
Wallace Carothers, an American and the inventor of nylon in 1935, was apparently afflicted with bipolar disorder. Throughout his career he tried to contend with severe mood swings, along with other maladies. In the end, his illnesses overwhelmed him, and he dosed himself with cyanide.
Fritz Haber, a German, invented modern nitrogen-based fertilizer in 1908 and helped end Europe's millennial-long fear of famine. As a young man, he was hospitalized for "neurasthenia," after suffering sleeplessness, excitability, and nervous tension.
Unlike Nash and Carothers, Haber's illness did not progress to a chronic and profound mental disorder. But neither was his life a bed of roses. His wife's depression ended with her suicide. And while Haber's prodigious scientific accomplishments brought him fame, they also brought him infamy. In World War I, he initiated and organized chemical warfare for Germany, through the use of chlorine gas. He argued that poison gas would save lives by shortening the war. (Not all of Germany's enemies were outraged; it turned out that some influential Americans agreed with him.)
Most of the brilliant researchers McGrayne covers did not have mental illnesses. Many of them suffered from a much more prosaic and more ubiquitous "problem"- the inability to really foresee untoward consequences of their inventions. Paul Hermann Muller, a Swiss, invented DDT and in 1948 won a Nobel Prize for medicine. McGrayne's chapter on Muller includes a look at the huge plusses and minuses of the use of DDT. On the one hand, DDT saved millions of people from death from malaria and typhus. On the other side, the substance devastated wildlife, particularly bird populations, wherever it was used in any quantity. Muller apparently had a premonition that DDT was not an unmitigated good, but he didn't vigorously investigate its deleterious properties.
McGrayne is an outstanding contributor to the genre of well-researched, readable books on scientists and science for everyday people. You don't need a science background to enjoy her book; you just need to be curious about some very unusual people and where all sorts of everyday stuff-nylon, fertilizer, soap, DDT, synthetic colors, leaded gasoline and even clean water--came from.

Great stories, great read
I picked up this book because a ...review said, "On your next trip to the bookstore bypass the action adventure thrillers and seek out Prometheans in the Lab... It is one of those 'story behind the story' books that are often written about celebrities and politicians [but it's about] the chemists responsible for the major chemical processes that undergird modern living.... I wish it were twice its length."
The reviewer was right. The book tells science stories you definitely didn't learn in high school. But it also dramatizes the tangled relationship between technology's benefits and drawbacks and the public's conflicting desires for new products and environmental purity. Great stories, and a great read. *****