Sir

Sunetra Gupta in her Millennium Essay “A victim of truth” (Nature 407, 677; 2000) astutely points out the dilemma in which the Swedish chemist Jons Berzelius found himself when his student Friedrich Wöhler declared in 1828 that he could make urea, a typical product of living organisms, from inorganic sources.

Gupta describes Berzelius's antagonism to the atheistic materialism that abandonment of vitalism would bring.

There was, however, another factor. An important reason that vitalism did not immediately disappear after Wöhler's discovery is given in J. R. Partington's textbook A History of Chemistry (Macmillan, London, 1961).

Wöhler synthesized urea from ammonium cyanate. The cyanate was obtained from cyanide, which in those days was made from ferrocyanide which in turn was extracted from the wastes from tanning factories. Thus, to an adherent of vitalism, the urea had not been derived from purely inorganic sources but had a vital component.

The death-knell of vitalism in chemistry was sounded in 1845 when Hermann Kolbe showed that acetic acid, a common end product in living organisms, could be “composed by synthesis from its elements”. This was the first use of the word 'synthesis' in a memoir on organic chemistry.