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Correspondence
Nature 408, 767 (14 December 2000) | doi:10.1038/35048755
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Acid test finally wiped out vitalism, and yet . . .
Sidney Toby1
- Department of Chemistry, Rutgers, the State University, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854, USA
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.
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