NATURE August 13~ 1960 Vol

540 NATURE August 13~ 1960 voL. 1s7 ing the detonation wave. As mentioned in the book, the famous in all branches of philosophy who appear this theory is essentially the same as that proposed in the pages of this remarkable book. Next we read by different authors as long ago as 1928 but not then how refugees from the Reformation and the counter generally published. Reformation transplanted luxury industries to Basle. There are useful chapters on the instrumentation The second part of the book ("Tho Development of used in modern explosives research and on the the Chemical Industry in Basle") commences by effects of air and ground blast waves, and consider showing that chemical industry grew from the able space is given to shaped nhargcs and to the co-operation between tho trado in crude drugs and behaviour of solids under explosive attack. Perhaps colouring matters, the apothecaries' shop, and the the most disappointing parts of the book are those gas works. In a short history of the ancient drug dealing with the blast waves produced in gases by trade drugs which are also colouring matters (for detonating explosives ; no mention is made of the example, saffron, buckthorn), are mentioned, as well modern approach basod on the methods of fluid as many others, some of which are illustrated in mechanics and the descript,ions are derived from some colour. Surprise is expressed that until the nineteenth what questionable qualitative assumptions. centw·y the whole drug was considered essential and The book is not easy to read ; in the attempt to be no one thought of searching for pure 'active' principles. comprehensive there is a tendency in places to deal Extraction of 'principles' soon became commercially too briefly with difficult physical concepts and this popular and in 1857 J. R. Geigy and U. Heusler built fault is aggravated by the widol:lpread use of symbols a plant in Basle to extract dye-woods. The silk as a shorthand method of writing. Evon though the ribbon industry in Ba.slo naturally attracted dyers symbols are clearly defined in an appendix it is to the neighbourhood. In 1859, three years after irritating to have to be continually refening to it. Perkin's discovery of mauveine, Geigy switched his However, it may be said that this is a reference attention to the manufacture of synthetic dyes, volume for tho research worker rather than a text starting with the preparation of fuchsine. Also in book, and as such its wealth of detailed information 1859, Clavol commenced the manufacture of fuchsine and exhaustive lists of referennes make its appearance in Basle and his firm eventually became Ciba {a welcome. W. L. MuRRAY name formed from the initial letters of the Society for Chemical Industry in Basle). The factors loading to the rapid growth in chemical STORY OF CHEMICAL INDUSTRY industry in Basle are described. These are briefly (1) the case with which coal-tar could be obtained IN BASLE from England, France and Germany, (2) the advan The Story of Chemical Industry in Basle tage of being able to dispose of waste products in the Pp. 234. (Published by CIBA Limited on the Rhine, (3) plenty of capital from the older industries, occasion of its 75th Anniversary.) (Basle: CIBA (4) the local market for dyes provided by the silk Limited, 1959.) ribbon industry, (5) the socio-political freedom arising from the unification of the Swiss cantons into a HE title of this work is far too modest. In 233 federal State, and (6) the rapid riso in the population T beautifully printed anrl illustrated pages the (and hence the labour supply) of Basle. history of chemistry is set out in such a way as to give Dyestuffs are next dealt with in some detail, and I Basle its rightful place in the fields of drugs, plastics, have space hero only to mention such names as textiles and dyeing. Although Ciba Ltd. are the Liebig, Perkin, Hoffmann, Verquin, Graebe and publishers, full credit has been given to the firms of Liebermann, Caro, Peter Griess, Martins, Walter, Sandoz, Geigy, and Hoffmann La Roche, as well as Baeyer, Sand-Meyer and Heumann. to other fll'ms and individual scientists throughout The history of the scientific pharmaceutical the world, for their contributions to science and industry commences in this book with the founding technology. of the fll'st institute for experimental pharmacology The first part describes tho founding of tho first by Buck.heim in Estonia in 1849. Then follows the Universities in Paris (by Bartholomew the English bacteriological and antiseptic discoveries of man in 1231), Oxford, Salerno and Montpellier. Tho Semmelweis, Pasteur, Lemaire, Lister and, last but influence of the Guilds is noted as is also the contribu not least, Socin in Basle, who in 1871 was using tion to tho Renaissance made by the monasteries. In phenol for wounds. Then on to Robert Koch's in the fourteenth century the Dominican monastery in 'Citro cultivation of bacteria and the work of Ehrlich Basle possessed works by Avicenna, commentaries on tho application of dyes and arsenicals to medicine. on Aristotle, Latin translations of the works of Galen Among tho newer bactericides we read how Prontosil and the medical works of Albert the Great (usually (Domagk 1935) led to 'Cibazol' (Ciba-1938, better referred to in English books as Albcrtus Magnus). known to us as Sulphathiazole). In 1950 the La In 1460 tho University of Basle (modelled on those of Roche group produced Isoniazide (for tuberculosis) Paris and Bologna) was founded and eight years la.ter and Ciba in 1958 introduced 'Ciba 1906' for leprosy. the printing of books commenced in Basle. Turning to drugs derived from natural precursors The University of Baslo received a refroshing blast we are told tho story of Nnporcaine (Ciba 1929), of fi·eHh air in 1526 when Paracclsus occupied the chair Dolantin (1940) and Cliradon (Ciba 1949) and of of medicine for a few months. As every student of Rntazolidino (Geigy). (The latter derived from chemistry knows this rebel publicly burnt the works quinine in the mistaken belief that antipyrine is a of Galen and A vicenna and scoffed at the alchemists, quinoline derivative.) stating that medicine, not gold, was the true aim of Similar treatment is given for very many other alchemy. organic medicaments: Ergotamine (Sandoz 1918), The story continuos to the eighteenth century, and Coramine (Hartmann of Ciba, 1918), Prisco! and tho ago of enlighterunent. Voltaire, Diderot, Nicholas Privino (Ciba 1939), and the isolation of Reserpine Leblanc, Edmund Cartwright, James Watt, Adam in 1952 (Ciba). Vitamin C was first synthesized by Smith, Montesquieu and Rousseau are just a few of Reichstein in 1933 and within two years La Roche © 1960 Nature Publishing Group No. 4737 August 13, 1960 NATURE 541 were manufacturing it. In the 'thirties Ciba helped Now we have yet another book with the same title to isolate progesterone and later worked with and a much braver effort. This new book, by Daudel, Reichstein on cortisone. Lefebvre and Moser, represents a creditable attempt Part 2 finishes with a historical account of plastics, to set down in an orderly manner those developments from ancient ceramic arts via gun-cotton (Schoenbein which in recent years have made quantum chemistry a of the University of Basle in 1845), celluloid, the subject of real interest to the experimental worker. Chardonnet denitrification process, to the important The centre of gravity of the book is the unsaturated modern epoxy resins of to-day such as Ciba's 'Araldite'. hydrocarbons and their physical and chemical The plain grey board covers of this book give no properties. This is not inappropriate, since until hint of the wealth of material within. Beautifully quite recently it would have been true to say that this printed on high-quality paper with hundreds of particular field of study had yielded a greater crop of illustrations, dozens of which are in beautiful colours, quantitative results than any other branch of it stands in a class of its own. theoretical chemistry. It is inevitable that a book of I have noticed only one error of fact (p. 123). The this sort should dwell on certain topics at the expense dibromoanthraquinone which Graebe and Liebermann of others, and it would be easy to criticize the authors hydrolysed to alizarin was, in fact, the 2 : 3 dibromo for having omitted any discussion of the recent compound and not the 1 : 2 as described, although striking advances in, for example, the theoretical this piece of 'research luck' was not discovered until chemistry of the transition elements. But this would several years after the event. A few expressions be ungrateful, &s the authors have obviously taken strike the English reader as unusual, for example, "in pains to include reference to the most important six years the price of quinine dare from 1·3 to 2 ·5 papers in the theory of conjugated molecules ; the florins per oz.", "diazo dyestuffs" (we say 'azo dyes'), fact that their book is not as broad as its title suggests and the use of the word 'somnifacients' for what we only bears witness to the great rate at which (with perhaps less Latin and more Greek) call theoretical chemistry is now developing. 'hypnotics'. Turning to details, one is glad to have a clear This work reflects great credit on Drs. Huber and account of the theory of antisymmetrized wave Menzi, who wrote the text, on Drs. Wilhelm and functions and the Hartree-Fock equations. Of less Kappeli, who had the idea of thus celebrating Ciba's value is the short chapter on biochemical applications : seventy-fifth anniversary, on the photographers and we still know so little about the cell that it seems blockmakers, and on all those concerned with the premature to attach any weight to a quantum book.

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