Candid Science III: More Conversations with Famous Chemists

  • István Hargittai &
  • Magdolna Hargittai
, edited by Magdolna Hargittai World Scientific/Imperial College Press: 2003. 520 pp. £48, $78 (hbk); £21, $34 (pbk)
István Hargittai has interviewed many of the most influential chemists of the past sixty years, including Glenn Seaborg (top left), Ad Bax (second row, right) and Jean-Marie Lehn (third row, second left).

This book is the latest in a continuing series of interviews with prominent scientists by István and Magdolna Hargittai. The Hargittais are highly regarded structural chemists, located in Budapest, Hungary, whose wide-ranging interests and energy have produced a 'cottage industry' of books.

Candid Science III provides snapshots of the culture and progress of chemistry over the final 60 years of the twentieth century. Its oldest interviewee, Glenn Seaborg (1912–1999), was a nuclear chemist who added a new row — the actinides — to the periodic table. Seaborg was one of the team that discovered plutonium, and worked on the extraction of this metal for the Manhattan Project. His frustration with the naming of the trans-uranium elements is apparent in this interview from 1995. But in a postscript that was first published in 1998, Seaborg happily describes the history of the discovery of element 106, which was named in his honour in 1997.

The youngest interviewee, born in 1956, is Ad Bax, who runs the US National Institutes of Health's section of NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) spectroscopy. From 1981 to 1997, the ISI logged 21,655 citations of his work, 50% more than the second-most-cited chemist, Nobel laureate John A. Pople. This emphasizes the amazing evolution over the past half-century of NMR spectroscopy from a physics experiment to a routine technique for structural proof, and finally to a method for solving protein structures in solution and for magnetic imaging. Bax, who is at the cutting edge of this work, briefly describes the integration of NMR experiment and computation that took off during this 50-year period, due, in part, to unimaginable advances in computer technology. These applications of NMR, along with advances in X-ray crystallography (also referred to in the interviews with Johann Deisenhofer and Robert Huber), contributed mightily to the emerging field of structural biology, which arguably began with the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953.

Reading this book reveals the growing sophistication with time of the interviewer's technique. For example, Hargittai began his 1996 interview with Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Lehn as follows: “You started as an organic chemist”, to which Lehn replied: “Yes, an organic chemist and, in fact, a natural products chemist.” The interviewer's follow-up was: “Now you are also a very conceptual chemist. Not every organic chemist develops general concepts the way you do.” Well, bien sur. Not many chemists of any stripe develop concepts like Lehn does.

In contrast, an interview two years later with another Nobel laureate, Bruce Merrifield, is more thoughtful and leads to some interesting insights. In discussing his early life in California during the Depression, Merrifield, who was seven years old when the stock market crashed, describes his family's economic condition: “So we scraped along, and that affected me all my life. I can't bear to waste things, I'm not extravagant, never buy anything on credit, and that came directly from the Depression.” Two decades later, Merrifield developed solid-phase protein synthesis, a technique that essentially wastes none of the synthetic amino acids and peptides.

Most of the interviews are fairly straightforward affairs, but once in a while some sparks fly. For example, Hargittai starts the interview with Paul von Ragué Schleyer with a provocative implied question: “I recently heard you say that experiments are no longer necessary in chemistry. We can compute everything.” Schleyer's response is forceful and there is a fascinating thrust and parry during the interview. The Schleyer interview tracks the career of this experimental chemist, whose early computations helped to rationalize interesting results, and whose later work using much faster computers predicted utterly non-classical organometallics, some of which were later verified experimentally.

Some interviewees offer insights that are worthy of further discussion. Jacqueline K. Barton is self-reflective and generous to students and colleagues in tracing her career path. Starting on tenure track at Hunter College in New York, she moved to Columbia University, where she was promoted to full professor, and then moved to the California Institute of Technology, where she holds an endowed professorship. She notes in passing that “the paths of woman professors tend to be non-traditional”. Barton concludes the interview: “You can be a woman scientist in a major research institution and also be a person with a family and be happy.” It is not a self-satisfied remark but rather active encouragement to young women pondering futures in science.

This book makes interesting light reading, especially for chemists who have watched the field develop over the past 30 to 60 years. One might wish for a preface that provides some integration and perspective, for example in considering the career paths of the three women interviewed (Barton, Mildred Cohn and Reiko Kuroda). Nonetheless, the book makes a worthwhile contribution to the oral history of science, and I recommend it for both libraries and individuals.