[.ca] Prometheans in the Lab (ISBN 0071407952)

the untold stories behind the science:
I was intrigued by the title and thought I would try it...this is an amazing book that puts into perspective life before refridgeration, soap, safe drinking water, sugar, dye, and more. This book makes a clear link between scientific discovery and the subsequent ripples in society -- as well as how those discoveries impact the lives of the scientists. Prometheans also shows how complicated science can be - for every discovery that changed modern society, it brought with it a host of new issues, ills, and irrevocable changes. A great example is Thomas Midgley, the man who created Freon and tetraethyl lead. Without him we would have no fridges, freezers, cheap gas (or a hole in the ozone layer). In his chapter, you discover that the early factory workers working with lead went insane from the fumes and ended up killing each other in psychotic rages; plus the high levels of lead were polluting the environment. This led to workplace reform and an overhaul of factory safety regulations. Then there's Wallace Carothers, who invented Nylon. He suffered from depression for years, and being around potent lab chemicals and fumes didn't help his outlook any; he killed himself with a cyanide pill he'd carried around for 15 years. I am not a scientist but interested in general scientific discovery. This book was great because each scenario is presented in a historical context, each side is shown and not portrayed in an extreme negative or positive light. It's very balanced, and didn't overwhelm me with incomprehensible explanations of the hard-core science behind the science. This is great & would make a great TV series.

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 \obut it's about\c 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. *****