Everything about alchemy raises questions. Where and when did it originate? Are they still alchemists at work in our time? Was alchemy a form of…
A scientist and a writer
Month: April 2008
AT UNH OCT. 22 A French scholar who sees the world in a grain of salt will speak at the University of New Hampshire on…
We tend to take for granted this essential ingredient in our daily life. Yet, it has a rich history, as recent as Gandhi’s 1930 Salt…
Concluding remarks, presentation to the ChemVets, Wilmington, Delaware, January 15 2002-01-21
Chemists are legitimately distressed by the chemophobia of the public. One of its manifestations (hardly the only one) is the stereotyped presentation of a chemist as an amoral character, having sold his soul to the Devil. The implicit sin is more than Faustian, for the betrayal is not only personal, but that of humanity. Fritz Haber is often this scapegoat.
Is this stereotyping deserved? And might we, collectively and individually, do something about it? We approach the issue here by way of an attentive reading of a selectioni of the literary pieces featuring Haber, whether under his own name or in transparent disguise, and of recent biographies of Haber.
(texte intégral d’un chapitre d’un ouvrage collectif, d’études du livre autobiographique de Georges Simenon, Pedigree)
“Cet oeil à la fois sagace et sans hâte qui pèse et qui rumine”, écrit Julien Gracq de Francis Ponge, dans un éloge Julien Gracq, OEuvres complètes, Bernhild Boie et Claude Dourguin, éds., vol.2, Gallimard-La Pléiade, Paris, 1995, pp. 1180-1183.: phrase à exciser, telle quelle, dans son sympathique fourbi hétéroclite, pour l’appliquer à l’ami Dubois. Jacques a mené une entreprise un peu comparable à celle de Francis Ponge, il est vrai. Là où Ponge, dans la mouvance de Jules Renard et de Paul Claudel (“Le porc”), a ouvert au poème en prose une friche, lui livrant les objets du quotidien, ces humbles fréquentations que sont le savon, l’automobile, la chèvre, le pré, Dubois s’est mis en tête d’étudier et de décrire, avec une sympathie comparable, avec une résonance ou une consonance, les formes replettes, bien nourries, du roman médical, du roman policier et de la littérature de gare. Pas seulement, certes. Proust aussi!
His Contributions to Chemistry and Molecular Biology.
Lecture by Pierre Laszlo (Ecole polytechnique and University of Liège) given at Southern University, Ashland, February 7 1998
Let me take you on a short walk. What’s this? We ascend first a spiral staircase. It winds upward in highly regular manner, each step in the climb makes us circle a little around the axis of the structure. Thus, we come to a landing. We have reached a rather flat, but nevertheless undulating floor. We can move across it quite easily, till we reach another of the spiraling structures. The architecture I am describing is that of a building, neither man-made nor inhabitable. The building I’m telling you about is also the build-up of a protein molecule and its scale is that of atomic dimensions.
The man who made the first sighting of such an architecture for proteins, in the late 1940s, with its a-helices (the spiral structures) and with its undulating floors (the b-sheets) was Linus Pauling. His vision was, for that time, truly prophetic. And it has endured, it has been borne out by whole libraries of evidence accumulated since.
The two questions I wish to examine in this lecture are:
1. How did Pauling come to his notion of protein architecture?
2. Were all the pronouncements by this visionary genius, those about vitamin C and cancer for instance, milestones in the advancement of science?
The edge of the forest is close enough for a good look. Each tree is unique. The pine I am examining differs from its neighbours. This individual tree flaunts its own mortality. Some of its branches are dead, their needles have become brown and sparse. But any tree is not only constrained into immobility. Its response to the whiffs of wind is a dance. It forms a paean to the environmental pressures that have molded the evolution of this particular species.
Juniperus communis L. (Conifers)
This bush, no taller than a child, is to be found on limy soils throughout the Northern hemisphere. Branches carry numerous small spiky leaves. It is a typical plant for the mediterranean garrigue (brush) landscape, at elevations ranging from 1,500 to 3,000 feet.