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It’s always fashionable to write about the death of a subject or idea. The current rage seems to be to predict the death of chemistry.

Even the American Chemical Society in their weekly journal Chemical & Engineering News is questioning the future of chemistry as an independent discipline, and articles around the web showcase speculations that chemistry should no longer be taught or that nanotechnology is simply “boring” chemistry being rebranded (via Nanobot).

The ACS article argues that chemistry has become increasingly broad and multidisciplinary and if this trend continues, it will cease to be anything more than a background of knowledge used in other disciplines. The suggestion is that modern chemistry is no longer just “inorganic,” “organic,” “physical,” and “analytical” but includes “biochemistry” and “materials chemistry” and elements of “nanoscience,” etc. and this evolution has brought other disciplines to teach chemistry-related classes (e.g., a biology or molecular biology department teaching biochemistry) or perform research in interdisciplinary teams (e.g., much nanoscience) that is not truly “chemical” in nature.

RedNOVA speculates on UK universities dropping their chemistry departments and a sense that the word “chemical” is linked with environmental pollution and toxicity. It suggests that interest in studying chemistry among children is dwindling.

And of course there’s the perception that chemistry is “boring” and thus “nanotechnology” or “nanoscience” is simply a way to spice up the view of individual molecules that are on the scale of nanometers to hundreds of nanometers.

I think the study of science is continually changing. In Newton’s time, there was no “chemistry,” per se, as it was generally lumped together with “alchemy.” Natural philosophy in the Royal Society ranged from dissections of animals to star-gazing to physical studies and throughout areas that would now be considered independent disciplines of science. At that time, “the Calculus” was a new discovery and an item of much dispute between Newton and Leibniz. Now, some 300-odd years later, it is taught to teenagers, yet there is still continuing research in mathematics.

Let’s continue with a bit of history…

The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote… Our future discoveries must be looked for in the six place of decimals.
–A. A. Michelson, 1894 (Nobel Laureate in Physics, 1907)

Michelson’s quote was, of course, made before the discoveries of quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity, which of course totally revolutionized modern physics. But I think it’s instructive in that there have often been predictions of the death of physics too. Currently the quest for a Grand Unified Theory or “theory of everything” in physics sometimes raises the same question–will physics research cease after such a discovery.

Yet physics has continued to exist since Michelson’s pronouncement, and I suspect it will continue to do so after finding a unified theory. Biology is extremely multidisciplinary now, yet it is still taught–and is perhaps more fashionable than ever with genomics and proteomics.

So what of chemistry and nanoscience? For one, I think there are difficulties implicit in working with individual molecules or small molecular clusters that do not exist when working with a test-tube of 10²³ molecules. For one, if I complete a chemical synthesis and have 99% purity, I’m quite happy. But in a nanoparticle of 100 atoms, the difference between 98%, 99%, and 100% purity leads to drastically different properties. I’ll get back to this thread at another time.

Which leaves the question of chemistry as “boring” and potentially sagging enrollments. As a current postdoc and a potential faculty member, I think there are currently efforts at rethinking how chemistry should be taught and how it is perceived by the public. Which I think is symbolic of a very healthy discipline, not one likely to disappear soon.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
–Mark Twain