Chemistry and society

For the first two-thirds of the 20th century, chemistry was seen by many as the science of the future. The potential of chemical products for enriching society appeared to be unlimited. Increasingly, however, and especially in the public mind, the negative aspects of chemistry have come to the fore. Disposal of chemical by-products at waste-disposal sites of limited capacity has resulted in environmental and health problems of enormous concern. The legitimate use of drugs for the medically supervised treatment of diseases has been tainted by the growing misuse of mood-altering drugs. The very word chemicals has come to be used all too frequently in a pejorative sense. There is, as a result, a danger that the pursuit and application of chemical knowledge may be seen as bearing risks that outweigh the benefits.

It is easy to underestimate the central role of chemistry in modern society, but chemical products are essential if the world’s population is to be clothed, housed, and fed. The world’s reserves of fossil fuels (e.g., oil, natural gas, and coal) will eventually be exhausted, some as soon as the 21st century, and new chemical processes and materials will provide a crucial alternative energy source. The conversion of solar energy to more concentrated, useful forms, for example, will rely heavily on discoveries in chemistry. Long-term, environmentally acceptable solutions to pollution problems are not attainable without chemical knowledge. There is much truth in the aphorism that “chemical problems require chemical solutions.” Chemical inquiry will lead to a better understanding of the behaviour of both natural and synthetic materials and to the discovery of new substances that will help future generations better supply their needs and deal with their problems.

Progress in chemistry can no longer be measured only in terms of economics and utility. The discovery and manufacture of new chemical goods must continue to be economically feasible but must be environmentally acceptable as well. The impact of new substances on the environment can now be assessed before large-scale production begins, and environmental compatibility has become a valued property of new materials. For example, compounds consisting of carbon fully bonded to chlorine and fluorine, called chlorofluorocarbons (or Freons), were believed to be ideal for their intended use when they were first discovered. They are nontoxic, nonflammable gases and volatile liquids that are very stable. These properties led to their widespread use as solvents, refrigerants, and propellants in aerosol containers. Time has shown, however, that these compounds decompose in the upper regions of the atmosphere and that the decomposition products act to destroy stratospheric ozone. Limits have now been placed on the use of chlorofluorocarbons, but it is impossible to recover the amounts already dispersed into the atmosphere.

The chlorofluorocarbon problem illustrates how difficult it is to anticipate the overall impact that new materials can have on the environment. Chemists are working to develop methods of assessment, and prevailing chemical theory provides the working tools. Once a substance has been identified as hazardous to the existing ecological balance, it is the responsibility of chemists to locate that substance and neutralize it, limiting the damage it can do or removing it from the environment entirely. The last years of the 20th century will see many new, exciting discoveries in the processes and products of chemistry. Inevitably, the harmful effects of some substances will outweigh their benefits, and their use will have to be limited. Yet, the positive impact of chemistry on society as a whole seems beyond doubt.

The history of chemistry

Chemistry has justly been called the central science. Chemists study the various substances in the world, with a particular focus on the processes by which one substance is transformed into another. Today, chemistry is defined as the study of the composition and properties of elements and compounds, the structure of their molecules, and the chemical reactions that they undergo. Rather than starting with such modern concepts, though, a fuller appreciation of the subject requires an examination of the historical processes that led to these concepts.

Philosophy of matter in antiquity

Indeed, the philosophers of antiquity could have had no notion that all matter consists of the combinations of a few dozen elements as they are understood today. The earliest critical thinking on the nature of substances, as far as the historical record indicates, was by certain Greek philosophers beginning about 600 bce. Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Empedocles, and others propounded theories that the world consisted of varieties of earth, water, air, fire, or indeterminate “seeds” or “unbounded” matter. Leucippus and Democritus propounded a materialistic theory of invisibly tiny irreducible atoms from which the world was made. In the 4th century bce, Plato (influenced by Pythagoreanism) taught that the world of the senses was but the shadow of a mathematical world of “forms” beyond human perception.

In contrast, Plato’s student Aristotle took the world of the senses seriously. Adopting Empedocles’s view that the terrestrial region consisted of earth, water, air, and fire, Aristotle taught that each of these materials was a combination of qualities such as hot, cold, moist, and dry. For Aristotle, these “elements” were not building blocks of matter as they are thought of now; rather, they resulted from the qualities imposed on otherwise featureless prime matter. Consequently, there were many different kinds of earth, for instance, and nothing precluded one element from being transformed into another by appropriate adjustment of its qualities. Thus, Aristotle rejected the speculations of the ancient atomists and their irreducible fundamental particles. His views were highly regarded in late antiquity and remained influential throughout the Middle Ages.

For thousands of years before Aristotle, metalsmiths, assayers, ceramists, and dyers had worked to perfect their crafts using empirically derived knowledge of chemical processes. By Hellenistic and Roman times, their skills were well advanced, and sophisticated ceramics, glasses, dyes, drugs, steels, bronze, brass, alloys of gold and silver, foodstuffs, and many other chemical products were traded. Hellenistic Alexandria in Egypt was a centre for these arts, and it was apparently there that a group of ideas emerged that later became known as alchemy.