These crucial turning points helped make the country a global chemical leader
This collage represents only a tiny fraction of the people, discoveries, and events that helped make US chemistry what it is today.
Credit: Madeline Monroe/C&EN/Sipa via AP Images/AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo/Bob Schutz/SPCOLLECTION, Retro AdArchives, Pictorial Press, GL Archive, Science History Images via Alamy/Shutterstock/C&EN Archives/Dan Addison/University of Virginia Communications
In 1776, the founding fathers of the United States of America declared their commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—but lesser known is their passion for the pursuit of science. Thomas Jefferson called it his “supreme delight.” Benjamin Franklin’s contribution to science far exceeded that of his famous kite experiment. Another founding Benjamin and signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, wrote what is widely considered to be America’s first chemistry textbook.
Many of the founding fathers of the United States of America were also men of science, including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. | Credit: Alamy
So it’s perhaps unsurprising that in the 250 years following its birth, the US grew into one of the world’s scientific powerhouses, including in chemistry. Across various measures of chemistry prowess—number of chemists, volume of high-quality research publications, and contributions of chemistry to the national economy, to name a few—the US has long stood as a global leader.
What might not have been foreseen, though, is how far chemistry would come to reach into seemingly disparate research spheres, as well as nearly every aspect of American life. Carsten Reinhardt, a historian at the Institute for Studies of Science of Bielefeld University in Germany, describes the wide reach that emerged mainly in the US during the second half of the 20th century as a “new kind of chemistry.” Chemistry became “a toolbox for many other scientific and engineering disciplines.”
The rise of US chemistry wasn’t predestined. In examining various historical, cultural, and economic forces, C&EN identified six pivotal shifts that made the US chemical enterprise what it is today.
In a young country, where improvements in agriculture and manufactures are so much to be desired, the cultivation of [chemistry], which explains the principles of both of them, should be considered as an object of the utmost importance.
Benjamin Rush, Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical, 1786
In 1770, physician Benjamin Rush (shown), a professor at the College of Philadelphia, wrote what is considered to be the first American chemistry textbook, Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry.
Credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Alamy
Chemistry was part of American education from the start, in large part for medical training. During the the first half of the 19th century, at least some educators recognized that chemistry’s practical application required laboratory experience. At the University of Virginia, founded by Jefferson in 1819, students did hands-on work reacting substances with heat at workstations built around shared furnaces. In the 1820s, American scientist Amos Eaton established teaching laboratories at what would become Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, which he helped found to, in his words, qualify teachers “in the application of experimental chemistry, philosophy and natural history to agriculture, domestic economy, the arts and manufactures.”
Still, for much of US history, no training existed of the type that today accompanies advanced degrees. Instead, American chemistry professors were more likely to have arrived from Europe or to have gone there to study.
American chemist and future American Chemical Society president Ira Remsen helped change that situation. After studying in Germany, Remsen became the first chemistry professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1876—also the year ACS was founded. Hopkins opened that year as a new type of American university focused on graduate education and research.
John P. Emmet, who taught natural sciences at the University of Virginia from 1825 until 1842, kept drawings of the instruments he made and used, such as the images shown. | Credit: Dan Addison/University of Virginia Communications
A hearth at the University of Virginia, built in 1825 and among the earliest hands-on chemistry teaching labs in the US, had two fireboxes and five workstations. It was enclosed in a wall in the 1840s and rediscovered more than 150 years later during a renovation (shown). | Credit: Dan Addison/University of Virginia Communications
Ira Remsen (center front, shown in 1890 in a Johns Hopkins University lab) helped transform chemistry training in the US by importing teaching and lab practices from Germany. | Credit: Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries/Gado/Alamy
Remsen imported instructional and laboratory approaches from Germany, a world leader in chemistry. He introduced “journal meetings,” where students discussed the latest advances, and he worked with students to uncover new knowledge. Reflecting on Remsen’s legacy in 1931, chemists William A. Noyes and James Flack Norris concluded that “he transplanted the atmosphere of the laboratories of the great masters—the spirit of hard work, the desire to learn and a love of chemistry.”
Schools training scientists to address the immediate needs of the nation also received a boost. The Morrill Act of 1862 granted states land, often seized from tribal nations, that could be sold to fund such schools “for the benefit of agriculture and the Mechanic arts.” Many land-grant institutions developed strong applied science and engineering programs. Among them was the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which by 1902 operated a chemistry laboratory with more than 7,000 m2 of workspace. Under the leadership of Noyes, who had studied with Remsen and would also be president of ACS, that lab space doubled, and the chemistry program became and remains among the most prestigious in the nation.
US universities had now positioned themselves to push the frontiers of science and compete with European institutes to attract American and international talent.
These universities also adopted a department structure that enabled chemists to adapt quickly to emerging trends. Because the programs were not run by a single professor, as was often true in Europe, they could be less hierarchical and thus more open to new ideas and cross-disciplinary approaches. “It was more democratic,” says Jeffrey Johnson, a retired historian at Villanova University, “and that allowed the teaching to become more progressive in a scientific sense.”
The Morrill Act of 1862 granted states land that could be sold to fund universities, such as the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (originally called Illinois Industrial University, shown). These institutions prioritized applied science and engineering. | Credit: Daily Illini/Wikimedia Commons
The chemist is a strange combination of realist and dreamer…. Give a chemist coal and wood and air and water and he can make anything from sugar to explosives.
New York Times, 1940
World War I marked the first large-scale use of chemical weapons, necessitating soldiers’ use of gas masks (shown). The war also kickstarted a boom in the US chemical industry, in part because the US could no longer import many products from Europe.
Credit: Science History Images/Alamy
Before World War I (WWI), the US chemical industry was still nascent. Colonists and then newly independent Americans, like the native people before them, transformed raw materials into useful products, making soap, glass, ironworks, and gunpowder. Before the start of the war, the US was rapidly industrializing, with the development of the first oil refineries setting the foundation for today’s extensive petrochemical industry.
The US petrochemical industry traces back to Edwin Drake (right) drilling the first oil well, in Titusville, Pennsylvania (shown in 1861). | Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Because Bakelite is heat resistant and can be easily molded, manufacturers in the first half of the 20th century used the plastic to mass produce everything from telephones (shown) and jewelry to the nonconducting parts of radios and other electrical products. | Credit: Alamy
The chemical industry had begun to diversify thanks in part to an “inventor culture,” fueled by the arrival of millions of immigrants searching for new opportunities, says Evan Hepler-Smith, a historian at Duke University. Hepler-Smith points to Leo Hendrik Baekeland, a Belgian-born chemist who, after moving to the US, invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, and continued work on photographic technologies, including inventing Velox photographic paper. Entrepreneurs, some immigrants and some not, established a framework for research and development that companies, such as E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and Eastman Kodak, would later take up, Hepler-Smith says.
Belgian-born chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland in a lab. Baekeland invented Bakelite in 1907 after immigrating to the US. | Credit: Pictorial Press/Alamy
E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, founded in 1802 as a gunpowder manufacturer (a 1913 ad is shown), developed many synthetic materials ubiquitous today, including neoprene, nylon, Teflon, and Kevlar. | Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
In addition to Bakelite, Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented the photographic paper Velox, which could be developed under artificial light and was acquired by Eastman Kodak (a packet from the 1940s is shown). | Credit: Andrew Linscott/Alamy
In 1891, Herbert H. Dow successfully produced bromine electrolytically from brine in Midland, Michigan. Dow’s cost-effective technique spurred the production of other chemicals (a buggy loaded with a bromide shipment in 1900 is shown). By the onset of World War I, the Dow Chemical Company was well placed to help meet the US’s chemical needs. | Credit: Courtesy of Science History Institute
Despite this activity, US chemical industries didn’t rival the reach of the German dye and pharmaceutical industries until after WWI. The war brought demand for new products, both to support Allied efforts and to make up for goods that could no longer be imported because of blockades.
Commonly known as “the chemist’s war,” WWI saw the first large-scale use of chemical weapons and production of high explosives. But there was more to it: the war convinced nations that their strength on a global stage was directly linked to the strength of their chemical industry. “By and large,” Reinhardt says, WWI “is the beginning of a very quick and decisive American rise.”
The country emerged from the war with the drive to catch up, universities for training new chemists, and the economic position to succeed. Some US strength came from co-opting German talent and know-how, including taking custody of thousands of German-owned US patents, Johnson says. Tariffs on German goods, the international boycott of German scientists, and the flight of scientists from Nazi Germany likely all played a part in eroding Germany’s former chemical dominance.
As World War II (WWII) got underway, the nation looked back on US chemists’ contribution to WWI and called on them again. A New York Times article from 1940 headlined “CHEMISTS TO OUR DEFENSE” praised the American chemist as “a strange combination of realist and dreamer.” It went on: “Give a chemist coal and wood and air and water and he can make anything from sugar to explosives, from gasoline to artificial silk.”
On the verge of the US entering World War II, the New York Times ran an article (shown) praising the US chemist and how far the US chemical industry had come since World War I. | Credit: The New York Times Archive
Scientific progress on a broad front results from the free play of free intellects, working on subjects of their own choice, in the manner dictated by their curiosity for exploration of the unknown. Freedom of inquiry must be preserved under any plan for Government support.
Vannevar Bush, Science: The Endless Frontier, 1945
Government investment in big research projects during World War II, such as the synthetic rubber program (a sheet of rubber coming off a rolling mill in 1941 is shown), spurred scientific and industrial advances.
Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
While WWI was a story of technology transfer to the US, WWII was about government investment in research, Hepler-Smith says. A bonanza of special research projects—the Manhattan Project, the synthetic rubber program, the development of radar, the search for antimalarials, and the production of penicillin—offered evidence that big advances can come from investment in fundamental research.
The Manhattan Project and continued interest in nuclear science after World War II created a fruitful environment for Glenn T. Seaborg (shown) and other chemists affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, to discover numerous transuranium elements. | Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The country had taken a “no stone unturned” approach to wartime research, Hepler-Smith says, which helped establish the US government as a significant funding source. In addition to the role of the national laboratories, the postwar era saw an expansion of the National Institutes of Health into a major research funder and the establishment of the National Science Foundation.
Industry also saw the value of research investment. The success of nylon as material for parachutes and other military needs, the accidental discovery of Teflon and its role in the Manhattan Project, and the revolutionary nature of sulfa drugs to treat bacterial infections highlighted how such research could yield a commercial payoff.
Vannevar Bush (shown in 1942) was the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. Bush championed government investment in research, which led to the establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1950. | Credit: Associated Press
Wallace Carothers, a chemist at E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, holds a sample of neoprene, the first commercially successful synthetic rubber, in 1931. Carothers also led the development of nylon. | Credit: Logic Images/Alamy
Nylon, the world’s first fully synthetic fiber, was a hugely successful product for E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (a 1950s ad is shown). The strong, lightweight, and elastic material was put to use making everything from stockings to cords and military parachutes. | Credit: RetroAdArchives/Alamy
Roy J. Plunkett (shown in 1986) accidentally discovered Teflon while studying refrigerant gases at E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. After opening a frozen, compressed sample of tetrafluoroethylene, he discovered it had polymerized into a white solid known as polytetrafluoroethylene, which was heat resistant and chemically inert and had a very low surface friction, a perfect material for nonstick products like cookware. | Credit: Associated Press
The US pharmaceutical industry, for example, began to bring scientific expertise in-house during the interwar period and to establish research links with universities, says John Lesch, an emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. The success of sulfa drugs, followed by other antibiotics, further boosted this effort, with pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) expanding dramatically from the late 1930s to the ’60s.
Peter Dervan, a California Institute of Technology chemist who established his lab in the 1970s, says he is a direct beneficiary of the golden times of basic research. Dervan’s lab studied synthetic molecules that could bind to DNA in sequence-specific ways. “We weren’t trying to make a new medicine. We weren’t trying to make a new gizmo to build a company,” he says. Instead, they wanted to know, “What’s possible at the frontier of chemistry and biology that chemists can do that hasn’t been done before?”
Hepler-Smith notes that WWII’s big science projects also changed the information landscape, leading to systems for managing and making available vast amounts of data. These systems, he says, helped enable the broad-based screening of compounds in drug development and the establishment of environmental regulation. These systems also facilitated chemistry’s relatively early adoption of computational approaches.
I would like to emphasize strongly my belief that the era of computing chemists, when hundreds if not thousands of chemists will go to the computing machine instead of the laboratory for increasingly many facets of chemical information, is already at hand.
Robert S. Mulliken, 1966
A 1960s IBM computer system. In the post–World War II era, new instruments allowed chemists to collect new types of data, and better computers allowed for more powerful analyses.
Credit: ClassicStock/Alamy
The impact of computers on chemistry, and on science more generally, is hard to overstate. But computers weren’t the only tools that expanded chemists’ vistas after WWII. A plethora of techniques offered new ways to identify, quantify, analyze, and separate matter. In some cases, as with ultraviolet and infrared spectroscopy, an outside event (such as WWII) spurred the development of inexpensive and automated instruments. In other cases, as with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, brand-new techniques borrowed from other disciplines needed chemists to champion them.
After World War II, instruments for precisely characterizing chemical substances, such as this ultraviolet–visible spectrophotometer, became more widely available to US chemists. | Credit: Courtesy of Science History Institute
This advertisement for a commercial nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer appeared in C&EN in 1967. | Credit: C&EN Archives
Linus C. Pauling (shown), who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and the structure of complex molecules, showed early enthusiasm for the potential of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in chemistry. | Credit: Associated Press
NMR is emblematic of this transformation, Morris says. “Firstly, it’s so important chemically. Secondly, it was hideously expensive.” US researchers benefited from having funding available. “The third thing is that a lot of it was developed in the United States, mainly because the United States was made strong in electronics,” he says, thanks to wartime R&D. Close proximity to instrument manufacturers also meant US chemists could easily acquire the new tools and collaborate on improving them, Morris says.
Beyond these factors, Reinhardt notes, US chemists had the scientific framing to see the value of these instruments and trust their results. Being quick to adopt mechanistic ways of thinking about reactions, and to bridge different subdisciplines, US chemists were poised to put new instruments to use. American chemist Linus C. Pauling, for example, who pioneered the application of quantum mechanics to the questions of bonding and brought his techniques to the study of biological molecules, showed early enthusiasm for the potential of NMR in chemistry.
Electronic computers allowed Roald Hoffmann (shown in 1981) and R. B. Woodward in the 1960s to run the calculations required to formulate and test the Woodward-Hoffmann rules, which predict fine geometric details of how bonds will form and break in chemical reactions. | Credit: Zuma Press/Alamy
Roald Hoffmann, a Polish American chemist who was born in what is now Ukraine, credits new instruments, including computers, with making his Nobel Prize–winning work possible. Hoffmann immigrated to the US in 1949 at the age of 11 after surviving the Holocaust. In the 1960s, in collaboration with chemist R. B. Woodward, he showed that simple ideas about orbitals could be used to predict fine geometric details of how bonds would form and break in chemical reactions. He relied on electronic computers to do the quantum mechanical calculations required for formulating and testing the theory, which couldn’t be done by hand. And the data gleaned from new instruments helped researchers determine the detailed outcomes of reactions, to see if the predictions were correct.
“We were so lucky,” Hoffmann says. “We hit a field that was ripe for getting the answers for the questions that were asked of us.”
Ultimately, Reinhardt says, these new instruments and the data they collected made chemistry portable. “You are disconnecting yourself from the material in the test tube,” he says. “You don’t need it in the same way anymore.” Chemistry could now be done anywhere, from within cells to out in space, and it became a major part of nearly every scientific discipline.
Chemistry developed the methods of synthesis and sequencing and analysis. Brilliant biochemists had their enzymes and plasmids. Those two rivers coming together was the seed corn for what we now call the biotech industry.
Peter Dervan
A Charles Pfizer and Company factory. With deep-tank fermentation, Pfizer was able to mass produce penicillin during World War II, and the technique led to the development of more antibiotics.
Credit: Courtesy of Pfizer
People have harnessed biology to do their bidding for millennia, but large-scale efforts emerged in the 20th century—with chemists central to those efforts. In the 1920s, for example, before it became a pharmaceutical giant, Charles Pfizer and Company built a mold-fermentation plant in Brooklyn, New York, to produce citric acid, used as a preservative, stabilizer, and flavoring agent, notably at that time in soft drinks. The approach freed citric acid’s production from its reliance on lemons and limes, which had become tough to come by during WWI. What’s more, emerging fermentation techniques led to other useful products—gluconic acid and ascorbic acid (or vitamin C)—and became essential to the mass production of penicillin during WWII.
Citric acid and later penicillin were manufactured by fermentation at Charles Pfizer and Company’s Brooklyn, New York, plant (shown circa 1948). | Credit: Courtesy of Pfizer
Calling on microorganisms to churn out molecules was transformative, but biotechnology was barely getting started. The 1970s brought a quantum leap: as scientists learned how to manipulate DNA, they could step far beyond what nature had made. “Chemists create new biology, new chemistry—we build things,” says Frances H. Arnold, a biochemical engineer at Caltech who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work using directed evolution to engineer novel enzymes.
In 1972, chemist Paul Berg and colleagues published a paper reporting on the first human-made recombinant DNA. This figure from the paper outlines the team’s general approach to DNA splicing. | Credit: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA
Herbert W. Boyer (shown in the 1970s) and Stanely N. Cohen achieved a genetic engineering milestone when they inserted foreign DNA into a bacterium and the DNA replicated naturally. Boyer went on to cofound Genentech in 1976. | Credit: Courtesy of Genentech
The development of recombinant DNA was a huge milestone. In 1972, Stanford University biochemist Paul Berg reported creating the first human-made recombinant DNA after splicing a bit of DNA from a bacterial virus into the DNA of a host virus. Not long after, biochemists Herbert W. Boyer at the University of California, San Francisco, and Stanley N. Cohen at Stanford inserted recombinant DNA into a bacterium and got the foreign DNA to replicate naturally. Boyer went on in 1976 to found Genentech with venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson. Other start-ups quickly followed.
“Chemistry developed the methods of synthesis and sequencing and analysis,” says Dervan. “Brilliant biochemists had their enzymes and plasmids. Those two rivers coming together was the seed corn for what we now call the biotech industry.”
Both Dervan and Lesch point to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 as a major driver in the growth of biotech. By giving universities rights over inventions born from federal funding, it encouraged the commercialization of research.
Arnold attributes the US’s leading role in the ongoing biotech boom in part to the willingness of US researchers to take risks. “We weren’t constrained by the past,” she says. “We had the youthful advantage to redefine what chemistry is.”
Sen. Birch Bayh (D-IN) and Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS), shown, sponsored the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which spurred biotech innovations by allowing universities and other institutions to patent and commercialize inventions developed with federal funding. | Credit: AP Photo/John Duricka
Frances H. Arnold (shown), who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on using directed evolution to engineer enzymes, says, “In the not-distant future, we’ll just be able to genetically encode any chemistry.” | Credit: Christopher Michel
Arnold’s own research introduces random mutations into enzyme-encoding gene sequences, inserts those sequences back into bacteria, and selects the best of the best to parent a next generation. Over many generations, enzymes are optimized to do just what researchers want them to do. This directed evolution, she says, holds immense promise for new medicines and clean energy technologies.
She sees the future of US chemistry—and chemistry in general—as biological. “In the not-distant future,” she says, “we’ll just be able to genetically encode any chemistry.”
If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals eating and drinking them, taking them into the very marrow of our bones—we had better know something about their nature and their power.
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962
Demonstrators in Boston in 1969 protest against air pollution. Nationwide concerns about pollution led to the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.
Credit: Associated Press
Across history, chemists have confronted how chemical products and processes can damage human health and the planet, making the story of US chemistry not only one of successes but also one of learning and growth through course correction.
At the turn of the 20th century, physician Alice Hamilton (shown), a pioneer of occupational medicine, studied high rates of mortality and lead poisoning among people working in the manufacturing of enamelware, rubber production, and other industries. | Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Here are some examples: In 1910, physician Alice Hamilton formally began investigating illnesses among industrial workers in Illinois, including high mortality rates in lead-related industries. Later studying the occupational hazards of explosives factories and viscose-rayon manufacturing, she is credited with the development of occupational medicine.
In her 1962 book Silent Spring, biologist Rachel Carson described how pesticides, particularly DDT, could find their way into the food chain and harm wildlife and human health. The book, and the public awareness surrounding it, led to increased government oversight of the chemical industry and encouraged many chemists to think differently about their work.
Rachel Carson testifies before the Senate in 1963. With her 1962 publication of Silent Spring, Carson helped spark the modern environmental movement in the US. | Credit: Associated Press
Today, chemistry-related concerns include the proliferation of microplastics, the persistence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and the warming of our planet from greenhouse gas emissions.
A big shift in public sentiment began in the 1970s, Reinhardt says, as people started seeing chemical products, such as plastics, not primarily as tools but as a problem. The US took the lead in trying to regulate these products. He points to the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Toxic Substances Control Act. Some of the same instruments that revolutionized chemistry more generally enabled chemists to detect environmental pollutants at ever-smaller concentrations.
Economic factors also came into play. The gasoline crisis of the 1970s prompted a push toward clean energy, says Caltech inorganic chemist Harry B. Gray. Work on chemical reactions initiated by light—photochemistry—picked up as people tried to split water to make hydrogen fuel. But such work moved ahead in fits and starts. Enthusiasm fell back before picking up again in the 1990s, Gray says. It was also in the 1990s that chemists Paul Anastas and John Warner published Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice, outlining 12 principles that chemists should follow to make reactions that are more friendly to humans and the environment.
Physical chemist Emily A. Carter of Princeton University says that in the next decade, in 2007, she woke up to the need for the fields of chemistry and chemical engineering to make a dramatic shift—away from fossil fuels and toward more-sustainable approaches. That year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fourth report, declaring the warming of the planet “unequivocal.” Carter has since led efforts that bring academic researchers and industry representatives together to collaborate on the energy transition and carbon mitigation.
A worker tests car emissions at a US Environmental Protection Agency lab in 1977. The EPA sets and enforces air-quality and emissions standards. | Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Demonstrators protest in 1970 outside the New Orleans offices of Chevron after an offshore rig spilled tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. | Credit: Associated Press
The US has had an important part in addressing the global climate crisis, says Laura Gagliardi, a chemist at the University of Chicago, both by supporting basic research and by bringing chemists and engineers together with policymakers in the push for clean energy. “Chemists are at the center of this revolution, and we have to keep playing a role,” she says.
Microplastics collected in the San Francisco Bay Area. In recent years, people have started to worry about the pervasiveness of microplastics, and chemists have started studying what, if any, health effects these particles might have. | Credit: Cole Brookson
Paul Anastas, shown at a Senate hearing about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, developed the 12 principles of green chemistry in the 1990s with John Warner. | Credit: Associated Press
Solar panels operate on a farm in Tennessee. Developing clean energy is among the current challenges for US chemists. | Credit: AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel
How the US chemistry enterprise will fare in its next chapter is difficult to predict.
By some measures, the US has already lost much of the leading edge it gained in the 20th century. China is the top producer of high-quality chemistry research, according to the Nature Index, and ahead of the US and other countries in annual chemistry patent publications.
And while some groups of chemists have supported the Donald J. Trump administration’s push to increase domestic production and roll back regulation, others are concerned that reducing federal funding for basic research will undermine future scientific advances.
Many also see shifts in US visa and immigration policy and restrictions on collaborations with non-US researchers as antithetical to the forces that have made US science strong.
“Historically this has been a country of opportunities,” Gagliardi says. “I hope it stays like that.”
For now, Carter says, the rest of the world is going to have to lead on climate and energy solutions. “It’s not a problem for one nation to solve, anyway,” she says.
Despite any current upheavals, US chemists are optimistic that they will continue to work toward addressing the biggest challenges of the day. Developing renewable energy, keeping the environment free of pollution, and improving human health are at the top of the list, Gray says.
“If we can handle those, we will have contributed an enormous amount to civilization,” he says. “Chemists should flex their muscles now and not hold back.”
Elizabeth Quill is a freelance science journalist based near Washington, DC.
This collage represents only a tiny fraction of the people, discoveries, and events that helped make US chemistry what it is today. Credit:
Madeline Monroe/C&EN/Sipa via AP Images/AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo/Bob Schutz/SPCOLLECTION, Retro AdArchives, Pictorial Press, GL Archive, Science History Images via Alamy/Shutterstock/C&EN Archives/Dan Addison/University of Virginia Communications
Many of the founding fathers of the United States of America were also men of science, including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Credit:
Alamy
In 1770, physician Benjamin Rush (shown), a professor at the College of Philadelphia, wrote what is considered to be the first American chemistry textbook, Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on Chemistry. Credit:
Smith Collection/Gado/Alamy
A hearth at the University of Virginia, built in 1825 and among the earliest hands-on chemistry teaching labs in the US, had two fireboxes and five workstations. It was enclosed in a wall in the 1840s and rediscovered more than 150 years later during a renovation (shown).
Credit:
Dan Addison/University of Virginia Communications
John P. Emmet, who taught natural sciences at the University of Virginia from 1825 until 1842, kept drawings of the instruments he made and used, such as the images shown. Credit:
Dan Addison/University of Virginia Communications
Ira Remsen (center front, shown in 1890 in a Johns Hopkins University lab) helped transform chemistry training in the US by importing teaching and lab practices from Germany. Credit:
Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries/Gado/Alamy
The Morrill Act of 1862 granted states land that could be sold to fund universities, such as the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (originally called Illinois Industrial University, shown). These institutions prioritized applied science and engineering. Credit:
Daily Illini/Wikimedia Commons
World War I marked the first large-scale use of chemical weapons, necessitating soldiers’ use of gas masks (shown). The war also kickstarted a boom in the US chemical industry, in part because the US could no longer import many products from Europe. Credit:
Science History Images/Alamy
The US petrochemical industry traces back to Edwin Drake (right) drilling the first oil well, in Titusville, Pennsylvania (shown in 1861). Credit:
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Because Bakelite is heat resistant and can be easily molded, manufacturers in the first half of the 20th century used the plastic to mass produce everything from telephones (shown) and jewelry to the nonconducting parts of radios and other electrical products. Credit:
Alamy
Belgian-born chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland in a lab. Baekeland invented Bakelite in 1907 after immigrating to the US. Credit:
Pictorial Press/Alamy
E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, founded in 1802 as a gunpowder manufacturer (a 1913 ad is shown), and developed many synthetic materials ubiquitous today, including neoprene, nylon, Teflon, and Kevlar. Credit:
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
In addition to Bakelite, Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented the photographic paper Velox, which could be developed under artificial light and was acquired by Eastman Kodak (a packet from the 1940s is shown). Credit:
Andrew Linscott/Alamy
In 1891, Herbert H. Dow successfully produced bromine electrolytically from brine in Midland, Michigan. Dow’s cost-effective technique spurred the production of other chemicals (a buggy loaded with a bromide shipment in 1900 is shown). By the onset of World War I, the Dow Chemical Company was well placed to help meet the US’s chemical needs. Credit:
Courtesy of Science History Institute
On the verge of the US entering World War II, the New York Times ran an article (shown) praising the US chemist and how far the US chemical industry had come since World War I. Credit:
The New York Times Archive
Government investment in big research projects during World War II, such as the synthetic rubber program (a sheet of rubber coming off a rolling mill in 1941 is shown), spurred scientific and industrial advances. Credit:
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
The Manhattan Project and continued interest in nuclear science after World War II created a fruitful environment for Glenn T. Seaborg (shown) and other chemists affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley, to discover numerous transuranium elements. Credit:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Vannevar Bush, shown in 1942, was the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. Bush championed government investment in research, which led to the establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1950. Credit:
Associated Press
Wallace Carothers, a chemist at E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, holds a sample of neoprene, the first commercially successful synthetic rubber, in 1931. Carothers also led the development of nylon. Credit:
Logic Images/Alamy
Nylon, the world’s first fully synthetic fiber, was a hugely successful product for E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company (a 1950s ad is shown). The strong, lightweight, and elastic material was put to use making everything from stockings to cords and military parachutes. Credit:
RetroAdArchives/Alamy
Roy J. Plunkett, shown in 1986, accidentally discovered Teflon while studying refrigerant gases at E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. After opening a frozen, compressed sample of tetrafluoroethylene, he discovered it had polymerized into a white solid, polytetrafluoroethylene, which was heat resistant and chemically inert and had a very low surface friction—a perfect material for nonstick products like cookware. Credit:
Associated Press
A 1960s IBM computer system. In the post–World War II era, new instruments allowed chemists to collect new types of data, and better computers allowed for more powerful analyses. Credit:
ClassicStock/Alamy
After World War II, instruments for precisely characterizing chemical substances, such as this ultraviolet–visible spectrophotometer, became more widely available to US chemists. Credit:
Courtesy of Science History Institute
This advertisement for a commercial nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer appeared in C&EN in 1967. Credit:
C&EN Archives
Linus C. Pauling (shown), who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954 for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and the structure of complex molecules, showed early enthusiasm for the potential of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in chemistry. Credit:
Associated Press
Electronic computers allowed Roald Hoffmann (shown in 1981) and R. B. Woodward in the 1960s to run the calculations required to formulate and test the Woodward-Hoffmann rules, which predict fine geometric details of how bonds will form and break in chemical reactions. Credit:
Zuma Press/Alamy
A Charles Pfizer and Company factory. With deep-tank fermentation, Pfizer was able to mass produce penicillin during World War II, and the technique led to the development of more antibiotics. Credit:
Courtesy of Pfizer
In 1972, chemist Paul Berg and colleagues published a paper reporting on the first human-made recombinant DNA. This figure from the paper outlines the team’s general approach to DNA splicing. Credit:
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA
Sen. Birch Bayh (D-IN) and Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS), shown, sponsored the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which spurred biotech innovations by allowing universities and other institutions to patent and commercialize inventions developed with federal funding. Credit:
AP Photo/John Duricka
Fraces H. Arnold (shown), who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work on using directed evolution to engineer enzymes, says, “In the not-distant future, we’ll just be able to genetically encode any chemistry.” Credit:
Christopher Michel
Demonstrators in Boston in 1969 protest against air pollution. Nationwide concerns about pollution led to the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Credit:
Associated Press
At the turn of the 20th century, physician Alice Hamilton (shown), a pioneer of occupational medicine, studied high rates of mortality and lead poisoning among people working in the manufacturing of enamelware, rubber production, and other industries.
Credit:
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Rachel Carson testifies before the Senate in 1963. With her 1962 publication of Silent Spring, Carson helped spark the modern environmental movement in the US. Credit:
Associated Press
A worker tests car emissions at a US Environmental Protection Agency lab in 1977. The EPA sets and enforces air-quality and emissions standards. Credit:
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division
Demonstrators protest in 1970 outside the New Orleans offices of Chevron after an offshore rig spilled tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Credit:
Associated Press
Microplastics collected in the San Francisco Bay Area. In recent years, people have started to worry about the pervasiveness of microplastics, and chemists have started studying what, if any, health effects these particles might have. Credit:
Cole Brookson
Paul Anastas, shown at a Senate hearing about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, developed the 12 principles of green chemistry in the 1990s with John Warner. Credit:
Associated Press
Solar panels operate on a farm in Tennessee. Developing clean energy is the latest challenge for US chemists. Credit:
AP Photo/Joshua A. Bickel
Key Insights
- Over the last 250 years, the US has become a global leader in chemistry. Six pivotal transitions in history explain the rise of the US chemistry enterprise. How US chemistry will fare in the future is difficult to predict.
In 1776, the founding fathers of the United States of America declared their commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—but they also had a passion for the pursuit of science. Thomas Jefferson called it his “supreme delight.” Benjamin Franklin’s contribution to science far exceeded that of his famous kite experiment. Another founding Benjamin and signer of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, wrote what is widely considered to be America’s first chemistry textbook.
So it’s perhaps unsurprising that in the 250 years following its birth, the US grew into one of the world’s scientific powerhouses, including in chemistry. Across various measures of chemistry prowess—number of chemists, volume of high-quality research publications, and contributions of chemistry to the national economy, to name a few—the US has long stood as a global leader.
What might not have been foreseen, though, is how far chemistry would extend into seemingly disparate research spheres, as well as nearly every aspect of American life. Carsten Reinhardt, a historian at the Institute for Studies of Science of Bielefeld University, describes the wide reach that emerged mainly in the US during the second half of the 20th century as a “new kind of chemistry.” Chemistry became “a toolbox for many other scientific and engineering disciplines.”
The rise of US chemistry wasn’t predestined. In examining various historical, cultural, and economic forces, C&EN identified six pivotal shifts that made the US chemistry enterprise what it is today.
The rise of the US research university Chemistry was part of American education from the start, in large part for medical training. During the the first half of the 19th century, at least some educators recognized that chemistry’s practical application required laboratory experience. At the University of Virginia, founded by Jefferson in 1819, students did hands-on work reacting substances with heat at workstations built around shared furnaces. In the 1820s, American scientist Amos Eaton established teaching laboratories at what would become Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, which he helped found to, in his words, qualify teachers “in the application of experimental chemistry, philosophy and natural history to agriculture, domestic economy, the arts and manufactures.”
Still, for much of US history, no training existed of the type that today accompanies advanced degrees. Instead, American chemistry professors were more likely to have arrived from Europe or to have gone there to study.
American chemist and future American Chemical Society president Ira Remsen helped change that situation. After studying in Germany, Remsen became the first chemistry professor at Johns Hopkins University in 1876—also the year ACS was founded. Hopkins opened that year as a new type of American university focused on graduate education and research.
Remsen imported instructional and laboratory approaches from Germany, a world leader in chemistry. He introduced “journal meetings,” where students discussed the latest advances, and he worked with students to uncover new knowledge. Reflecting on Remsen’s legacy in 1931, chemists William A. Noyes and James Flack Norris concluded that “he transplanted the atmosphere of the laboratories of the great masters—the spirit of hard work, the desire to learn and a love of chemistry.”
Schools training scientists to address the immediate needs of the nation also received a boost. The Morrill Act of 1862 granted states land, often seized from tribal nations, that could be sold to fund such schools “for the benefit of agriculture and the Mechanic arts.” Many land-grant institutions developed strong applied science and engineering programs. Among them was the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which by 1902 operated a chemistry laboratory with more than 7,000 m2 of workspace. Under the leadership of Noyes, who had studied with Remsen and would also be president of ACS, that lab space doubled, and the chemistry program became and remains among the most prestigious in the nation.
US universities had now positioned themselves to push the frontiers of science and compete with European institutes to attract American and international talent.
These universities also adopted a department structure that enabled chemists to adapt quickly to emerging trends. Because the programs were not run by a single professor, as was often true in Europe, they could be less hierarchical and thus more open to new ideas and cross-disciplinary approaches. “It was more democratic,” says Jeffrey Johnson, a retired historian at Villanova University, “and that allowed the teaching to become more progressive in a scientific sense.”
War catalyzes innovation in US chemistry
Before World War I (WWI), the US chemical industry was still nascent. Colonists and then newly independent Americans, like the native people before them, transformed raw materials into useful products, making soap, glass, ironworks, and gunpowder. Before the start of the war, the US was rapidly industrializing, with the development of the first oil refineries setting the foundation for today’s extensive petrochemical industry.
The chemical industry had begun to diversify thanks in part to an “inventor culture,” fueled by the arrival of millions of immigrants searching for new opportunities, says Evan Hepler-Smith, a historian at Duke University. Hepler-Smith points to Leo Hendrik Baekeland, a Belgian-born chemist who, after moving to the US, invented Bakelite, the first fully synthetic plastic, and continued work on photographic technologies, including inventing Velox photographic paper. Entrepreneurs, some immigrants and some not, established a framework for research and development that companies, such as E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company and Eastman Kodak, would later take up, Hepler-Smith says.
Despite this activity, US chemical industries didn’t rival the reach of the German dye and pharmaceutical industries until after WWI. The war brought demand for new products, both to support Allied efforts and to make up for goods that could no longer be imported because of blockades.
Commonly known as “the chemist’s war,” WWI saw the first large-scale use of chemical weapons and production of high explosives. But there was more to it: the war convinced nations that their strength on a global stage was directly linked to the strength of their chemical industry. “By and large,” Reinhardt says, WWI “is the beginning of a very quick and decisive American rise.”
The country emerged from the war with the drive to catch up, universities for training new chemists, and the economic position to succeed. Some US strength came from co-opting German talent and know-how, including taking custody of thousands of German-owned US patents, Johnson says. Tariffs on German goods, the international boycott of German scientists, and the flight of scientists from Nazi Germany likely all played a part in eroding Germany’s former chemical dominance.
As World War II (WWII) got underway, the nation looked back on US chemists’ contribution to WWI and called on them again. A New York Times article from 1940 headlined “CHEMISTS TO OUR DEFENSE” praised the American chemist as “a strange combination of realist and dreamer.” It went on: “Give a chemist coal and wood and air and water and he can make anything from sugar to explosives, from gasoline to artificial silk.”
Big science and big research investments pay off
While WWI was a story of technology transfer to the US, WWII was about government investment in research, Hepler-Smith says. A bonanza of special research projects—the Manhattan Project, the synthetic rubber program, the development of radar, the search for antimalarials, and the production of penicillin—offered evidence that big advances can come from investment in fundamental research.
The country had taken a “no stone unturned” approach to wartime research, Hepler-Smith says, which helped establish the US government as a significant funding source. In addition to the role of the national laboratories, the postwar era saw an expansion of the National Institutes of Health into a major research funder and the establishment of the National Science Foundation.
Industry also saw the value of research investment. The success of nylon as material for parachutes and other military needs, the accidental discovery of Teflon and its role in the Manhattan Project, and the revolutionary nature of sulfa drugs to treat bacterial infections highlighted how such research could yield a commercial payoff.
The US pharmaceutical industry, for example, began to bring scientific expertise in-house during the interwar period and to establish research links with universities, says John Lesch, an emeritus professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. The success of sulfa drugs, followed by other antibiotics, further boosted this effort, with pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) expanding dramatically from the late 1930s to the ’60s.
Peter Dervan, a California Institute of Technology chemist who established his lab in the 1970s, says he is a direct beneficiary of the golden times of basic research. Dervan’s lab studied synthetic molecules that could bind to DNA in sequence-specific ways. “We weren’t trying to make a new medicine. We weren’t trying to make a new gizmo to build a company,” he says. Instead, they wanted to know, “What’s possible at the frontier of chemistry and biology that chemists can do that hasn’t been done before?”
Hepler-Smith notes that WWII’s big science projects also changed the information landscape, leading to systems for managing and making available vast amounts of data. These systems, he says, helped enable the broad-based screening of compounds in drug development and the establishment of environmental regulation. These systems also facilitated chemistry’s relatively early adoption of computational approaches.
The instrument upheaval and the computer age
The impact of computers on chemistry, and on science more generally, is hard to overstate. But computers weren’t the only tools that expanded chemists’ vistas after WWII. A plethora of techniques offered new ways to identify, quantify, analyze, and separate matter. In some cases, as with ultraviolet and infrared spectroscopy, an outside event (such as WWII) spurred the development of inexpensive and automated instruments. In other cases, as with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, brand-new techniques borrowed from other disciplines needed chemists to champion them.
This new instrumentation wasn’t exclusively American, but US researchers had a leg up in developing and incorporating it, says Peter J. T. Morris, a historian at University College London who has done extensive research on what he and others call the “instrumental transformation.” NMR is emblematic of this transformation, Morris says. “Firstly, it’s so important chemically. Secondly, it was hideously expensive.” US researchers benefited from having funding available. “The third thing is that a lot of it was developed in the United States, mainly because the United States was made strong in electronics,” he says, thanks to wartime R&D. Close proximity to instrument manufacturers also meant US chemists could easily acquire the new tools and collaborate on improving them, Morris says.
Beyond these factors, Reinhardt notes, US chemists had the scientific framing to see the value of these instruments and trust their results. Being quick to adopt mechanistic ways of thinking about reactions, and to bridge different subdisciplines, US chemists were poised to put new instruments to use. American chemist Linus C. Pauling, for example, who pioneered the application of quantum mechanics to the questions of bonding and brought his techniques to the study of biological molecules, showed early enthusiasm for the potential of NMR in chemistry.
Roald Hoffmann, a Polish American chemist who was born in what is now Ukraine, credits new instruments, including computers, with making his Nobel Prize–winning work possible. Hoffmann immigrated to the US in 1949 at the age of 11 after surviving the Holocaust. In the 1960s, in collaboration with chemist R. B. Woodward, he showed that simple ideas about orbitals could be used to predict fine geometric details of how bonds would form and break in chemical reactions. He relied on electronic computers to do the quantum mechanical calculations required for formulating and testing the theory, which couldn’t be done by hand. And the data gleaned from new instruments helped determine the detailed outcomes of reactions, to see if the predictions were correct.
“We were so lucky,” Hoffmann says. “We hit a field that was ripe for getting the answers for the questions that were asked of us.”
Ultimately, Reinhardt says, these new instruments and the data they collected made chemistry portable. “You are disconnecting yourself from the material in the test tube,” he says. “You don’t need it in the same way anymore.” Chemistry could now be done anywhere, from within cells to out in space, and it became a major part of nearly every scientific discipline.
Chemists build new products out of biology
People have harnessed biology to do their bidding for millennia, but large-scale efforts emerged in the 20th century—with chemists central to those efforts. In the 1920s, for example, before it became a pharmaceutical giant, Charles Pfizer and Company built a mold-fermentation plant in Brooklyn, New York, to produce citric acid, used as a preservative, stabilizer, and flavoring agent, notably at that time in soft drinks. The approach freed citric acid’s production from its reliance on lemons and limes, which had become tough to come by during WWI. What’s more, emerging fermentation techniques led to other useful products—gluconic acid and ascorbic acid (or vitamin C)—and became essential to the mass production of penicillin during WWII.
Calling on microorganisms to churn out molecules was transformative, but biotechnology was barely getting started. The 1970s brought a quantum leap: as scientists learned how to manipulate DNA, they could step far beyond what nature had made. “Chemists create new biology, new chemistry—we build things,” says Frances H. Arnold, a biochemical engineer at Caltech who won the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her work using directed evolution to engineer novel enzymes.
The development of recombinant DNA was a huge milestone. In 1972, Stanford University biochemist Paul Berg reported creating the first human-made recombinant DNA when he spliced a bit of DNA from a bacterial virus into the DNA of a host virus. Not long after, biochemists Herbert W. Boyer at the University of California, San Francisco, and Stanley N. Cohen at Stanford inserted recombinant DNA into a bacterium and got the foreign DNA to replicate naturally. Boyer went on in 1976 to found Genentech with venture capitalist Robert A. Swanson. Other start-ups quickly followed.
“Chemistry developed the methods of synthesis and sequencing and analysis,” says Dervan. “Brilliant biochemists had their enzymes and plasmids. Those two rivers coming together was the seed corn for what we now call the biotech industry.”
Both Dervan and Lesch point to the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 as a major driver in the growth of biotech. By giving universities rights over inventions born from federal funding, it encouraged the commercialization of research.
Arnold attributes the US’s leading role in the ongoing biotech boom in part to the willingness of US researchers to take risks. “We weren’t constrained by the past,” she says. “We had the youthful advantage to redefine what chemistry is.”
Arnold’s own research introduces random mutations into enzyme-encoding gene sequences, inserts those sequences back into bacteria, and selects the best of the best to parent a next generation. Over many generations, enzymes are optimized to do just what researchers want them to do. This directed evolution, she says, holds immense promise for new medicines and clean energy technologies. She sees the future of US chemistry—and chemistry in general—as biological. “In the not-distant future,” she says, “we’ll just be able to genetically encode any chemistry.”
Making good—and doing good—with chemistry
Across history, chemists have confronted how chemical products and processes can damage human health and the planet, making the story of US chemistry not only one of successes but also one of learning and growth through course correction.
Here are some examples: In 1910, physician Alice Hamilton formally began investigating illnesses among industrial workers in Illinois, including high mortality rates in lead-related industries. Later studying the occupational hazards of explosives factories and viscose-rayon manufacturing, she is credited with the development of occupational medicine.
In her 1962 book Silent Spring, biologist Rachel Carson described how pesticides, particularly DDT, could find their way into the food chain and harm wildlife and human health. The book, and the public awareness surrounding it, led to increased government oversight of the chemical industry and encouraged many chemists to think differently about their work.Today, chemistry-related concerns include the proliferation of microplastics, the persistence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and the warming of our planet from greenhouse gas emissions.
A big shift in public sentiment began in the 1970s, Reinhardt says, as people started seeing chemical products, such as plastics, not primarily as tools but as a problem. The US took the lead in trying to regulate these products. He points to the establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the Toxic Substances Control Act. Some of the same instruments that revolutionized chemistry more generally enabled chemists to detect environmental pollutants at ever-smaller concentrations.
Economic factors also came into play. The gasoline crisis of the 1970s prompted a push toward clean energy, says Caltech inorganic chemist Harry B. Gray. Work on chemical reactions initiated by light—photochemistry—picked up as people tried to split water to make hydrogen fuel. But such work moved ahead in fits and starts. Enthusiasm fell back before picking up again in the 1990s, Gray says. It was also in the 1990s that chemists Paul Anastas and John Warner published Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice, outlining 12 principles that chemists should follow to make reactions that are more friendly to humans and the environment.
Physical chemist Emily A. Carter of Princeton University says that in the next decade, in 2007, she woke up to the need for the fields of chemistry and chemical engineering to make a dramatic shift—away from fossil fuels and toward more-sustainable approaches. That year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its fourth report, declaring the warming of the planet “unequivocal.” Carter has since led efforts that bring academic researchers and industry representatives together to collaborate on the energy transition and carbon mitigation.
The US has had an important part in addressing the global climate crisis, says Laura Gagliardi, a chemist at the University of Chicago, both by supporting basic research and by bringing chemists and engineers together with policymakers in the push for clean energy. “Chemists are at the center of this revolution, and we have to keep playing a role,” she says.
The future of US chemistry
How the US chemistry enterprise will fare in its next chapter is difficult to predict.
By some measures, the US has already lost much of the leading edge it gained in the 20th century. China is the top producer of high-quality chemistry research, according to the Nature Index, and ahead of the US and other countries in annual chemistry patent publications.
And while some groups of chemists have supported the Donald J. Trump administration’s push to increase domestic production and roll back regulation, others are concerned that reducing federal funding for basic research will undermine future scientific advances. Many also see shifts in US visa and immigration policy and restrictions on collaborations with non-US researchers as antithetical to the forces that have made US science strong.
“Historically this has been a country of opportunities,” Gagliardi says. “I hope it stays like that.”
For now, Carter says, the rest of the world is going to have to lead on climate and energy solutions. “It’s not a problem for one nation to solve, anyway,” she says.
Despite any current upheavals, US chemists are optimistic that they will continue to work toward addressing the biggest challenges of the day. Developing renewable energy, keeping the environment free of pollution, and improving human health are at the top of the list, Gray says.
“If we can handle those, we will have contributed an enormous amount to civilization,” he says. “Chemists should flex their muscles now and not hold back.”
Elizabeth Quill is a freelance science journalist based near Washington, DC.
