Return to the ground floor of this tower
Return to the Main Courtyard
Return to Fort Freedom's home page
]]]]]]]]] CHEMISTS: TURM LEADEN PROSE INTO GOLD [[[[[[[[[[[[
By P.J. Wingate
From The Wall Street Journal, 6 October 1988, p. A18:4
(Mr. Wingate, retired from DuPont Co., lives in Wilmington, Del.)
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
The chemical industry has been very useful to the human race
and has the potential of being even more useful. If the
industry, convicted in the court of public opinion of being a
menace to society, is hog-tied into immobility by a multitude of
new laws and regulations, it will be a shame. But in large part
it will have itself to blame. Not because it has behaved
atrociously, but because chemists write so abominably that only
other chemists read what they write. As a consequence, the
industry has been explained to the public by Ralph Nader [1934-],
Barry Commoner [1917-] and a few hundred TV reporters, all of
whom have scant understanding of the subject.
T.S. Eliot [1888-1965], whose doctoral dissertation was titled
"Meinong's Gegendstandstheorie Considered in Relation to
Bradley's Theory of Knowledge," [(1)] said later that Harvard
probably accepted it "because it was unreadable." So are nearly
all the papers written by chemists. Most do nothing to promote
public understanding of chemistry. This must be changed before
the verdict that chemistry is a menace to society can be
successfully appealed.
Some years after leaving Harvard, Eliot changed his style, and
his works were so well received that in 1948 he won the Nobel
Prize for literature. Chemists will never be able to make such
remarkable changes in their writings, but the time has come for
them to try to explain in readable English what their industry
has been doing since chemistry left alchemy behind and became a
science. The public should be told that chemistry has been
amazingly successful in making the world a better place, despite
a few stupid mistakes.
Lewis Thomas [1913-; physician, educator, medical
administrator], in "The Lives of a Cell [1974]," noted that
medicine was pitifully inept in the treatment of many diseases
until chemistry gave it some effective drugs to work with. Prior
to that, all a doctor could do was hold a patient's hand, so to
speak, until he died or was cured by his body's natural
resources. Similarly, vitamins, discovered by chemists and made
available as dietary supplements at relatively low cost by the
drug and chemical industries, have made many ailments a thing of
the past in developed countries.
The chemical industry's contributions toward feeding the human
race are at least as spectacular. Norman Borlaug [1914-; American
agronomist], winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 [for his
agricultural "Green Revolution"], has stated these contributions
succinctly. But he is never quoted on the evening news when
fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides and herbicides are accused
of poisoning the soil, water and air of planet Earth. As he once
wrote: "Had our country tried to achieve the 1980 production
employing the yield and technology of 1940, it would have
required the cultivation of an additional 437 million acres of
land." [(2)]
Perhaps more than anything, the public needs to get away from
the notion that everything in nature is pure and helpful to the
human race, while everything done by people, particularly
chemists, is likely to cause cancer. The world has always
contained a multitude of toxic and carcinogenic materials,
ranging from arsenic and radon, which chemists did not invent, to
yeasts and other ingredients in zymurgical liquids -- beer to the
patron's of Joe's Tavern. The human race must learn how to
protect itself from toxic materials because it is impossible to
wipe them from the face of the Earth. But this is no reason to
panic.
No single paper written in plain English, or even a hundred of
them, will be able to get this message across to a public that
has been fed millions of messages to the contrary during the past
30 years, but a start has to be made.
George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950], in his essay "Valedictory,"
said he would always be regarded as "an extraordinarily witty,
brilliant and clever man" because he had been dinning this idea
into the public mind for so many years that his reputation had
been built up on "an impregnable basis of dogmatic reiteration."
The case against the chemical industry has been built up on a
similar basis, and it is time for the chemists to use the same
methods in their industry's defense.
-------------
The following is not part of the original article.
Notes:
1. From Britannica 15 (1986):
Alexius Meinong (1853-1920). "Austrian philosopher and
psychologist remembered for his contributions to axiology, or
theory of values, and for his Gegenstandstheorie, or theory of
objects." (s.v. Meinong, Alexius)
Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924). "[I]nfluential English
philosopher of the absolute Idealist school, which based its
doctrines on the thought of G.W.F. Hegel and considered mind to
be a more fundamental feature of the universe than matter."
(s.v. Braley, Francis Herbert)
2. From "Table 320. Land Utilization, By Type: 1959 to 1982",
Statistical Abstract of the United States 1988 (Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1987):
Land use:
Cropland used for crops:
369 million acres (1978)
383 million acres (1982)
Idle cropland:
26 million acres (1978)
21 million acres (1982)
Cropland used only for pasture:
76 million acres (1978)
65 million acres (1982).
More:
Bruce N. Ames, Renae Magaw, Lois Swirsky Gold. Ranking Possible
Carcinogenic Hazards. Science, 17 April 1987, pp. 271-280.
Robert James Bidinotto, "Bhopal: The Fruit of Industrial Policy,"
The Intellectual Activist, 19 July 1985. (The Intellectual
Activist, P.O. Box 582, Murray Hill Station, New York, NY
10156; Past issues, $3.00 each)
This is a very good article, though I cannot recommend The
Intellectual Activist, an (Randian) Objectivist newsletter
published by Peter Schwartz, which suffers from the
intellectual rigidities of that philosophy.
Norman E. Borlaug. Land Use, Food, Energy and Recreation.
Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983. (20 pp, $5.00)
William R. Havender and Leonard T. Flynn. Does Nature Know Best?
Natural Carcinogens in American Food. July 1987. (The American
Council on Science and Health, 47 Maple Street, Summit, NJ
07901; $2.00)
* * *
Return to the ground floor of this tower
Return to the Main Courtyard
Return to Fort Freedom's home page