00:00:00 After Opportunities in Chemistry came out—this, of course, being directed at a rather special

00:00:19 audience, science policy people in Washington, D.C., Congress, and the like—I felt that

00:00:27 it would be worth the effort to try to revise this in a fashion that brought it to a much

00:00:34 wider audience.

00:00:35 But first, what was the reaction on the Hill?

00:00:38 Well, the reaction on the Hill was, without any doubt, a positive one in the sense that

00:00:47 it backed up the arguments that chemists were making with factual examples, and so there's

00:00:55 no doubt that it had a generally positive result.

00:00:59 It happened that it came at a time when the national deficit was a matter of prime concern

00:01:10 and budgets were being cut all over the place.

00:01:13 And I feel confident that the appearance of the report helped avert cuts that would have

00:01:18 come into chemistry otherwise.

00:01:21 Incidentally, it attracted international attention and was looked at all over the world.

00:01:30 One of your initiatives as president of the American Chemical Society in 1986 was to promote

00:01:35 the public understanding of science.

00:01:39 Is the ASC doing enough about this?

00:01:43 The ACS, yes.

00:01:46 We're working very hard at it, and I think doing a fairly good job.

00:01:53 One of my initiatives was to originate the concept of National Chemistry Day, which was

00:02:01 a day to be celebrated, so to speak, across the country by all of the local sections of

00:02:09 which there are 130 in the American Chemical Society.

00:02:13 The idea was to try to reach out to as many people as possible to tell them about chemistry,

00:02:19 what it's all about, how important it is in their lives in a positive sense, and to

00:02:26 provide an opportunity for the chemical industry to reach out toward the public and let them

00:02:33 know that the chemical industry cares an awful lot about safety, toxic materials, and the

00:02:40 welfare of the public in a bigger sense than just selling more products.

00:02:47 A number of companies opened their doors to open houses where the local community could

00:02:53 come into the chemical plant and see what they do about safety and see their concern

00:02:59 about it.

00:03:01 And that has been institutionalized now into Chemistry Week, National Chemistry Week.

00:03:07 The other thing that I'd like to mention is an extension of the opportunities in chemistry.

00:03:12 In order to try to bring this to a wider audience, I enlisted the co-authorship of my daughter,

00:03:20 Janice Coonrod, who is an extremely able chemistry teacher at the high school level, to rewrite

00:03:26 the whole book, revise it, and reorganize it for an audience of what we call Advanced

00:03:35 Placement Chemistry students.

00:03:38 These are high school students who have taken the normal chemistry class and are interested

00:03:42 enough to want to take another course while they're still in high school.

00:03:47 And this is supposedly a resource book for them.

00:03:50 This book is called Opportunities in Chemistry Today and Tomorrow, and I think in the long

00:03:55 run will have a wider impact than Opportunities in Chemistry itself.

00:04:03 I'm going to jump around a little bit now, just throw you out a sentence, an idea, and

00:04:10 I'd like a brief response to it.

00:04:16 Perception of the media coverage of chemistry.

00:04:20 The media, of course, are interested in advancing the media, selling newspapers, getting people

00:04:27 to watch TV.

00:04:29 And inevitably, the emphasis then falls on the sensational and the more newsworthy things

00:04:39 in the sense of what the public is liable to be concerned about.

00:04:43 So it generally has a negative flavor.

00:04:46 I organized as another initiative while I was the president of the ACS a symposium in

00:04:52 which I brought two people from the press and two people, one person from industry,

00:04:59 one from the university, to discuss the media and chemistry in a symposium at a national

00:05:05 ACS meeting.

00:05:08 One of the individuals from the press was Cowan, the science editor of Christian Science

00:05:14 Monitor, an extremely reputable newspaper, and he's a very reputable person.

00:05:20 And he convinced me of one thing that I really hadn't realized before.

00:05:25 I saw this as something in which the chemistry community and the media had a joint responsibility

00:05:32 of educating the people about the difficulties of benefit, cost-benefit decisions, and the

00:05:43 fact that there are benefits as well as risks and so on.

00:05:47 And he, a very conscientious man, said I should get out of my mind the idea that I'll ever

00:05:54 convince the media that they're in the education business.

00:05:57 So they're in the news business, and they're going to report what they consider to be newsworthy,

00:06:01 that is to say what will attract the attention of a reader or a television viewer.

00:06:07 And that had a big impact on me.

00:06:10 From then on, I decided that what I had to emphasize in this particular flag-carrying

00:06:17 issue was that the chemistry community had to act as its own educational system to reach

00:06:24 out to the public and tell them what chemistry is all about.

00:06:31 The cold fusion experiment.

00:06:39 Well, I've been watching that with enormous interest, as has everybody else in the world.

00:06:50 My feeling is that it's, however it turns out, whether it turns out to be a positive

00:06:57 or a negative, it was a very healthy thing, because I think it'll open up people's

00:07:04 thinking to the possibility that there are other directions in which to approach fusion

00:07:10 than the two that the physics community had decided upon, that is to say magnetic containment

00:07:15 and laser containment.

00:07:20 And the latest situation seems to be that a few laboratories have been able to reproduce

00:07:28 the heat effects, and that seems to be the part that is most confidently going to survive.

00:07:39 But the heat effects can be explained by chemical processes.

00:07:43 The question is whether there will be any corroboration of neutrons or tritium or helium.

00:07:50 And the very most recent news coming through the press, of course, is that Los Alamos may

00:07:56 have seen neutrons.

00:07:59 They emphasize always in very small amounts, and this I think because the fusion community

00:08:09 doesn't want to believe that it could be done in an entirely different way that they

00:08:13 never thought of after twenty-five years of spending three hundred million dollars a year.

00:08:20 But my feeling is that even if one could become convinced that neutrons are being produced

00:08:27 by some sort of a fusion event, even though it is not now producing large amounts of heat,

00:08:36 it's an enormous step ahead, because it means that there are other conditions than what

00:08:42 we've been thinking about for the last three decades to be investigated.

00:08:49 Physicists versus chemists.

00:08:52 Well, that's not probably a proper way to divide.

00:09:00 Another way to divide is big science versus little science.

00:09:04 Physics has quite a number of areas that are well classified as little science, where all

00:09:11 the problems that chemistry has are seen there too.

00:09:16 One of the results that we got from Opportunities in Chemistry was blatant responses from leaders

00:09:23 of the science funding agencies that, if you just come in and ask for a big machine, we

00:09:29 could get it for you.

00:09:31 We can't get the money for all these little projects.

00:09:34 Congress won't give it to us.

00:09:36 That's a mindset, and I'm sure that Congress could be dissuaded from it by someone who

00:09:43 is convinced that it isn't so.

00:09:47 So you need to get people with that opposite mindset in positions to convince Congress.

00:09:54 In any event, the big science approach, I think, obviously is the only way to approach

00:10:02 certain projects, the Manhattan Project being the obvious prototype.

00:10:10 But it leads one into an approach to science that I think quenches creativity by having

00:10:22 everything done by consensus in big groups and each individual being more or less swallowed

00:10:30 by the whole.

00:10:32 Incidentally, that's one of the reasons that I would encourage young people, creative young

00:10:37 people interested in science, to consider seriously going into chemistry, because chemistry

00:10:43 is one field in which individual creativity is still the name of the game.

00:10:48 They can get into an experimental area where very exciting things are happening because

00:10:54 of the laser, because of the computer, because of all sorts of instrumentation that lets

00:11:00 us look at biological molecules on a chemical, molecular level, but it could still be done

00:11:06 by an individual, one graduate student, one research director, and the graduate student

00:11:13 gets to design the experiment, collect his own data, and interpret it himself.

00:11:18 So it's a very exciting field for young people.

00:11:21 Females and minorities.

00:11:26 The situation is different for these two.

00:11:31 As far as females are concerned, chemistry happens to be an area in which the growth

00:11:36 of presence of females has been very rapid and quite comfortable.

00:11:42 To give you an example, I have five graduate students right now, two of them are female.

00:11:46 I have three postdocs, one of them is female.

00:11:51 We were just noticing the other day at the commencement, the College of Chemistry commencement,

00:11:56 how many female chem engineers there are now.

00:12:01 This is a different story.

00:12:03 The black and Hispanic communities are having a terrible time getting into the hard sciences.

00:12:11 And my own feeling is that it's not to be laid to any kind of discrimination against

00:12:18 them, but rather a need for cultural adjustments that are very difficult and slow to come by.

00:12:26 But progress in that area is much slower than the females in the workforce science.

00:12:34 What do you mean by cultural adjustments?

00:12:37 Well, I guess a way to highlight what I'm talking about is to look at the performance

00:12:47 of the Asian students at Berkeley, for instance, and in our school system.

00:12:53 You could look on these as some sort of a minority group, if you like, from the point

00:12:58 of view of numbers in the society, but from the point of view of representation in the

00:13:09 engineering science fields, they're overrepresented.

00:13:13 And you ask why, and why isn't that so, for instance, for blacks and Hispanics?

00:13:19 And I'm afraid one has to come back to the very strong family orientation in the Asian

00:13:24 culture that places enormous family emphasis on getting as much education as possible.

00:13:33 And that element just does not seem to be as strongly at work in these other cultures.

00:13:40 How worried should we be about a flu of carbons in the atmosphere?

00:13:45 My feeling is that we're worried enough, that is to say, this was almost a classic

00:13:52 example of a problem that was recognized early enough and studied carefully enough to allow

00:14:00 us to take a prudent and deliberate approach to what to do about it.

00:14:08 And we're moving toward international control of the production of these chlorofluorocarbons,

00:14:15 and I believe that everything will be taken care of in due course, and it as one of the

00:14:21 possible atmospheric contaminants will be under control.

00:14:25 Future trends in chemical research?

00:14:30 Well, the future trends, I used to say in the Opportunities in Chemistry days, chemistry's

00:14:38 hot and it's hottest at the ends.

00:14:41 What I mean by that is at the peripheries of chemistry where it's contiguous with physics

00:14:48 on one extreme and the biological sciences on the other, progress is most rapid.

00:14:54 And chemists are needed in these areas, and that's where the most promise is.

00:14:59 The biological side, our progress in bioengineering is dependent now on the fact that we're able

00:15:06 to understand biological function on the molecular level.

00:15:10 On the molecular level means chemistry's the name of the game.

00:15:14 Future in chemical applications?

00:15:17 Well, here I'm a little less able to come up with some brilliant remarks.

00:15:27 Basically the design of new materials is a field that chemists are involved in.

00:15:33 They synthesize things, and as new needs come up that demand new syntheses, new structures,

00:15:43 new materials, chemists are going to take the lead role.

00:15:47 An example of this is possibly the high-temperature superconductors.

00:15:53 Those are new kinds of structures.

00:15:55 They don't follow the traditional paradigm of physicists' understanding of superconductivity

00:16:04 in metals, and it's a wide-open game now, and chemists are going to be important there.

00:16:10 You've obviously had a lot of fun in chemistry.

00:16:14 You bet.

00:16:15 I feel that one of the luckiest decisions I made ever, for what I now consider to be

00:16:20 a rather wrong reason, was when I decided to go into chemistry.

00:16:25 Very exciting field, and I've never looked back with any kind of regret.

00:16:31 Okay, you're the same person now, a person who's the age you were when you went into

00:16:42 chemistry.

00:16:43 What future is there for a young George Pimentel entering the field?

00:16:48 Well, as I say, we are at a moment when chemistry is benefiting from enormous opportunities

00:16:57 associated with new instrumental developments.

00:17:02 One of the easy things to point to is the laser, which has gotten us down to the millionth

00:17:07 of a millionth of a second, picosecond time scale, and that means that any chemical phenomenon

00:17:13 that you can mention can be now looked at in real time.

00:17:17 This means that questions are being posed and answered today that you just wouldn't

00:17:21 think of answering, even posing, some decades ago.

00:17:26 But can the young George Pimentel today have as much fun as you had?

00:17:31 Oh, I'm sure.

00:17:32 See, as I say, I think what science is all about is giving rain, open rain, to individualism

00:17:40 and creativity, and chemistry is as good a place as any to do it.

00:17:46 Okay, thank you very much.

00:17:47 All right.

00:17:48 It's a pleasure.

00:17:54 Good.

00:17:55 Do you want to take any, two, any naps of time?

00:17:59 Oh, that was a very instructive interview.

00:18:04 You should basically just be listening.

00:18:07 This is so that we can cut.

00:18:10 I think I've learned a lot.

00:18:13 I had a very good chemistry teacher in high school, and I was never very good at science.

00:18:18 It was my brother who was good at science.

00:18:21 But I always found it so difficult.

00:18:23 And I don't know, I got a 90 in chemistry, which was the highest I ever got.

00:18:27 But then in college I got C's in math, and I had a very good teacher.

00:18:32 And I suspect that some people are either cut out for it or not cut out for it.

00:18:40 But the math course, I mean, he was a marvelous teacher who explained sort of all the concepts,

00:18:47 and I enjoyed going to class.

00:18:49 I just found it extremely difficult.